Live Albums

The Rolling Stones – Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!

More Rolling Stones

  • This boxed Decca UK pressing boasts superb Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • Remarkably quiet vinyl too – for those of you who prize audiophile quality surfaces, you are unlikely to see a quieter copy with grades this good hit the site again for a very long while
  • With rock and roll energy and you-are-there presence, turn this one up good and loud and you will find yourself at the Stones concert of a lifetime
  • The live performances of “Sympathy For The Devil,” “Midnight Rambler,” and “Honky Tonk Woman” are MAGICAL from these shows – the Stones in 1970 were taking their music to a whole new level
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Recorded during their American tour in late 1969, and centered around live versions of material from the Beggars Banquet-Let It Bleed era… Often acclaimed as one of the top live rock albums of all time…”

(more…)

Joe Cocker – Mad Dogs And Englishmen

More of the Music of Joe Cocker

  • This vintage copy boasts KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on side four and seriously good Double Plus (A++) sound on the other THREE sides, and plays about as quietly as any early pressing ever will
  • The sound is rich and tubey, with driving energy and the top end and clarity that was simply missing from far too many of the copies we had to work through in order to find this one
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Unlike a lot of other ‘coffee table’-type rock releases of the era, such as Woodstock and The Concert for Bangladesh, people actually listened to Mad Dogs & Englishmen – most of its content was exciting, and its sound, a veritable definition of big-band rock with three dozen players working behind the singer, was unique.”

(more…)

Mike Bloomfield & Al Kooper – The Live Adventures Of…

More Al Kooper

  • The Live Adventures Of… is finally back on the site after a twenty-six month hiatus, here with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on all FOUR sides of these early 360 Stereo pressings
  • This copy is doing everything right – it’s clean, clear, spacious and present with a big bottom end, just the right sound for this raw, live blues rock music
  • Great material to be found here, including covers of well-known tracks by Paul Simon, The Band, and Traffic
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 stars: “One of the seminal live albums of the late 60s… The idea of musical spontaneity both in live performance and in the recording studio had reached a certain apex in 1968… But it was the union of Bloomfield and Kooper that can truly claim an origination of the phenomenon, and this album takes it to another level entirely.”

Outstanding sound for this double LP of superb live blues-rock! We rarely have a copy of this title on the site, so if you’re a fan of Super Session, you should jump on this one right away.

Some of the tracks here (recorded on the second night) feature none other than Carlos Santana. (more…)

Thelonious Monk – Misterioso (Recorded On Tour)

More Thelonious Monk

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

  • A vintage pressing of Monk’s 1965 live album with seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades throughout – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • These sides are rich, spacious, big and Tubey Magical, with noticeably less smear on the piano, a problem that keeps many pressings from earning better grades
  • So many copies just sound like an old jazz record, but this one lets you feel like you are right there in the audience as the music is being created
  • Credit Teo Macero, the man responsible for some of Columbia’s most consistently open, natural sounding records from the early ’60s

(more…)

Darin at the Copa / Another Great Sounding Reissue? What the Heck Is Going On!?

More Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

More Records We’ve Reviewed that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

  • Darin At The Copa arrives on the site with stunning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from top to bottom 
  • Recorded live at the Copacabana in New York City, this album captures Darin’s unique charisma, as well his phenomenal music
  • With clear, present vocals, huge amounts of space, and boatloads of Tubey magic – the kind they had plenty of in 1960 – this copy blew away the competition in our recent shootout
  • “…an appearance that confirmed for the adult pop crowd that the former singer of ephemera like “Splish Splash” had made the complete transition from rock & roll to more “serious” music. Serious this record certainly isn’t, though.” 
  • If you’re a fan of Bobby Darin’s, this live album from 1960 surely deserves a place in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1960 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

This Shootout Winning pressing of Bobby Darin’s live album from 1960 has ENERGY and TUBEY MAGIC like you will not believe. The reissues on Bainbridge that we used in our shootout just KILL the original pressings, which are truly awful based on the ones I have heard. I started out with a copy such as this way back in the early ’90s, and when I finally tracked down a clean original on Atco, not a hard record to find really, I was shocked at just how bad it sounded.

This is, of course, one of the best reasons to own a good CD player. It’s simply a fact that some recordings, vintage and otherwise, were never mastered properly for the analog medium.

Defending Reissues

We bash reissue labels like Classic and Sundazed mercilessly on this site for making the worst kind of substandard pressings, all the while absurdly promoting them as “superior.”

Bainbridge reissued this album sometime in the early ’80s I would guess, and they did this one right. Discovery Records reissued some jazz in the ’70s (Shorty Roger’s Jazz Waltz comes readily to mind) and they did a great job.

Reissues can sound great, but they seem to be limited to the ones from back in the day when they still knew how to make good sounding records. Modern reissues, for whatever reason, almost never do, and that’s the reason we criticize them (and their apologists / promoters so relentlessly).

We are not anti-reissue. We are anti-bad-sounding-reissue.

Bobby Darin was a tremendously talented performer and this record catches him showing off his stuff to good advantage. I don’t know of a better Darin album on vinyl.

Variety Review

Darin’s finger snapping, jazzy and extremely hep delivery has its moments of humor, ease and at all times, a singular brand of charm that make it big at this particular scene.

Darin on CD

Speaking of CDs, This Is Darin from 1960 on the ’90s CD pressing is, or can be — CDs don’t all sound the same either — superb, and the record is, again, just awful. We don’t make many CD recommendations here at Better Records but we do recommend that one. We don’t know if the newer version is any good so that’s a caveat emptor situation you will have to figure out for yourself.

(more…)

Vince Guaraldi & Bola Sete – Live At El Matador

More Vince Guaraldi

 More Live Recordings of Interest

  • This early Fantasy pressing of Live at El Matador earned excellent Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER from start to finish
  • Both of these sides are rich, clean, clear, lively and spacious with little of the grittiness that plagues the average copy
  • This is the third and final collaborative effort between Vince Guaraldi and Bola Sete, and if you’re a fan of either, you should find much to enjoy here
  • “… a virtuoso guitar performance; even as a living room listening experience, Sete demonstrates the mastery that so impressed club patrons.” – Five Cents Please

(more…)

Junior Wells – It’s My Life

More Electric Blues

More Soul, Blues, and Rhythm and Blues

  • A superb copy of Junior Wells’ recording from Chicago in ’66 (this is the read deal, folks!) with Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound – just shy of our Shootout Winner – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Bigger and bolder, with more bass, more energy, and more of that “you-are-there-immediacy” of a live performance that set the best vintage pressings apart from reissues, CDs, and whatever else might be out there
  • “Cut from the same cloth as Wells’ classic Hoodoo Man Blues LP from the same period, It’s My Life, Baby! captured the Junior Wells-Buddy Guy team in great form, both in the studio and live at Pepper’s Lounge on 43rd Street. This album tends a bit more towards slow blues, including a rare example of Wells’ chromatic harmonica playing on ‘Slow, Slow,’ but there are fine uptempo pieces…”

(more…)

Jimi Hendrix – War Heroes

More Jimi Hendrix

  • Outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound from the first note to the last on this Hendrix classic
  • The material here is unusually well-recorded by Hendrix’s longtime engineer, Eddie Kramer – with sound that is competitive with, maybe even better than, Hendrix’s “real” albums
  • Features top-tier Hendrix rarities such as “Izabella,” “Highway Chile,” “Bleeding Heart” and “Stepping Stone”
  • “One of the few consistent compilations of unreleased Hendrix.”

Drop the needle at the start of either side and prepare to be floored. You won’t believe the big-time presence, the mindblowing energy, or the massive WHOMP factor. Here’s a copy with the kind of big, three-dimensional sound we wish we heard on more Hendrix records. You’ll know what I’m talking about as soon as the needle hits the groove.

The vocals are full-bodied and present with lots of body and breath. The bottom end is tight and punchy with more weight than we heard on other copies. You could play a good-sized stack of copies and you’d probably still not find one as open, spacious, and transparent as either of these sides.

The guitar — obviously a key element of any Hendrix recording — absolutely FLIES out of the speakers here. The bottom end is strong and solid, and the overall sound is big, rich and open.

Bridge of Sighs

Note that the guitar sound on the first track of side two appears to have acted as the template for Robin Trower’s sound throughout his career. We love Robin Trower — wish we could find more copies of Bridge of Sighs that sound good — but his guitar sound was all over this album years before it was on any of his own.

It’s beyond difficult for us to find killer copies of Jimi’s first three or four albums, so I advise you Hendrix fans to give this one a chance. It’s the real deal.

(more…)

Willie Nelson & Family – Honeysuckle Rose

More Willie Nelson

More Country and Country Rock

  • This surprisingly well recorded live album has the kind of smooth, rich, tonally correct analog sound we thought they had forgotten how to achieve by 1980, but here it is!
  • 4 stars: “The soundtrack to Honeysuckle Rose is… a collection of songs by Willie Nelson and his Family band as well as a host of friends… Nelson’s readings of his own tunes like “On the Road Again,” and others are solid, inspired, and rollicking. His versions of tunes written by Kris Kristofferson (“Loving Her Was Easier Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again”), Rodney Crowell (“Angel Eyes”), and Lee Clayton (“If You Could Touch Her at All”) blow away the studio versions.”

(more…)

Oscar Peterson / The Trio – Live From Chicago

Reviews and Commentaries for the Recordings of Oscar Peterson

xxx

  • Tonally correct from top to bottom and as transparent as any vintage recording you’ve heard, the combination of clarity and Tubey Magic here is hard to beat
  • The Trio, including Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen, are in fine form on these live recordings from the London House in Chicago; if you want to hear one of the great jazz trios at the height of their powers, this is the ticket!
  • “…[Peterson] was generally in peak form during this era. He sticks to standards on this live [album] (a good example of the Trio’s playing), stretching out ‘Sometimes I’m Happy’ creatively for over 11 minutes and uplifting such songs as ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,’ ‘Chicago’ and ‘The Night We Called It a Day.'”
  • If you’re a fan of Oscar’s, this Top Title from 1961 belongs in your collection.
  • The complete list of titles from 1961 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

Peterson really puts on a great show. He’s made an awful lot of records during his career and most of them aren’t especially noteworthy. This album is clearly an exception to that rule. (If You Could See Me Now is another one.)

This pressing was a HUGE step up from the other copies we played in our recent shootout. This killer copy has the immediacy that puts you front and center at The London House for a great jazz show. Ray Brown is his usual incredible self on bass.

(more…)