Top Artists – Thelonious Monk

Brilliant Corners – This Pig Sure Wears Pretty Lipstick

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Thelonious Monk Available Now

During our most recent shootout of Brilliant Corners, we took the opportunity to play the Craft pressing cut by Bernie Grundman and released in 2023.

We thought it was godawful, the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played.

But how is that possible? Read all about the best practices being followed and look at the description of the fancy packaging below. Why would they go to all that trouble just to produce a bad souding record?

For the answer to that question, you will have to ask them. We’re stumped.

  • Pressed using a one-step lacquer process at RTI utilizing Neotech’s VR900 compound
  • All-analog mastering by Bernie Grundman from the original master tapes
  • Housed in a foil-stamped, linen-wrapped slipcase
  • Numbered and limited to 4,000

They used Neotech’s VR900 compound! Really?! That must be one awesome compound!

Apparently even the VR900 compound was not enough to save this pathetic excuse for a record.

For those of you who might be new to this blog, we should point out that we have been dumbfounded by Bernie Grundman’s work for more than twenty five years. The first RCA he remastered for Classic Records, LSC 1806, was so bright and the strings were so shrill that it probably lasted on our turntable maybe all of three minutes. My ears just couldn’t take it, even on a system that was dramatically darker and less revealing than the one we have now.

Equally bad sounding Classic Records were to follow by the hundreds.

Our quickie notes for side one are shown on the left. After hearing side one fall so short of the mark, we dropped it from the shootout and put the Craft pressing on the shelf to go back to whoever loaned it to us. Who cares what side two sounds like if side one is that bad? Time is money. We are in the business of finding good records to sell to our customers, not playing crap Heavy Vinyl that only the most hard-of-hearing collector types would consider owning.

Before long we had a change of heart. We thought we owed it to Bernie’s fans to be more thorough, so we took our best side two and played it against the Craft pressing.

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Thelonious Monk – In Person

More of the Music of Thelonious Monk

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Albums Available Now


  • In Person returns to the site with solid Double Plus (A++) sound on all FOUR sides of these vintage Milestone pressings – remarkably quiet vinyl too
  • Unusually rich, full-bodied, lively and present sound which brings out the best in this music
  • Features incomparable jazz greats Donald Byrd and Joe Gordon
  • The 1976 transfers of tape to disc by David Turner are superb in all respects – remastering is not a dirty word when it sounds like this
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The first half of In Person contains the pianist/composer’s famous Town Hall concert of 1959… The second half of this two-fer finds Monk leading a strong sextet with trumpeter Joe Gordon and tenors Rouse and Harold Land live…”

The Riverside pressings we’ve auditioned of both The Thelonious Monk Orchestra – At Town Hall and Thelonious Monk Quartet Plus Two – At The Blackhawk were just awful sounding. The OJC reissues from the ’80s, although better, were not overflowing with the rich, natural, relaxed sound we were looking for either.

Ah, but a few years back we happened to drop the needle on one of these good Milestone Two-Fers. Here was the sound we were looking for and had had so little luck in finding.

Which prompts the question that should be on the mind of every audiophile:

What are the rules for collecting records with the best sound quality?

The answer, of course, is that there are no such rules and never will be.

There is only trial and error. Our full-time staff has been running trials — we call them shootouts and needle drops — for decades, with far more errors than successes. Such is the nature of records. It may be a tautology to note that the average record has mediocre sound, but it nevertheless pays to keep this inconvenient fact in mind.

Even worse, if you make the mistake of pinning your audiophile hopes on a current reissue — and you have reasonably high standards and two working ears — your disappointment is almost guaranteed.

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Robert Brook Shoots Out Brilliant Corners

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below you will find a link to the shootout Robert recently conducted for Thelonious Monk’s amazing Brilliant Corners album on OJC.

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Straight, No Chaser – Now That’s a Piano (and a Saxophone)

monk_strai_1507_1435596984

More of the Music of Thelonious Monk

An outstanding copy we played not long ago had us singing its praises, to wit:

If you want to hear just how good Monk’s big, rich piano can sound, look no further.

Rudy Van Gelder, eat your heart out. This is the piano sound Rudy never seemed to be able to get on tape all those years ago.

Some say it’s the crappy workhorse piano he had set up in his studio. Others say it was just poorly miked. Rather than speculating on something we know little about (good pianos and their miking), let’s just say that Columbia had the piano, the room and the mics to do it right, as you can easily hear on this very record.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term)
  • We like them to be solidly weighted
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that is rarely mentioned in the audiophile reviews we read

Listen to Monk vocalizing — this copy is so resolving you can hear him clearly, yet the overall sound is warm, rich and smooth in the best Columbia tradition.

Speaking of warm, rich and smooth, this is important to the horn sound too. Most copies could not make the sax as full-bodied and free of honk as we would have liked.

This one did, earning lots of points in the process. Hard to fault and definitely hard to beat.

Thelonious Monk – It’s Monk’s Time

More of the Music of Thelonious Monk

  • An incredible 360 label pressing of It’s Monk’s Time, with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or very close to it throughout
  • The piano is clear with a solid bottom end — we’re crazy for that sound, and Columbia knew exactly how to give it to us on these vintage pressings
  • 5 stars: “contains some of the best — if not arguably the best — studio sides that the pianist cut during his final years as a recording musician…”

There are three main elements that comprise the sound of a top quality It’s Monk’s Time: piano, sax and drums. You need all three to be balanced and correct. The mix is perfection on the best copies, with the piano, sax and drums clearly audible and in musically correct proportion to each other.

As we played the sides we noted how each of them fared.

  • PIANO. Clear, present and lively. Very high-rez.
  • SAX. Smooth, rich and tubey, with no RVG squawk to be found.
  • DRUMS (and BASS). Big drums in a big room. Listen to how solid that kick is. The standup bass is tight and note-like.

On the top copies, this is a truly superb sounding Thelonious Monk album. We can thank the brilliant Columbia engineers for their service to one of the authentic geniuses of jazz.

And if you own the Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl reissue, please buy this copy and hear what you’ve been missing.

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Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk – Miles & Monk at Newport

More Miles Davis

More Thelonious Monk

  • This original 360 Stereo pressing boasts seriously good Double Plus (A++) live jazz sound from first note to last
  • Remarkably spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – this pressing was a big step up over most other copies we played
  • The energy and presence are wonderful – Monk’s piano has real weight and the brass sounds just right
  • “On the first side of the LP [are] are a series of high tempo performances of bebop tunes and other staples of the Davis live repertoire from 1958. On the second side [are] a few numbers by Thelonious Monk’s combo, from a 1963 Newport appearance [that] featured the idiosyncratic appearance by clarinetist Pee Wee Russell.”
  • “[The Miles Davis Sextet’s] rapid version of ‘Ah Leu Cha’ is thunderous and ‘Straight No Chaser’ swings like mad.”

Of special note on the Monk side is the excellent work of Frankie Dunlap on drums, and of course Charlie Rouse is always interesting. Add to those top players someone you wouldn’t normally associate with Monk — Pee Wee Russell on clarinet, here proving that he’s every bit the bop jazz musician that these other guys are.

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This Thelonious Monk Record Didn’t Make the Grade

More of the Music of Thelonious Monk

Every copy of this record we have ever played sounded terrible. The early pressings sounded bad and the OJC sounded bad. We gave up on the album a long time ago. Why throw good money after bad?

Some audiophile reviewers prefer to review only the records that sound good to them and ignore the rest. We think this does the audiophile community a disservice.

Like Consumer Reports, we like to test things. They test toasters, we test records. We put them through their paces and let the chips fall where they may.

They want to find out if the things they are testing offer the consumer good quality and value.

We want to find out if the records we are testing offer the audiophile good sound and music.

It takes a lot of people and a healthy budget to carry out large numbers of these kinds of tests.

No other record dealers, record reviewers or record collectors could possibly have auditioned more than a small fraction of the records that we’ve played. We’ve been looking for the best sounding records for a very long time. Now, with a staff of ten or more, we can buy, clean and play records in numbers that are unimaginable for any single person to attempt.

That puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings.

Yes, we have the resources, the staff and the budget. More importantly, we came up with a different approach.

We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.

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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

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Thelonious Monk – Monk.

  • A wonderful early 360 Stereo pressing with seriously good Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER first note to last
  • Columbia records produced by Teo Macero in the early ’60s have consistently open, natural sound – this one from 1964 is no exception
  • The piano has real weight, the bass definition is wonderful, Rouse’s sax is full-bodied, and the overall sound is Columbia to a “T”: warm, sweet, and rich
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • “The Thelonious Monk Quartet of 1964 is well featured on this excellent set… Easily recommended to Monk fans, this set is just further proof that he never made an unworthy recording.”

We’re big Monk fans here at Better Records and we wish we could get more records like this up on the site. Unfortunately, clean, vintage pressings of Monk’s music have become increasingly difficult to find, and even when you can track them down, they rarely play as quietly as this one, and of course, this being a Hot Stamper, they rarely sound as good as this one. (more…)

What Are Some Good General Rules for Acquiring Records with the Highest Quality Sound?

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

The Riverside pressings we’ve auditioned of both The Thelonious Monk Orchestra – At Town Hall and Thelonious Monk Quartet Plus Two – At The Blackhawk were just awful sounding.

The OJC reissues of both albums from the 80s, although better, were not overflowing with the rich, natural, relaxed analog sound we were looking for either.

Ah, but a few years back (2015, maybe?) we happened to drop the needle on one of these Monk Milestone Two-Fers. Here was the sound we were looking for and had had so little luck finding until then.

Which prompts the question that should be on the mind of every audiophile:

What are the rules for collecting records with the best sound quality?

The answer, of course, is that there are no such rules and there never will be.

There is only trial and error. Our full-time staff has been running trials — we call them shootouts and needle drops — for more than twenty years now, with far more errors than successes. Such is the nature of records.

It may be a tautology to note that the average record has mediocre sound, but it nevertheless pays to keep that undeniable fact in mind.

Even worse, if you make the mistake of pinning your hopes on a current Heavy Vinyl reissue — and you happen to be a member of that blessed minority of audiophiles with top quality equipment; a dedicated, heavily-treated room; decades of experience; reasonably high standards and well-trained ears — your disappointment is almost assured.