Top Artists – Art Pepper

Yet Another Art Pepper Record that Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Pepper’s New York Album from 1985 left us unimpressed. If you’re a die-hard fan and you see it for cheap, by all means, pick it up.

Those of you looking for top quality vintage vinyl should stick to the man’s better albums, of which there are plenty. We’ve done shootouts for a great many of them. Our reviews can be found here.

Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile 

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound.

We also have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.

We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper shootouts, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”

If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.

Art Pepper’s Roadgame Doesn’t Cut It Anymore

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Roadgame is a live recording from 1981 on Galaxy Records, but nothing about it was impressive. Certainly not the sound. If you’re a die-hard fan and you see it for cheap, by all means, pick it up and see if it does more for you than it did for us.

Those of you looking for top quality vintage vinyl should stick to the man’s better albums, of which there are plenty.

We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.

Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.

If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are the worst.

Our Job

Our job is to find you good sounding pressings.

That’s the reason we carry:

  • Virtually no Heavy Vinyl repressings of any kind. (This one was done as a fluke a few years ago and since abandoned. The original plum label VICS pressings are the ones that win shootouts, not something pressed by Classic Records.)
  • Just a handful of Half-Speed mastered titles, including one that was made by, can you believe it?, Mobile Fidelity.
  • Rarely any Japanese pressings, and
  • Nothing made in the 21st century from vintage tapes. (Well, almost. This one is coming to the site, eventually, and another is in the works,)

If these kinds of records sounded good compared to the vintage pressings we offer — in other words, if they performed well in shootouts — we would be happy to offer them to our customers. But they almost never do.

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Skip the Original OJC of West Coast Sound (C3507)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2025

A new shootout for this title gave us a better understanding of the OJC relative to the other pressings we were playing. We came across one fairly good sounding OJC pressing out of the three we played, one that earned grades of 2+/1.5+, so if you have an OJC, play it and see whether it is one of the good ones or, as is most likely the case, one of the bad ones.

Side two is the side to play to hear what we are on about. The grades ranged from decent, 1.5+, to just awful, NFG.

The sound of the early OJC pressings of West Coast Sound that we played recently were not to our liking.

They are brighter and thinner than even the worst of the real Contemporary pressings.

That is decidedly not our sound.

We have to admit that we used to find the sound of many of these OJC pressings much more tolerable in the past.

More than tolerable. Enjoyable. Recommendable. Saleable even.

Nothing to be ashamed of, that was many years ago. As you may already know, live and learn is our motto. Getting it wrong is a feature, not a bug, of collecting if your goal is to find the best sounding pressings of the music you love.

(If you have some other goal, this may not be the right blog for you. Definitely steer clear of this website. The prices there are ridiculous!)

It’s true: Our old system from the 80s and 90s was tubier, tonally darker and dramatically less revealing, which strongly worked to the advantage of leaner, brighter, less Tubey Magical titles such as this one.

That was thirty or more years ago. Pretty much every dynamic speaker system I ran into had that sound. And I was never a fan of screens or horns. Like most audiophiles, I thought my stereo sounded great. It sure sounded right to me at the time.

And the reality is that no matter how hard I worked or how much money I spent, I would never have been able to achieve substantially better sound for one simple reason: most of the critically important revolutions in audio had not yet come to pass. It would take many technological improvements and decades of effort until I would have anything like the system I do now.

Art Pepper and George Cables – Tete-A-Tete from 1983

More of the Music of Art Pepper 

  • Tete-A-Tete appears on the site for only second time ever, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it throughout this original Galaxy pressing
  • Remarkably spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied (particularly on side one) – this pressing was a solid step up over most other copies we played
  • It’s also guaranteed to be far more natural than any other pressing you’ve heard (also particularly on side one), since the most natural sounding, least-hyped up pressing is usually the one that wins the shootout
  • 4 stars: “Pepper never did decline on record, and although he died in June 1982 (just a month after the last of these duets), he is in prime form throughout the emotional performances.”

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Chad and Bernie Step on Another Rake

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Just in time for Record Store Day — what could be better?

In the interest of streamlining the process of getting reviews like this up on the blog, we’ll try to stick mostly to the facts and let the description of the strengths and weaknesses of the pressings speak for themselves.

One quick note: the sonic qualities you see described below are the ones we heard with the mono switch on our EAR 324P phono stage activated.

Without the switch set to mono, the sound is even thicker and darker.

Yes, as bad as this pressing sounds, you can make it worse if you don’t switch your preamp or phono stage to mono. Hard to believe but it’s true!

The notes for side one can be seen below. For side one we started with the second track.

Side One

Track Two / Red Pepper Blues

  • Boomy low end
  • Sax is stuck [in the speakers]
  • And lacking in breath and space

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Art Pepper – Among Friends

More Art Pepper

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone

  • Among Friends appears on the site for only the second time ever, here with incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades on both sides of this Discovery reissue pressing, just shy of our Shootout Winner – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Exceptionally spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – this pressing was a big step up over practically all other copies we played
  • There’s so much life in these grooves – the sound jumps out of the speakers and right into your lap
  • 4 stars: “Art Pepper mostly sticks to standards on this Discovery LP, but he brings out new life in the veteran songs, particularly on such ballads as “Round Midnight,” “What’s New” and “Besame Mucho.” An excellent…release.”

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Barney Kessel – Some Like It Hot on OJC

More Barney Kessel

  • Superb sound for Kessel’s brilliant 1959 large group outing, with both sides of this Contemporary recording pressed on OJC vinyl earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • With Tubey Magic, richness, sweetness, and dead on tonality from top to bottom (particularly on side two), this is a textbook example of Contemporary’s sound when it’s really working
  • The other OJC pressings in this shootout did not do nearly as good as this one, but out of what we played it sounded right to us
  • An All Star West Coast lineup came together for this one: Art Pepper (on sax and clarinet!), Shelly Manne, Joe Gordon and others
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Such tunes as ‘I Wanna Be Loved by You,’ ‘Runnin’ Wild,’ ‘Down Among the Sheltering Palms,’ and ‘By the Beautiful Sea’ are given fairly modern arrangements…”

This copy is spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. The liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it. (more…)

Art Pepper / Art Pepper Today

More of the Music of Art Pepper

  • Outstanding sound throughout this original Galaxy pressing, with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades
  • It has more presence, space, clarity and top end extension than most of what we played in our recent shootout
  • Big, rich and full-bodied sound was not that easy to find on the album, but this copy had plenty of all three
  • 4 stars: “Altoist Art Pepper, in the midst of a successful comeback, recorded this excellent set for Galaxy. With pianist Stanley Cowell, bassist Cecil McBee, and drummer Roy Haynes, Pepper performs a definitive version of his intense ballad ‘Patricia.’ Other highlights include ‘Miss Who,’ ‘Lover Come Back to Me’ and ‘Chris’ Blues.'”

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Art Pepper Today – Latest Findings

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

UPDATE 2024

In 2010 we wrote a commentary about the album which can be found here.

It’s a long story that goes into great detail comparing the sound of the original Galaxy pressings with those of the much more common OJC’s.

Fourteen years later (!) and here we are, finally getting to the point where we have enough copies of Art Pepper Today to do a proper shootout.

Since this is a title we have not played in a very long time, we took the opportunity to give a quick listen to both kinds of pressings just to make sure that both could be expected to do well enough to be included in the shootout.

The OJCs Fall Short in a Different Way

Well, it turns out that the OJC pressings are no longer cutting it. That’s money down the drain.

It seems to be the case that they are dark and hard sounding compared to the Galaxy pressings.

This is a bit surprising because most of the OJC pressings that we don’t like are thin and bright, not dark and hard.

That’s not the way OJC’s typically sound, but in the world of records, when has that ever counted for anything?

Patterns are helpful up to a point, but on this album, the patterns we see across the label have broken down, which is why our business is built upon a foundation of playing every record we sell and judging it strictly on its own merits.

There are just too many exceptions to whatever patterns we may think we have detected.

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Art Pepper / Living Legend

More Art Pepper

More Jazz Recordings featuring the Saxophone

  • Stunning sound throughout this vintage Contemporary pressing, with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from first note to last
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this killer copy in our notes: “very natural + roomy + relaxed”…”3-D + rich”…”sax jumps out [of the speakers]”…”sweet + rich + breathy”
  • Both of these sides are a textbook example of the Contemporary sound we love here at Better Records: rich, warm and lively, with superb clarity throughout
  • Which means that well into the 70s, Contemporary was still at the top of their game, and well ahead of most of the jazz label competition
  • Pepper’s saxophone sound is right on the money – breathy and airy with clearly audible leading edge transients
  • Speaking of transients, listen for the powerful kinetic energy produced when Shelly Manne whacks the hell out of his cymbals
  • This is only the second copy of this title to hit the site in years – finding them in audiophile condition is getting harder (and more expensive) than ever these days
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs, but once you hear just how incredible sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting stitches and just be swept away by the music
  • 4 stars: “After 15 years filled with prison time and fighting drug addiction, Pepper was finally ready to return to jazz. Accompanied by three of his old friends (pianist Hampton Hawes, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Shelly Manne), Pepper … shows a greater emotional depth in his improvisations and was open to some of the innovations of the avant-garde in his search for greater self-expression.”

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