Top Artists – Barney Kessel

Sonny Rollins – Sonny Rollins & the Contemporary Leaders

More Sonny Rollins

More Contemporary Jazz Label Recordings

  • Boasting seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER throughout, this vintage pressing of Rollins’s sophomore Contemporary release will be very hard to beat
  • Both of these sides are textbook examples of the kind of rich, smooth, effortlessly natural Contemporary Jazz sound that Roy DuNann‘s All Tube Recording Chain was known for in 1958
  • “The last of the classic Sonny Rollins albums prior to his unexpected three-year retirement features the great tenor with pianist Hampton Hawes, guitarist Barney Kessell, bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Shelly Manne… Great music.”

This Contemporary Label LP has THE BIG SOUND we love here at Better Records — rich and full-bodied with live-in-your-listening-room immediacy. The bass is deep, rock-solid, and note-like. There’s plenty of clarity and extension up top, bringing Shelly Manne’s fantastic work on the cymbals to life.

This is no Heavy Vinyl slogfest. Just listen to the leading edge transients on Sonny’s sax.

The guitar is warm, rich, and sweet, and just swimming in ambience.

Sonny is backed here by a heavy-hitting lineup of Barney Kessel, Shelly Manne, Leroy Vinnegar and Hampton Hawes — all favorite players of ours here at Better Records.

(more…)

What We Listen For – Timbre, Richness, Tubey Magic and Freedom from Artificiality

More of the Music of Barney Kessel

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Barney Kessel

Man, when you play a Hot Stamper copy of an amazing recording such as this, the timbre of the instruments is so spot-on it makes all the hard work and money you’ve put into your stereo more than pay off. To paraphrase The Hollies, you get paid back with interest.

If you hear anything funny in the mids and highs of this record, don’t blame the record. This is the kind of record that shows up audiophile BS equipment for what it is: Audiophile BS. If you are checking for richness, Tubey Magic and freedom from artificiality, I can’t think of a better test disc. It has loads of the first two and none of the last.

A Great Test Disc

We highly recommend you make every effort to find yourself a copy of this album and use it to test your own equipment. The right pressing can be both a great Demo Disc and a great Test Disc.

Two of the best sounding jazz guitar records in the history of the world were made by Barney Kessel for Contemporary: this one, and Music To Listen To Barney Kessel By. I used to have them both in my personal collection.

[This was written many years ago when I actually had a personal collection. With 40,000 records in stock I don’t need a collection of my own anymore. Any record I might want to play is in stock, waiting to be shot out.]

Such a wonderful idea for an album. The melodies from Bizet’s Carmen are unforgettable and perfect fodder for jazz improvisation. Don’t think that this is just guitar and rhythm. This is a full band with lots of horns, clarinets of all kinds, bassoons, oboes, flutes, piano, vibes — the variety of sounds to be found on this album is practically unlimited.

And with Roy DuNann’s engineering, you will never hear richer, fuller sound with more accurate timbres for all the instruments mentioned above. The guy was a genius. His recordings define High Fidelity for me. I know of none better.

The Sound We Love

For those of you who appreciate the sound that Roy DuNann (and Howard Holzer on other sessions) were able to achieve in the ’50s at Contemporary Records, this LP is a Must-Own (unless you already have it, which is doubtful considering how hard it is to find a copy in clean condition). Their stuff just doesn’t get any better than this. Tubey magic, richness, sweetness, dead-on timbres from top to bottom — this is a textbook example of Contemporary sound at its best.

From an audiophile point of view, how can you beat a Roy DuNann recording of so many instruments? It’s audiophile heaven. The sound is gorgeous, all tube, live-to-two-track direct from the Contemporary studio.

Warning: Stereo Editorial Follows

The same is true for audio equipment, as I’m sure you’ve experienced first-hand. Some stereos can just bore you to tears with their dead-as-a-doornail sound and freedom from dynamic contrasts. Other stereos are overly-detailed and fatiguing; they wear out their welcome with their hyped-up extremes.

As Goldilocks will gladly tell you, some stereos are just right; they have the uncanny ability to get out of the way of the music. Some equipment doesn’t call attention to itself, and that tends to be the kind of equipment we prefer around here at Better Records.

After thirty five years in this hobby [now closer to fifty], I’ve had my share of both. 90+ per cent of the stuff I hear around town makes me appreciate what I have at home. I’m sure you feel the same way.

(more…)

Barney Kessel – Vol. 3: To Swing Or Not To Swing

More Barney Kessel

More Contemporary Label Jazz Recordings

  • Boasting seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades from start to finish, this early Contemporary MONO pressing is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Vol. 3, To Swing Or Not To Swing you’ve heard – reasonably quiet vinyl too
  • Tubey Magic, richness, sweetness, dead-on timbres from top to bottom – this is a textbook example of Contemporary sound at its best
  • For some reason, the guitar sound from this era of All Tube Chain Recording is seems to have died out with the times – it can only be found on the best of these vintage pressings, like this one
  • 5 stars: “The unusual repertoire on this set … would by itself make this bop/cool set noteworthy. Add to that a very interesting lineup of players (trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, Georgie Auld or Bill Perkins on tenor, pianist Jimmy Rowles, the rhythm guitar of Al Hendrickson, bassist Red Mitchell, and Shelly Manne or Irv Cottler on drums) … and the overall result is a recording highly recommended to fans of straight-ahead jazz.”
  • If you’re a fan of Jazz Guitar, this All Tube MONO Recording from 1955 belongs in your collection.

Man, this music is a blast when it sounds this good. I don’t think there’s a whole lot you could do to make this music sound any better! It’s one of the best early mono Contemporary LPs we’ve ever played. It’s so Tubey Magical. Kessel’s guitar sound is out of this world.

The music here matches the sound for excellence. The whole band just swings. There’s a real old rag-timey feel to the songs. Look at this list of all-star players: Harry Edison, Jimmy Rowles, Red Mitchell and Shelly Manne — this is some serious jazz talent.

(more…)

The Poll Winners – Poll Winners Three!

More of The Poll Winners

More Contemporary Label Jazz Recordings

  • An excellent Contemporary stereo pressing with Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from the first note to the last – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Tubier, more transparent, and more dynamic than most other copies we played, with plenty of that “jumpin’ out of the speakers” quality that only The Real Thing (an old record) ever has
  • Roy DuNann always seemed to get phenomenally good sound out of the sessions he recorded – amazingly realistic drums in a big room; Tubey Magical guitar tone; deep, note-like string bass, and on and on
  • 4 stars: “From 1956-1959, it seemed as if guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Shelly Manne won just about every jazz poll. For their third joint recording, the musicians contributed an original apiece and also performed seven standards. Highlights of the fairly typical but swinging straightahead set include ‘Soft Winds,’ ‘It’s All Right with Me,’ ‘Mack the Knife,’ and ‘I’m Afraid the Masquerade Is Over.'”

(more…)

Benny Carter – Jazz Giant

More of the Music of Benny Carter

Contemporary Jazz Records Available Now

  • Both sides of this superb Contemporary reissue earned excellent Double Plus (A++) sonic grades
  • If you still think that Analogue Productions is remastering records properly, you have definitely never heard a real Contemporary that sounds as good as this one does
  • The music of this Jazz Giant comes alive on this copy, with space, size, clarity and richness that few other pressings can match
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Benny Carter had already been a major jazz musician for nearly 30 years when he recorded this particularly strong septet session for Contemporary … This timeless music is beyond the simple categories of ‘swing’ or ‘bop’ and should just be called ‘classic.'”

If you like the sound of Contemporary Records, you won’t find a better example than this. Midrange magic doesn’t get anymore magical.

It’s been several years since our last shootout, but we hope the lucky buyer of this copy realizes it was more than worth it. To find a copy of Jazz Giant that sounds as good as this one is a very special event indeed.

(more…)

Julie London – About The Blues

More Julie London

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings

  • Boasting two outstanding Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, this original Liberty Turquoise label MONO pressing was giving us the sound we were looking for on Julie London’s wonderful 1957 release
  • Julie’s lilting vocals are clear, breathy, Tubey Magical, and sweet, like nothing you’ve ever heard (unless you have one of our other Hot Stamper Julie London records)
  • Rich, smooth, sweet, full of ambience, dead-on correct tonality – everything that we listen for in a great record is here
  • Marks and 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
  • 4 stars: “About the Blues … may just be her best orchestral session. Since downbeat torch songs were London’s specialty, the album features an excellent selection of nocturnal but classy blues songs that play to her subtle strengths…”

Liberty and Ted Keep

Why does this 1957 recording sound so good?

Well, Liberty was a label that tended to produce very good sounding records. We’ve played scores of them, and we’ve done many shootouts for the ones that had music that could justify our high prices the time and effort required to find the best sounding copies.

But the most obvious reason this record has such good sound is that Ted Keep recorded it.

You don’t have to, but if you want this kind of sound quality, it pays to go back to the All Tube Recording and Mastering Chains of the late ’50s and early ’60s. That is where you are most likely to find it.

(more…)

Ella Fitzgerald – The Duke Ellington Songbook, Volume Two

More Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald Albums We’ve Reviewed

  • An excellent Verve Mono reissue with wonderful sound on all FOUR sides
  • Forget the originals – like so many of the early songbook pressings, they suffer from painfully hard and honky mastering EQ (and gritty sounding vinyl)
  • We know whereof we speak when it comes to early Ella records – we’ve played plenty of them and found that most just don’t sound very good
  • Exceptionally quiet vinyl throughout* — Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus
  • “Duke’s spectacular catalog dazzles, and his sprightly, lush textures are transfigured under Fitzgerald’s warm-timbred voice and elegant, precise delivery… each tune as familiar as it is delightful to hear in this new context.”
  • If you’re a fan of Ella’s, this Top Title from 1957 belongs in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1957 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

This mono reissue is the only way to find the MIDRANGE MAGIC that’s missing from modern records. As good as the best of those pressings may be, this record is going to be dramatically more REAL sounding.

(more…)

Billie Holiday / Songs for Distingue Lovers – Classic Records Reviewed

Sonic Grade: B?

Probably a fairly good jazz vocal album from Classic Records.

Back in the day we noted that: “This is one of the best Billie Holiday records around” and we stand by that statement, at least until another copy of the Classic comes our way and we have a chance to play it.

By the way, we have never had a Hot Stamper pressing of the album on the site. We simply cannot find enough clean copies with which to do a shootout! Not sure we’ve even found one that played quietly and sounded good.

For thirty bucks the price of this Heavy Vinyl pressing has to be seen as a bargain.

But…

Who the hell thought that the label below was better looking than the ones Verve used?

Classic Records was run by some of the most clueless audiophiles there ever were, and this label is a good example of a pitifully poor choice they made in the design of the labelling. (The Shaded Dog “shading” was all wrong but hey, it didn’t seem to bother too many people.)

A self-inflicted wound, and for no reason. Nobody could figure out how to make an authentic looking vintage Verve stereo label? I’m pretty sure it’s been done.

What was the point of this one? It’s ugly and modern. Who wants to collect classic albums with ugly modern labels?

The shiny jackets are bad enough. Now they have to ruin the labels too?

(more…)

Benny Carter / Jazz Giant – Is the OJC Really 100x Worse?

More of the Music of Benny Carter

Contemporary Jazz Records Available Now

The OJC versions of Contemporary Records are typically thin and somewhat opaque, as well as tizzy up top, the kind of sound one often hears on CDs (and that CD lovers for some reason never seem to notice).

Some OJC pressings, however, can be excellent when you chance upon the right copy.

The pressings that were mastered and put out by Contemporary in the mid-’70s (until they were bought by Fantasy) are almost always superior to the OJCs, but these rules of thumb break down so badly and so often that the only workable approach is just to play as many different copies of the album as you can get your hands on and simply let them sort themselves out sonically.

This of course is exactly how we conduct our shootouts. We make a lot of mistakes, but when all is said and done, we rarely fail to come up with the goods, the goods being phenomenal sounding pressings of important music, pressings that are dramatically superior to any others.

Although we’ve liked the OJC of Jazz Giant in the past, last time around the OJC versions were quite a bit thinner, smaller and less energetic than our “real” Contemporary stereo pressings. They were a big step down from our killer shootout winner.

The notes read “100x better” if that tells you anything (!)

A clear case of Live and Learn.

(more…)

Barney Kessel – Hard Left, Hard Right Staging “Problems”

More of the Music of Barney Kessel

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Barney Kessel

We hear complaints from time to time about hard-left/ hard-right staging, but the right pressing, properly cleaned, then played on the right equipment and all the rest, will allow you to hear the ROOM in the middle, the real space the musicians are in.

It’s the same with The Beatles twin track stereo stuff — there is a room there. The sounds may be stuck in the speakers at your house, but over here that music is floating in the real space of the studio, from left to right, and including the middle.

This Kessel record really doesn’t have a problem with hard right hard left sound, but some Contemporary titles do and I just thought I would get that off my chest. Modest equipment (as well as not so modest equipment, especially if it’s modern, if my experience is any guide) has one helluva time finding the ambient information on most recordings, just one more reason why we don’t recommend cheap tables and inexpensive phono stages.

A Top Kessel Title

Barney Kessel comes out SWINGIN’ on this 1962 album — he is up for this gig! The energy you hear in his playing is partly the Hot Stamper pressing of course. When you get a record that has all of its dynamics and transients intact, the musicians just come alive in a way that the typically compressed, dead-as-a-doornail Heavy Vinyl reissue cannot begin to communicate. We HATE that reissue sound; it’s the main reason we stopped carrying them.

Where is the life of the music you ask? It’s on the kind of Hot Stamper pressings you are reading about right now. The band is cookin’, and because the pressing is so transparent, so open and spacious, you can hear each and every player’s contribution clearly and effortlessly. The cool air of the studio surrounds every instrument. They’re in a nice-sized room and you can really hear the sound bouncing around, just as you would if you were sitting in with the band.

And what would a good Contemporary be without Tubey Magic, especially on the guitar. Man, we love that sound. And check out the deep bass while you’re at it. No half-speed mastered audiophile pressing EVER had bass like this.