- The First Set makes it to the site with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
- Three-dimensional space and ambience, with Tubey Magic by the boatload – this is guaranteed to be one of the better sounding live jazz records you’ve heard
- Rudy Van Gelder was masterful at this is the kind of spacious, low-distortion, dynamic, energetic sound
- “Griffin and Davis, competitive tenors with different sounds, battle each other… Exciting music that deserves to be made more widely available.” [And here is a wonderful copy ripe for the taking.]
Top Artists – Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis
Coleman Hawkins – Night Hawk
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Night Hawk
- An outstanding copy with solid Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
- With a nearly perfect balance of analog richness and high-res clarity and space, this reissue showed us once again just how good an engineer Rudy Van Gelder could be back in 1961
- “This [album] has many fine moments from these two highly competitive jazzmen, particularly the lengthy title cut and a heated tradeoff on “In a Mellow Tone,” on which Davis goes higher but Hawkins wins on ideas.”
For us audiophiles both the sound and the music here are wonderful. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good an 1961 All Tube Analog recording can be, this killer copy will do the trick. (more…)
Harry Edison & Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis – Simply Sweets Is Simply Wonderful
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- With stunning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from first note to last, this copy of Simply Sweets simply blew away every other pressing in our recent shootout
- This is one of the best sounding small group Pablo recordings we have played in quite a while – the sound of this superb jazz quintet is lively and real like you will not believe
- The legendary engineer Val Valentin put this one on tape, brilliantly – he’s the man behind some of our All Time Pablo favorites
- “Trumpeter Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison and tenor saxophonist Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis always made a potent pair. They both possessed immediately identifiable sounds, were veterans of Count Basie’s Orchestra and never had any difficulty swinging.” — Allmusic
Both sides of this very special pressing — it looks the same as every other copy we played but it sure doesn’t sound like them — are huge, rich, tubey and clear. As soon as the group got going we knew that this copy was going to be exceptional, and the longer it played the better it got and the more we liked it. There was no other copy in our shootout that could touch it, in any area of reproduction. (more…)
Harry Edison & Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis – Simply Sweets – A Sleeper from Pablo
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- This outstanding copy of Simply Sweets boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides and relatively quiet vinyl too
- The sound of this superb jazz quintet is big, lively, open and clear with Tubey Magical richness
- The legendary engineer Val Valentin put this one on tape, brilliantly – he’s the man behind some of our All Time Pablo favorites
- “Trumpeter Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison and tenor saxophonist Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis always made a potent pair. They both possessed immediately identifiable sounds, were veterans of Count Basie’s Orchestra and never had any difficulty swinging.” — Allmusic
Both sides of this outstanding pressing are big, rich, tubey and clear. Few other copies in our shootout held this kind of sound.
Titles such as this one are the reason we put so much time and money into hunting down and auditioning every Pablo jazz record we can get our hands on — because some of them sound like this one. Who else was recording jazz this good in the late ’70s and well into the ’80s?
And don’t say Concord. There are maybe five great sounding records on that label. Pablo has ten or twenty times that many, and that’s a conservative estimate. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Norman Granz for starting the Pablo label and keeping the quality as high as he did. (more…)