Potentially Good Sounding OJC Pressings
Not Very Good Sounding OJC Pressings
The best copies of a certain small, select group of reissues sound like the vintage jazz albums they are attempting to emulate, and sometimes they even beat the originals at their own Tubey Magical game. They can be every bit as rich, sweet and spacious as their earlier-pressed brethren in our experience.
In the case of Night Hawk we simply have never seen an original stereo copy clean enough to buy, so we have no actual, physical evidence for what an original would sound like.
That said, having critically auditioned literally thousands of vintage jazz records over the course of the last few decades, including hundreds recorded by Rudy Van Gelder like this one, we’re pretty confidant we know what the good ones are supposed to sound like.
And they sound just like the best copies of the very pressing we are offering here.
The Players and Personnel
Bass – Ron Carter
Drums – Gus Johnson
Piano – Tommy Flanagan
Recorded By – Rudy Van Gelder
Tenor Saxophone – Coleman Hawkins
Tenor Saxophone – Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis
This is an Older Jazz Review.
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a fine art.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
