Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Albums Available Now
How do you make a vintage jazz recording sound wrong?
Easy. Just take out all the Tubey Magic that was captured on the master tape all those years ago by Howard Holzer and Roy DuNann.
You know the kind of Tubey Magic I’m talking about. It’s the trademark sound of every vintage Contemporary pressing ever made. It’s the defining sound of the best jazz recordings from the era. It’s the reason that jazz lovers and record collectors the world over pay big bucks for vintage pressings — because they have the sound of tubes.
When you take away that one quality — just the one, leaving everything else as it should be: the bass, the mids, the highs, the energy, the space, the size, you name it — what you are left with doesn’t sound right.
It no longer sounds the way a jazz record from 1958 would sound.
If you don’t know that sound, it’s possible that this cheap reissue pressing from 1984 might not be as bothersome for you as it was for us. But we’ve played vintage jazz records from the 50s by the hundreds. They never sound like this. The reissues might, but the best early pressings sure don’t.
Maybe This Is Your Sound?
However, if you happen to like the sound of CDs for some reason, something that is frankly hard to imagine but nevertheless seems to be true, this OJC might just be the ticket.
We’ve never liked that sound, and we sure don’t like this pressing.
Other records we’ve played that sounded like CDs to us can be found here.
We’ve only played three releases on the Music Matters label, but all three of them sounded like CDs to us — Green Street, The Magnificent Thad Jones, and Tina Brooks’ True Blue (review coming someday!).
Much of Kevin Gray‘s work has the kind of sound we associate with the compact disc. We don’t understand why everyone doesn’t hear how badly mastered his records are, but we have no trouble recognizing their many faults. They are, to one degree or another:
- Lacking in ambience
- Artificial sounding
- Hard sounding
- Lacking in transparency
- Lacking in richness
- Sour sounding
- Tonally leaned out
- Lacking in Tubey Magic
The OJC pressings of Harold in the Land of Jazz we played were thinner and brighter than even the worst of the 70s LPs we auditioned.
They did not make the cut for our shootout, a shootout we abandoned years ago because the early pressings we liked were just too rare, too noisy and too expensive to justify the cost and effort that would be required to make a shootout a reality.
