Top Artists – Kenny Burrell

Stan Getz / Getz Au Go Go – A Bossa Nova Classic

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More Bossa Nova

  • Musically and sonically, this is a must own jazz album for audiophiles, perfect for those new to jazz as well as serious jazz aficionados
  • This was a magical night (or two) with Stan feeling the spirit and staying telepathically in the groove with his compadres all evening long
  • An incredibly tough album to find with the right sound and decent surfaces, which is the main reason it’s been about four years since we last did this shootout
  • The top copy of Getz-Gilberto last time around sold for $1499 — if I had to choose between them, I would be tempted to take Getz Au Go Go, especially with sound like this
  • 4 stars: “Highly recommended for all dimensions of jazz enthusiasts.” [We would, of course, give it the full 5 Stars]

This Stan Getz record has the kind of live jazz club sound that audiophiles like us (you and me) dream of.

More importantly, this ain’t no jazz at some stupid pawnshop — this is the real thing. Stan Getz, Gary Burton, Kenny Burrell and the lovely Astrud Gilberto, the living embodiment of cool jazz, are coming to a listening room near you.

Fans of cool jazz — in point of fact, some of the coolest jazz ever recorded — take note.

Cool Jazz Is Right

I’ve gotten more enjoyment out of this Getz album than any other, including those that are much more famous such as Getz/Gilberto (which doesn’t sound as good by the way). This one is (mostly) live in a nightclub and it immediately puts you in the right mood to hear this kind of jazz.

Listening to side one, I’m struck with the idea that this is the coolest jazz record of cool jazz ever recorded. Getz’s take on Summertime is a perfect example of his “feel” during these sessions. His playing is pure emotion; every note seems to come directly from his heart.

What really sets these performances apart is the relaxed quality of the playing. Getz seems to be almost nonchalant, but it’s not a bored or disinterested sound he’s making. It’s more of a man completely comfortable in this live setting, surrounded by like-minded musicians, all communicating the same vibe. Perhaps they all got hold of some really good grass that day. That’s the feeling one gets from their playing. As one is listening, there’s a certain euphoria that seems to be part of the music. This is definitely one of those albums to get lost in. (more…)

Kenny Burrell – Weaver of Dreams

More Kenny Burrell

More Recordings on Vintage Columbia Vinyl

  • With two excellent Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, this original 6-Eye Stereo pressing of Burrell’s 1961 vocal release will be very hard to beat
  • Exceptionally spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – this pressing was a big step up over most of the other copies we played
  • ANALOG at its Tubey Magical finest – you’ll never play a CD (or any other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record as long as you live
  • If you have the Classic Records pressing from 1995, you were probably as unimpressed by the sound of it as we were, but not to worry, our Hot Stamper pressing murders that Heavy Vinyl wannabe
  • These are the Top Titles from 1961 we’ve reviewed to date. From an audiophile perspective, depending on your taste in music, most should be worthy of a place in your collection
  • Here is the complete list of titles from 1961 that we’ve reviewed (which overlaps quite a bit with the group above). Just about any of these, depending on how much you like the artist(s) or music, are worth seeking out

This original 6-Eye Stereo pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

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Stan Getz – Live and Learn

More of the Music of Stan Getz

Hot Stamper Pressings of Bossa Nova Albums Available Now

A classic case of We Was Wrong.

Many years ago we had written these silly lines in a review:

Of course, you would never know this is a good recording by playing the average domestic copy. This Japanese LP is one of the few pressings that can show you that this wonderful smoky night club jazz LP really can have Demo Disc sound.

Ridiculous, right? Well, at the time we believed it. Now our understanding is quite a bit more sophisticated, in the sense that the Japanese pressing is clearly better than many originals, but certainly not all of them.

More importantly, there are amazing sounding domestic reissues of the album that we’ve auditioned over the last ten years or so that really blew our minds and helped to set an even higher standard for the sound of Getz Au Go Go.

Our old story:

Way back in 2005 I discussed this very subject when listing a sealed copy:

There are pressing variations for this title on Japanese vinyl, and there’s no way to know what this one sounds like but all of them are better than any other pressing I know of. As I played the open copy we have listed on the site (1/12/05) I couldn’t help but marvel at the quality of the sound.

These days we would crack open a sealed one, clean it up and shoot it out with any others we could lay our hands on, because finding a copy with sound like this is a positive THRILL.

I’m no fan of Japanese pressings as readers of this Web site know very well, but the Japanese sure got this one right!

The domestic copies of this album are mediocre at best — there’s simply no real top end to be found on any Verve pressing I have ever heard.

The top end is precisely where the magic is! Astrud Gilberto’s breathy voice needs high frequencies to sound breathy.

Gary Burton’s vibes need high frequencies to emerge from the mix, otherwise you can hardly hear them.

And Stan Getz’s sax shouldn’t sound like it’s being played under a blanket.

The only version of this album that allows you to hear all the players right is a Japanese pressing, and then only when you get a good one.

That was our understanding in 2005, after being seriously into audio and records for 30 years, as a professional audiophile record dealer for 18 of them. Clearly we had a lot to learn, and we were on the road to learning it, having embarked on our first real Hot Stamper shootout just the year before. (We had been doing them less formally since the ’90s of course. It was only in 2004 that we were able to do them with the requisite scientific protocols in place.)

In 2005, we simply did not have the cleaning system or the playback system capable of showing us what was wrong with the sound of the Japanese pressing we were so impressed by at the time.

And we couldn’t clean and play the standard Verve pressings right either.

We were unable to move forward. The technologies we needed to get to the truth had not been invented yet.

The Revolutions in Audio of the last twenty years are are responsible for allowing us to get the domestic pressings — originals and reissues — to sound much better than the Japanese imports we mistakenly thought were superior.

When I got started in audio in the early- to mid- ’70s, the following important elements of the modern stereo system did not exist:

  • Stand-alone phono stages.
  • Modern cabling and power cords.
  • Vibration controlling platforms for turntables and equipment.
  • Synchronous Drive Systems for turntable motors.
  • Carbon fiber mats that sit on top of massive metal turntable platters.
  • Highly adjustable tonearms (for VTA, etc.) with extremely delicate adjustments and precision bearings.
  • And there wasn’t much in the way of innovative room treatments like the Hallographs we use.

And one of the most important revolutions is not a playback technology per se, but makes much better playback possible:

  • Modern record cleaning machines and fluids.

A lot of things had to change in order for us to reproduce records at the level that is required for us to do our record shootouts and be confident about our findings, and we pursued every one of them about as far as time and money allowed.

Practically every one of the 5000 listings on this blog is a testament to the changes brought about by those hard-won advancements.

For a further discussion of these issues, please click here.

Further Reading

Chet Baker – Chet

More Chet Baker

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Trumpet

  • This wonderful album of ballads has Mile Davis’ rhythm section supporting Chet, as well as contributions from other greats such as Kenny Burrell and Bill Evans
  • These guys are playing live in the studio and, on a copy that sounds this clear, you can really feel their presence on every track
  • This Chet Baker record belongs in any serious jazz collection, and for you audiophiles out there, prepare to be shocked when you play this copy against your Heavy Vinyl pressing, no matter which one you have
  • “…this Riverside issue captures the gifted but troubled trumpeter at his best. It might even qualify as Baker’s most satisfying and representative recording.”

Chet is one of the best sounding Chet Baker records we’ve ever played, although that’s not saying much because finding good Chet Baker records is like finding hen’s teeth these days.

The albums he did for Pacific Jazz in the ’50s can be wonderful, but few have survived in audiophile playing condition.

The Mariachi Brass albums are as awful as everyone says — we know, we’ve played them, too. The album he recorded for CTI in 1974, She Was Too Good To Me, is excellent and will be coming to the site again soon I hope.

We’d never heard the album Chet sound better than in our most recent shootout, and that’s coming from someone who’s been playing it since it was first reissued in the ’80s.

The less said about the awful Doug Sax remastering for Analogue Productions in the mid-’90s the better. What a murky piece of crap that was. Audiophile reviewers may have been impressed, but even way back then we knew a bad sounding record when we played one, and that pressing is very bad indeed.

One further note: the Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today, decades later, have a similar suite of shortcomings, sounding every bit as bad if not worse, and fooling the same audiophile reviewers and their followers to this very day. Nothing has changed, other than we have come along to offer the discriminating audiophile an alternative to the muddy messes these labels have been churning out.

Like this one!

Based on what we’re hearing, my feeling is that most of the natural, full-bodied, smooth, sweet sound of the album is on the master tape, and that all that was needed to get that vintage sound correctly on to disc was simply to thread up that tape on a reasonably good machine and hit play.

The fact that nobody seems to be able to make an especially good sounding record — certainly not as good sounding as this one — these days tells me that in fact I’m wrong to think that such an approach would work. Somebody should have been able to figure out how to do it by now. In our experience that is simply not the case today, and has not been for many years.

George Horn was doing brilliant — albeit spotty — work for Fantasy all through the ’80s. This album is proof that his sound is the right sound for this music.

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Aretha Franklin / Soul ’69 – Four Men with Beards Heavy Vinyl

More of the Music of Aretha Franklin

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues and R&B Albums Available Now

Four Men with Beards recut this record back in 2002. When it came out I was still selling Heavy Vinyl, and I liked some of the titles they had remastered. This one, however, sounded terrible to me and I was not interested in carrying it.

I fancied myself a curator back in those days, but I was not able to set the standards that we can now set for our records, for one simple reason. We hadn’t learned how to do it yet.

We did our first shootout twelve years later, and that’s when our real record education began.

This is a Must Own Soul Classic from 1969 that belongs in every right-thinking audiophile’s collection

The complete list of titles from 1969 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

The music, of course, is top notch, and it’s even better when you don’t have the bad sound and groove distortion of the average copy getting in the way.

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Sonny Rollins – Alfie

The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

Sonny Rollins Albums We’ve Reviewed

  • This Sonny Rollins classic finally returns to the site boasting superb sound on both sides of this original Impulse stereo pressing
  • A triumph for Rudy Van Gelder, a Top Impulse Title, and as much a showcase for Oliver Nelson as it is for Sonny Rollins
  • 4 1/2 Stars: “Rollins attempts to capture the textures of life through his incisive and energetic playing, his coherent improvisations, and variations on musical themes.”
  • If you’re a fan of Sonny Rollins, this Impulse from 1966 surely belongs in your collection.

This album is on the TAS Super Disc list, which is probably what first alerted me to it. I know I was listening to this album decades ago, just from the memory of hearing it in the condo I used to live in. It sounded great back then and it sounds even better now! It may just be my personal favorite of all his work.

What makes this album so great? For starters, great players. Kenny Burrell is wonderful as always. Interestingly, I never realized that Roger Kellaway is the pianist on these sessions. I saw him live years ago with Benny Carter (who was 90 at the time) and he put on one of the most amazing performances at the piano I have ever seen. For some reason, he was never able to make it as a recording artist, but the guy is a genius at the keyboard.

Of course, any orchestration by Oliver Nelson is going to be top flight and this is no exception. Two of his records are Must Owns, in my book: Jimmy Smith’s Bashin’ and his own The Blues and the Abstract Truth. No jazz collection without them can be taken seriously.

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Kenny Burrell – Midnight Blue Is a Masterpiece

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Kenny Burrell

Reviews and Commentaries for Midnight Blue

One of our All Time Favorite Blue Note albums for music and sound – is there a better bluesy Jazz Guitar album? Midnight Blue is our favorite Kenny Burrell album of all time, at least in part because it’s one of the All Time Best Sounding Blue Notes. 

Midnight Blue checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records.

If you already own a copy of Midnight Blue and you don’t consider it one of the best sounding jazz guitar records in your collection, then you surely don’t have a copy that sounds the way our Hot Stamper pressings do. In other words, there is a very good chance you simply don’t know what you’re missing.

Don’t think this is just another 60s jazz guitar album. With Stanley Turrentine on sax and Ray Baretto on congas, this music will move you like practically no other. When Turrentine (a shockingly underrated player) rips into his first big solo, you’ll swear he’s right there in the room with you.

And if you do have one of our better Hot Stampers and it still isn’t the best sounding jazz guitar album in your collection, then you have one helluva jazz collection. Drop us a line and tell us what record you like the sound of better than Midnight Blue. We’re at a loss to think of what it might be.

Originals Vs Reissues

The reason this copy has such amazing transparency and such an extended top end compared to other copies is clearly due, at least to some degree, to the better cutting equipment used to master it. It’s the rare original Blue Note pressing that has this kind of resolution, leading-edge transient information, articulate bass definition, and big, bold but shockingly REAL sound.

Here is an example to the contrary. We played an early Blue Note mono pressing from 1956 that was fairly mind-blowing, so we have no doubt that it is possible for amazingly good sounding early pressings to exist. They are simply too much of an outlier for this fact to have any real value to the audiophile record collector of today.

How can anyone find, let alone afford, the five or more original Blue Note pressings that it would take to do a shootout?

What Are You Paying For?

Collectors routinely pay hundreds of dollars for original copies that don’t sound remotely as good as this one.

Which is fine by us. We’re not in that business.

We’re not selling the right labels; we’re selling the right sound. The two could not be more different.

Collecting single pressings of original albums is doable, albeit expensive.

Collecting good sounding pressings is hard. In fact, nothing in the record collecting world is harder.

But if you actually like playing your records as opposed to collecting them, then the best possible sound should be right at the top of your list and the rarity of the label at the very bottom.

Further Reading

Kenny Burrell – Great Arrangements by Don Sebesky

More of the Music of Kenny Burrell

Don Sebesky, A Top Arranger

More Records that Are Good for Testing String Tone and Texture 

This is one of our favorite orchestra-backed jazz records here at Better Records. A few others off the top of my head would be Wes Montgomery’s California Dreaming (1966, and also Sebesky-arranged), Grover Washington’s All the King’s Horses (1973) and Deodato’s Prelude (also 1973, with brilliant arrangements by the man himself).

On a killer copy like this the sound is out of this world. Rich and full, open and transparent, this one defeated all comers in our shootout, taking the Top Prize for sound and earning all Three Pluses.

What’s especially notable is how well-recorded the orchestra’s string sections are. They have just the right amount of texture and immediacy without being forced or shrill. They’re also very well integrated into the mix. I wouldn’t have expected RVG to pull it off so well — I’ve heard other CTI records where the orchestration was abominable — but here it works as well as on any album I know of.

Both sides blew us away with a deep, wide soundstage and full extension on both the top and the bottom.

The bass is deep and defined; the tonality of the guitar and its overall harmonic richness are Right On The Money. The piano has the weight and heft of the real thing.

This kind of warm, rich, Tubey Magical analog sound is gone forever. You have to go back to 1971 to find it!

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Letter of the Week – “After returning to the 45 RPM there was no enjoyment, so I dropped the needle on the stamper one more time, and then I heard it…”

More of the Music of Kenny Burrell

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Kenny Burrell

A good customer had this to say about a recent shootout:

By the way, side 2 of Midnight Blue bested every other copy I played including the 45 RPM Blue Note AP reissue. The 45 RPM is very good. You know that technically it is right, but at the same time it’s missing something.

When I listened to the [Hot] stamper copy you dug up for me I found it a little noisy at first and wasn’t sure if I could live with it. However after returning to the 45 RPM there was no enjoyment, so I dropped the needle on the stamper one more time, and then I heard it…

I know what you mean about these modern reissues “missing something.” No matter how well mastered they may be, they’re almost always missing whatever it is that makes the analog record such a special listening experience. I hear that “analog” sound practically nowhere else outside of the live event (and, of course, the vintage LP). 

Thanks for your letter. 
TP

Our Classic Records Review

Pretty flat and lifeless. You would never understand why audiophiles rave about this recording by listening to the Classic Records pressing.

We played it up against our best, and as expected it was nothing to write home about. Since Rudy has remastered and ruined practically all the Blue Note CDs by now, you will have your work cut out for you if you want to find a good sounding version of Midnight Blue. This sure ain’t one.

Of course we would be more than happy to get you an amazing sounding copy — it’s what we do — but the price will be five to ten times (or more) what the Classic costs. In our opinion it’s money well spent.

Since the Classic conveys very little of what the musicians were up to whilst recording the album, our advice is to cross it off your list of records of interest. It’s thirty bucks down the drain.

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Kenny Burrell – God Bless The Child

More Kenny Burrell

More recordings by Rudy Van Gelder

  • Amazing sound from start to finish on this Shootout Winning TRIPLE TRIPLE (A+++) copy
  • One of our favorite CTI albums, and surely one of the best sounding, especially on this pressing
  • Credit goes to Rudy Van Gelder once again for the huge space that the superbly well-recorded orchestra occupies
  • AMG raves “This is Burrell at his level best as a player to be sure, but also as a composer and as a bandleader. Magnificent.”

God Bless The Child is one of our favorite orchestra-backed jazz records here at Better Records. A few others at the top of my list would be Wes Montgomery’s California Dreaming (1966, and also Sebesky-arranged), Grover Washington’s All the King’s Horses (1973) and Deodato’s Prelude (also 1973, with brilliant arrangements by the man himself).

What’s especially notable is how well-recorded the strings are. They have just the right amount of texture and immediacy without being forced or shrill. They’re also very well integrated into the mix. I wouldn’t have expected RVG to pull it off so well — I’ve heard other CTI records where the orchestration was abominable — but here it works as well as on any album I know of.

The bass is deep and defined; the tonality of the guitar and its overall harmonic richness are beautifully rendered. The piano has the weight and heft of the real thing.

This kind of warm, rich, Tubey Magical analog sound is gone forever. You have to go back to 1971 to find it. (more…)