Top Artists – Lee Ritenour

Lee Ritenour – Friendship

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More Audiophile Recordings

  • Superb sound throughout this original Direct-to-Disc Japanese import pressing, with both sides earning Double Plus (A++) grades – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Full-bodied and warm, exactly the way you want your vintage analog to sound – the guitar is surprisingly real here
  • Both of these sides are Tubey Magical, lively and funky, with the kind of rich, solid sound that will fill your listening room from wall to wall
  • “The third of three Lee Ritenour sets originally cut for Japanese JVC matches the studio guitarist with … Ernie Watts (on tenor and soprano), both Dave and Don Grusin on keyboards, electric bassist Abraham Laboriel, drummer Steve Gadd and percussionist Steve Forman.”

This is one of my all time favorite audiophile discs. It’s actually real music.

The song “Woody Creek” is wonderful and reason enough to own this excellent album. The guitar of Lee Ritenour and the saxophone of Ernie Watts double up during a substantial portion of this song and the effect is just amazing.

Special kudos should go to Ernie Watts on sax, who blows some mean lines. But everybody is good on this album, especially the leader, Lee Ritenour. I saw these guys live and they put on a great show.

By the way, looking in the dead wax I see this record was cut by none other than Stan Ricker of Mobile Fidelity fame himself!

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Lee Ritenour – Captain Fingers

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More Jazz Fusion

  • The sound is huge, spacious, lively, transparent and punchy – this is jazz fusion that really rocks
  • Full-bodied and warm, exactly the way you want your vintage analog to sound – the guitar is surprisingly real here

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Side One Is Actually In Phase (Usually) and You Read It Here First (Probably)

This is a Well Recorded Jazz Album that should be part of any audiophile jazz collection.

It is also one of the pressings we’ve discovered with Reversed Polarity

According to the liner notes, this Dave Grusin album has reversed absolute phase. They tell you to switch the positive and negative at the speaker for the best transient response and spatial clarity. But get this: most side ones are NOT in reversed phase.

That out of phase quality is as plain as the nose on your face when you know what to listen for. There’s an unpleasant hardness and hollowness to the midrange, a lack of depth, and an off-putting opaque quality to the sound.

With our EAR 324p Phono Stage, the click of a button reverses phase, also known as polarity. I can’t tell you how handy it is to have such a tool at your disposal. Checking the phase for Discovered Again couldn’t have been easier.

An Amazing Discovery

But get this: most side ones are NOT reversed phase. (All the side twos we played were however.) How about them apples! We could not have been more shocked. Here is the most famous out of phase audiophile recording in the history of the world, and it turns out most copies are not out of phase at all!

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Lee Ritenour / Rit – Nautilus Half-Speed

More of the Music of Lee Ritenour

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Fusion Albums in Stock

This review was written in 2010 or so, before we had done much work with the album. Even though the best Elektra pressings are sure to be much better than this half-speed, we haven’t been impressed enough with any of the copies we’ve played to get a shootout going.

This very nice Nautilus Half-Speed Mastered LP has SURPRISINGLY GOOD SOUND.

We played this pressing against the 180g Discovery reissue that Doug Sax remastered and it SMOKED it.

What a piece of muddy trash that Discovery pressing is. 

Members of both Toto and Chicago play on this album, so fans of either might get a kick out of this music. 

AMG Review

Lee Ritenour has long been the perfect studio musician, one who can melt into the background without making any impact. While he possesses impressive technique, Ritenour has mostly played instrumental pop throughout his career, sometimes with a Brazilian flavor. His few jazz efforts have found him essentially imitating Wes Montgomery, but despite that he has been consistently popular since the mid-’70s. After touring with Sergio Mendes’ Brasil ’77 in 1973, Ritenour became a very busy studio guitarist in Los Angeles, taking time off for occasional tours with his groups and in the mid-’90s with Bob James in Fourplay. He also recorded many albums as a leader.