Top Artists – Sonny Rollins

Rollins and Nelson Are Hard to Beat in 66

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

A triumph for Rudy Van Gelder, a Top Impulse title, and as much a showcase for Oliver Nelson as it is for Sonny Rollins. 

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 25 years 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. You will have a hard time finding a better Sonny Rollins record, sonically or musically. 

Great players of course. 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.

For audiophiles who are looking for one of the best sounding jazz recordings ever made, this is it.

Heavy Vinyl

There was a 180 gram reissue on Impulse a number of years back. I seem to recall it was awful. Most of the Heavy Vinyl reissues that Blue Note and Impulse did under their own names were garbage. They were probably a step up from the CDs those labels were making at the time, but none of those pressings have the magic that’s found on originals like this one.

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Sonny Rollins – The Standard Sonny Rollins

More Sonny Rollins

  • The Standard Rollins is back on the site for only the second time in over four years, here with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this original stereo pressing
  • Once again the brilliant engineering of Ray Hall for RCA conveys the vitality of live music for these sessions (which were undoubtedly recorded live)
  • Includes superstars like Herbie Hancock, Jim Hall, and Bob Cranshaw, who’ve lent their talents to some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time
  • “Each standard is given a brief performance that basically gives us a solid dose of Rollins waxing rhapsodic, sometimes backed by just bass and drums, with guitar and piano added sparingly. It all adds up to a mighty package that contains small, but ample doses of undiluted Rollins.” – All About Jazz.com

This original stereo RCA pressing from 1965 has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even 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 Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, and the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound. (more…)

Sonny Rollins – Saxophone Colossus

The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

  • With two STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this 60s Gold Label Prestige Mono pressing is certainly as good a copy as we have ever heard
  • An especially good sounding recording and one that we rarely have on the site, and copies in true mono are the rarest of them all
  • The sound is everything that’s good about Rudy Van Gelder‘s recordings – it’s present, spacious, full-bodied, Tubey Magical, dynamic and, most importantly, alive
  • Need I even mention have completely this Hot Stamper pressing will obliterate any and all Heavy Vinyl contenders you may have heard? No? OK, good, I won’t mention it
  • If the drum opening of “St. Thomas” doesn’t do it for you, I don’t know what will
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 5 stars: “Sonny Rollins recorded many memorable sessions during 1954-1958, but Saxophone Colossus is arguably his finest all-around set… Essential music[.]”
  • This is a Must Own jazz album from 1957 that belongs in every jazz-loving audiophile’s collection

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We Was Wrong about Saxophone Colossus and More in 2010

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

The album is a compilation of three major sessions from 1956, all with both Sonny Rollins and Max Roach. Allmusic describes it this way:

“Saxophone Colossus, the album that really made the jazz public fully aware of the majestic talents of Sonny Rollins, is combined here with seven other great performances from the same highly creative period in the long career of this major artist.”

In 2010 we thought this two-fer had very good sound for the music it contained. Here is what we had to say all those years ago:

This Prestige Two-Fer Double LP has FOUR GREAT SIDES with each rating an A+ or better. The standout sides here are two and four, both rating an A++. Both sides are EXCELLENT and very lively with lots of energy and presence. Side one rates an A+ and has a wonderfully extended top end and side three rates an A+ – A++ with clean and clear sound and huge breathy horns.

Well, it turns out that in 2010 we had a lot to learn.

We were about to do a shootout for Saxophone Colossus about five [make that ten or more] years ago, and we decided to pull out some of the two-fer pressings we had sitting in the backroom to see how they would hold up against the early pressings we liked, which you can read about here.

It did not go well. The album sounded like a cheap reissue, which of course it is, but many cheap reissues sound great, so we never hold the price of the record against it when deciding whether or not it is worth cleaning and auditioning.

There are scores of budget jazz reissues from the 70s and 80s that sound great, some of them two-fer pressings.

Just not this one. It’s passable at best, and a very far cry from what the best pressings can sound like.

More on Saxophone Colossus

Our last White Hot Stamper Gold Label Mono pressing went for big bucks, 900 of them in fact.

Of course, a clean original goes for many times that, which is one reason you have never seen such a record on our site.

How much would we have to charge for a Hot Stamper pressing of an album we paid many thousands of dollars for? Far more than our customers would be willing to pay us, that’s for sure.

You Say You Don’t Have Nine Hundred Bucks for This Album?

Try the DCC pressing from 1995.

The DCC Heavy Vinyl pressing is probably a nice record. I haven’t played it in many years, but I remember liking it back in the day.

It’s dramatically better than the 80s OJC, which, like many OJC pressings, is thin, hard, tizzy up top and devoid of Tubey Magic.

I would be surprised if the DCC Gold CD isn’t even better than their vinyl pressing.

They usually are.

Steve Hoffmann brilliantly mastered many classic albums for DCC. I like DCC’s CDs much better than their records.

Their records did not have to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we discussed in some depth here.

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Sonny Rollins Helped Us See the Light Many Years Ago

The following commentary was taken from our mid-90s catalogs, the ones that came out back in the days when it was still possible to find great jazz records like Alternate Takes for cheap, often still sealed.

The Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl recuts done by Doug Sax had come out a few years earlier, starting in 1992. Those remastered records were in print at the time I wrote this, and I was pretty pissed off at the way they sounded.

Here is our listing with some minor changes from long ago:

Acoustic Sounds had just remastered and ruined a big batch of famous jazz records, and shortly thereafter a certain writer in The Absolute Sound had said nice things about them.

Said writer and I got into a war of words over these records, long, long ago. You’ll notice that no one ever mentions these awful records anymore, and for good reason: they suck. If you own any of them, do yourself a favor and get either the CD or a good LP for comparison purposes. I expect you will hear what I’m talking about.

In my essay on reviewers I attack him for giving a big “Thumbs Up” in TAS to the botched remastering of Sonny’s Way Out West. The OJC reissue, though superior, is still only a pale shadow of the original.

The Real Deal

Now we have the real thing! This LP has three alternate takes from that session, all mastered by George Horn, and surprise, surprise, surprise, they sound just like my original, much better than (but not so different from) the OJC, and worlds away from the muted flab of the Analogue Productions LP!

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Letter of the Week – “I will spare you the time to comment on my 1992 Analogue Productions Reissue…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sonny Rollins’s Albums Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Dear Tom and Fred

After having had the opportunity to listen to the next batch of 7 more records, here are my observations on the now 40 records I bought from you.

First to my listening experience. After receiving the CSNY 4 Way Street and looking for my own record, I thought was a German press easy to beat I realized it was a white label promo first press and thought, oh, did I make a mistake to buy this for this kind of money from you guys, this may be a tough one to crack?

Not so, your SH Stamper clearly beat the WL promo, check!

Next up was the Miles Davis Sketches of Spain White Hot Stamper, one of my very top Miles favorites.

I did not recall that I had the six eye first press, and on side 2, with identical stampers (when your 3/3 WH show up, you do not have the time to check this but hurry :-since your WH 3/3s sell like hot cakes!).

So even more difficult to beat?? Promising start: your WH was clearly better on side 1, now to the identical stampers side 2: not as clearly but still just more transparent, better drums, less shrill on track 2, check!

But it certainly cannot get better than this 3/3 WH stamper, can it?

Next up is Sonny Rollins 3/3 WH Stamper [of Way Out West]. Hard to believe, but yes, even better than the great Miles 3/3 WHS, and I will spare you the time to comment on my 1992 Analogue Productions reissue which I always thought was quite decent.

And so it goes on…

Christian

Christian,

In less than a year you have acquired a large number of simply amazing sounding records. Congratulations.

As you point out about the stampers, you may have a pressing with the right stampers, but our copy will still beat it. How it was pressed and how it was cleaned are critical to the sound, and that is not something the stamper numbers can tell you. It’s a subject we discuss all over this blog. Here is a good place to start.

As for your 1992 Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl remaster, I honestly don’t know how anyone can listen to a record with sound like that and consider it acceptable, or, in your words, “quite decent.” I went into the long story of the album in this commentary.

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Thelonious Monk / Brilliant Corners

More Thelonious Monk

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

  • Boasting solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from start to finish, this vintage MONO recording pressed on OJC vinyl was giving us the sound we were looking for on Monk’s 1957 release – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Rich, full-bodied and present yet still clear and spacious (particularly on side one) – we guarantee this copy sounds better than any pressing you’ve heard, and should beat the pricey originals hands down
  • With masterful horn playing from Sonny Rollins and Clark Terry, and a rhythm section that can actually keep up with Monk – made up of Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford and Paul Chambers – this is a Must Own for any music loving audiophile
  • 5 stars: “Brilliant Corners may well be considered the alpha and omega of post-World War II American jazz. No serious jazz collection should be without it.”
  • If you’re a fan of Mr. Monk, this All Tube Recording from 1957 belongs in your collection.
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with the accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Brilliant Corners is a good example of a record most audiophiles probably don’t know well but would benefit from getting to know better

If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good a 1957 All Tube Analog recording can be, this superb copy should be just the record for you. Talk about Tubey Magic! The liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it.

No recordings will ever be made like this again, and no CD will ever capture what is in the grooves of this record. There is of course a CD of the album, but those of us in possession of a working turntable could care less.

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Saxophone Colossus – Why Not Try the DCC CD or LP?

The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

Our last White Hot gold label mono pressing went for big bucks, 900 of them in fact.

Of course, a clean original goes for many times that, which is one reason you have never seen such a record on our site.

How much would we have to charge for a Hot Stamper pressing of an album we paid many thousands of dollars for?

Far more than our customers would be willing to pay us, that’s for sure.

You Say You Don’t Have Nine Hundred Bucks for This Album?

Try the DCC pressing from 1995.

The DCC Heavy Vinyl pressing is probably a decent enough record. I haven’t played it in many years, but I remember liking it back in the day.

It’s dramatically better than the 80s OJC, which, like many OJC pressings from that era, is thin, hard, tizzy up top and devoid of Tubey Magic.

(We have many reviews of OJC pressings for those who are interested. We created two sections for the label: one for the (potentially, it’s what Hot Stampers are all about) good sounding OJC pressings and one for the bad sounding ones.)

I would be surprised if the DCC Gold CD isn’t even better than their vinyl pressing.

They usually are.

Steve Hoffmann brilliantly mastered many classic albums for DCC. I much prefer DCC’s CDs to their records.

Their records did not have to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-rez, modern-sounding (in the worst way) transistor cutting system, a subject we discuss in some depth here.

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How Good Are the Later Reissues of The Bridge?

When we did this shootout ten years ago, we thought the reissues with the cover you see to the left actually sounded better than the original pressings, but we were wrong and we have to admit it, as painful as that may be.

True, we never cared much for the later reissues described below — the tan labels can be passable but fall well short of the standards we set now.

However, even the best orange label pressings from 1975 don’t sound as good to us now as we thought they did ten years ago.

They can be good, but in our experience they can never be great.

Great is the sound that can only be found on the best originals, and they win all the shootouts now.

The notes for the AFL pressing with the black label describe it as bright, phony and lean.

This is the kind of sound better suited to the stone age stereos of the past.

I should know. I had a stereo all the way up until the late-90s — not exactly stone age quality, but far from the sound we have now — that prevented me from hearing my records with the highest quality reproduction.

As a result of the shortcomings of my system, I was wrong about a lot of records. (I loved DCC back in those days. Not that many years later I would undergo a “deconversion” as my stereo and critical listening skills improved.)

Of course, I was convinced my stereo was fantastic. It sure sounded better to me than any other system I’d ever heard, and by a long shot.

I had been working with expensive stereo equipment for more than twenty years at that point. The system I had put together by then cost a lot of money, played at loud levels with great energy, was in a dedicated room, et cetera, et cetera.

Are the audiophiles of today making the same mistakes I made back then?

Probably, if not almost certainly, and the one test we can use to determine which audiophiles have made the least amount of progress in this hobby are those who play records like the ones on this list and find nothing wrong with them. Their defense? “They sound just fine to me and who are you to say otherwise?”

Well, we’re the guys who say “you don’t know what you’re missing, and we have the superior-sounding pressing to prove it.”

Which, of course, as is the way of these things, almost always falls on deaf ears, pun intended.

Bottom Line

As of 2024, it’s clear to us that the early pressings have the potential for the best sound, but that the reissues can still sound very good, certainly quite a bit better than any Heavy Vinyl reissue is likely to.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

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Sonny Rollins – The Bridge
  • Seriously good Living Stereo sound throughout this 70s reissue pressing, with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades
  • It took us close to ten years to track down enough originals as well as the right reissues — so many to choose from, and so many of them just awful sounding — to get our most recent shootout going
  • Both of these sides are remarkably clean and clear with wonderful size, clarity and transparency, with real texture to the instruments and an abundance of energy
  • Of all the reissues we played, this one sounded the best, which came as a (costly) surprise
  • The sax sounds right, and played loud enough it’s almost as if you’re hearing the real instrument and not just a recording of one
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The interplay between Rollins and [guitarist Jim] Hall is consistently impressive, making this a near-classic and a very successful comeback.”

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