Top Engineers – John Kraus

Julie London / Calendar Girl in Glorious 1956 Mono

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  • An excellent copy of Julie London’s 1956 classic featuring solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout
  • Both of these mono sides have plenty of Tubey Magic – they’re fuller, more musical and more natural than many of the copies we’ve played over the years, especially the reissues, but it sure is hard to find them quiet enough for audiophiles
  • Julie’s voice sounds particularly nice on this copy – intimate, rich and warm, just as the way we like her to sound
  • 4 Stars: “… Julie London had an extremely limited vocal range but she did the most with what she had, possessing a special knack for torch songs that cast her in the role of a woman constantly being destroyed by love in general and by men in particular.”
  • If you’re a fan of Miss London’s, or vintage Pop and Jazz Vocals in general, this 1956 release belongs in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1956 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

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Julie London – Around Midnight

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  • Julie’s impossibly rare and wonderful 1960 release makes its Hot Stamper debut here with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER on both sides of this original Liberty stereo pressing
  • For whatever reason, this is a record that takes us years to find even one clean stereo copy, ouch
  • Like many of her best Liberty recordings, this one puts Julie right in the room with you thanks to the brilliant engineering of John Kraus (Julie Is Her Name, Calendar Girl, Julie… At Home, etc.)
  • 4 stars: “Her ability to interpret a song was at its strongest in the late ’50s and early ’60s, as is evidenced on the shimmering Around Midnight. While some of her best recordings were in front of small jazz combos, Around Midnight proves that London was just as effective in front of larger orchestras and bands. The drowsy “Black Coffee” and lazy “Lush Life” typify the late-night feel of the album, leading right into “The Wee Small Hours of the Morning.”

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Julie London – Julie Is Her Name

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  • Julie’s debut finally arrives on the site with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish
  • The vocal naturalness and immediacy of this early Liberty pressing will put Julie in the room with you – more than anything else, it lets her performance come to life
  • The naturalness of the presentation puts this album right at the top of best-sounding female vocal albums of all time
  • 4 stars: “Her debut is her best, a set of fairly basic interpretations of standards in which she is accompanied tastefully by guitarist Barney Kessel and bassist Ray Leatherwood.”

Listen to how rich the bottom end is on Barney Kessel’s guitar. The Tubey Magic here is off the charts. Some copies can be dry, but that is clearly not a problem on this one.

To take nothing away from her performance, which got better with every copy we played. Julie’s rendition of Cry Me a River may be definitive.

If only Ella Fitzgerald on Clap Hands got this kind of sound! As good as the best copies of that album are, this record takes the concept of intimate female vocals to an entirely new level.

Mono Versus Stereo

This is the kind of record that the mono cartridge owners of the world worship, with good reason: the sound is amazing. But you don’t need a mono cartridge to hear how good, in fact how much better, this copy sounds than the stereo pressing.

The recording is mono, which means that the stereo pressings are actually reprocessed into stereo. Not too surprisingly the sound is terrible.

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Peggy Lee – Mink Jazz

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  • Mink Jazz finally makes its Hot Stamper debut here with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides
  • The vocal naturalness and immediacy of this early pressing will put Peggy in the room with you – more than anything else, it lets her performance come to life
  • These sides are exceptionally spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied
  • “Peggy was, of course, in her element on the slow, seductive songs which were her trademark . . . The musicianship throughout the album is masterful, yet always secondary to Peggy’s lovely voice.”

John Krauss engineered this album, and brilliantly. You know him from many of Julie London‘s best recordings, albums such as Julie Is Her Name, Calendar Girl, Julie… At Home and Around Midnight.

This is some awfully good company if you ask me! (more…)

Peggy Lee – Big Spender

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  • Big Spender makes its Hot Stamper Debut here with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish
  • In-the-room presence, preternaturally breathy vocals, and boatloads of wonderful Tubey Magic
  • Everything sounds immediate and unprocessed, the hallmarks of analog – no other copy in our shootout put a living, breathing Peggy Lee right between our speakers the way this one did
  • There are a lot of bad sounding albums in Miss Lee’s catalog, but this one from Capitol in 1966 on the early stereo label showed us that there are some real winners too

John Krauss engineered brilliantly. You know him from many of Julie London‘s best recordings, albums such as Julie Is Her Name, Calendar Girl, Julie… At Home and Around Midnight. 

This is some awful good company if you ask me! (more…)

Julie Is Her Name – A Boxstar Bomb from Bernie

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocals Available Now

One question: Where’s the Tubey Magic?

We would never have pointed you in the direction of this awful Boxstar 45 of Julie Is Her Name, cut by Bernie Grundman in 2009, supposedly on tube equipment. I regret to say that we actually sold some copies, but in my defense I can honestly and truthfully claim that we never wrote a single nice thing about the sound of the record. That has to count for something, right?

We found the Tubey Magic on his pressing to be non-existent, as non-existent as it is on practically every Classic Record release he cut. If you have his version you are in for quite a treat when you finally get this one home and on your table. There is a world of difference between the sound of the two versions and we would be very surprised if it takes you more than ten seconds to hear it.

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Julie London – Julie… At Home in 1960

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If you’re a fan of intimate female vocals – the kind without a trace of digital reverb – you should get quite a kick out of Julie… At Home. And unless I miss my guess you’ll be the first and only person on your block to own it! (That’s not a bad thing considering the average person’s taste in music.) 

Need a refresher course in Tubey Magic after playing too many modern recordings or remasterings? These Liberty pressings are overflowing with it. Rich, smooth, sweet, full of ambience (or at least as much ambience as can be heard in Julie’s living room), dead-on correct tonality — everything that we listen for in a great record is here. (more…)