Top Engineers – Rudy Van Gelder

Miles Davis – Green Haze (‘The Musings of Miles’ and ‘Miles’)

More Miles Davis

More Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder

  • Spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience – talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny
  • This Prestige Two-Fer simply combines two complete Miles Davis titles recorded by Rudy Van Gelder in 1955 – ‘The Musings of Miles’ and ‘Miles’
  • The 1976 transfers of tape to disc by David Turner are superb in all respects – this is remastering done right
  • 4 stars: “… it is for the excellent rhythm sections and the playing of Miles Davis that this two-fer is highly recommended.”
  • If you’re a fan of Miles, this All Tube MONO Recording from 1955 belongs in your collection.
  • The complete list of titles from 1955 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

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. (more…)

Airto – Fingers

More of the Music of Airto

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Fusion Albums Available Now

  • An early CTI pressing with superb sound throughout – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Incredibly impressive funky Brazilian jazz sound with HUGE lifelike percussion – thanks RVG!
  • This is without a doubt the best album Airto ever made, and this copy really has the kind of sound we look for, with an open, fully extended top end that gives all the elements of this complex music room to breathe
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Produced by [Creed] Taylor and recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s famous New Jersey studio, this LP demonstrates just how exciting and creative 1970s fusion could be. When Moreira and his colleagues blend jazz with Brazilian music, rock and funk on such cuts as ‘Wind Chant,’ ‘Tombo in 7/4’ and ‘Romance of Death,’ the results are consistently enriching. Fingers is an album to savor.”
  • 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 less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Fingers is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but should.

Fingers is one of our all time favorite records, a Desert Island Disc to be sure. I’ve been playing this album for more than thirty years and it just keeps getting better and better. Truthfully it’s the only Airto record I like. I can’t stand Dafos, and most of the other Airto titles leave me cold.

I think a lot of the credit for the brilliance of this album has to go to the Fattoruso brothers, who play keyboards, drums, and take part in the large vocal groupings that sing along with Airto.

At times this record really sounds like what it is: a bunch of guys in a big room beating the hell out of their drums and singing at the the top of their lungs. You gotta give RVG credit for capturing so much of that energy on tape and transferring that energy onto a slab of vinyl. (Of course this assumes that the record in question actually does have the energy of the best copies. It’s also hard to know who or what is to blame when it doesn’t, since even the good stampers sound mediocre most of the time. Bad vinyl, worn out stampers, poor pressing cycle, it could be practically anything.)

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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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John Coltrane – Soultrane

More John Coltrane

  • This Prestige “stereo” pressing boasts killer Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • It may say stereo on the cover, but this album is in pure, glorious MONO, with sound that is full-bodied, relaxed, Tubey Magical and tonally correct
  • Here is the palpable jazz energy, the life of the music, that’s sure to be missing from whatever dead-as-a-doornail Heavy Vinyl pressing is being stamped out these days
  • There are very few early pressings around without marks or problems in the vinyl – this one has a number of marks that play, but finding copy that sounds this good with quiet surfaces is getting harder every day
  • It’s the nature of the beast and there is simply no way around it if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • “… a classic of the 20th century jazz canon and an essential point of reference in Coltrane’s own tumultuous career…. this is the album on which Coltrane first emerged as the primary innovator of the jazz world, wielding an astonishing technical virtuosity and a blinding vision of the possibilities of the tenor sax.”

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in clean shape. Most of them will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG, and it will probably be VG+. If you are picky about your covers please let us know in advance so that we can be sure we have a nice cover for you.

This is a mono recording that has supposedly been reprocessed into stereo. Rudy Van Gelder did the mastering, and my guess is he decided to leave the sound mono and simply not tell anyone. Who can blame him? He engineered it in mono, so why fix what ain’t broke because they printed the cover and the label with the word “stereo” on them in order to generate more sales?

We’re lucky he did. The OJC reissues of this title are awful, and whatever Heavy Vinyl they’re churning out these days is probably every bit as bad. Without these excellent ’60s and ’70s reissues, all that we would have available to do our shootouts with would be the originals. At one to three thousand dollars each for clean copies, few of which could ever be found anyway, that makes for a shootout whose costs could simply never be justified.

So our thanks go to Rudy for doing a good job!

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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 transients, articulate bass definition, and big, bold but shockingly REAL sound.

This early mono pressing from 1956 was fairly mind-blowing, so we have no doubt amazingly good early pressings exist. They are simply too much of an outlier for this have any real value to the audiophile record lover of today. How can anyone find, let alone afford, five or more original Blue Note pressings with which to do a shootout?

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 just collecting them, then the best possible sound should be right at the top of your list and the rarity of the label right at the very bottom.

Freddie Hubbard – Red Clay

More Freddie Hubbard

More Jazz featuring the Trumpet

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  • Red Clay is Hubbard’s Soul Jazz Masterpiece, and it’s a record that belongs in every audiophile’s jazz collection
  • Lenny White drums up a storm on this album – on this copy he is playing right in the room with you
  • 5 stars: “This may be Freddie Hubbard’s finest moment as a leader, in that it embodies and utilizes all of his strengths as a composer, soloist, and frontman. [It] places the trumpeter in the company of giants such as saxophonist Joe Henderson, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Lenny White… This is a classic, hands down.”
  • 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 less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Red Clay is a good example of a record most audiophiles may not know well but should.
  • If you’re a Hubbard fan, or perhaps a fan of early-’70s Soul Jazz, this title from 1970 is surely a Must Own.
  • The complete list of titles from 1970 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here

Hubbard was a master of funky jazz, and the song “Red Clay” is arguably the funkiest jazz track he ever committed to tape. At 12 minutes in length it is a transcendentally powerful experience — and the bigger your speakers and the louder you turn them up the more moving that experience is going to be!

The intro to “Red Clay” begins with a stylized free-form jam, sounding like a bop-jazz band of old, then takes form and solidifies into a groove of monstrous proportions. Ron Carter’s bass playing is stellar! It’s big and lively with tons of presence and energy.

Like many of our funky favorites, this one was eventually sampled for a popular hip-hop song. That may not mean much to you, but it definitely means that nice copies of this album get swiped up quickly by young DJs and producers.

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Donald Byrd – House of Byrd

More Donald Byrd

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Trumpet

  • Two rare Donald Byrd albums in one, with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on THREE of the four sides
  • The Tubey Magic is fully intact, making these two albums sound just the way a pair of classic All Tube 1956 Rudy Van Gelder jazz albums should
  • Composed of two superb LPs – 2 Trumpets and The Young Bloods – these wonderful MONO pressings capture some of Byrd’s best music and with top quality sound
  • “Art and Donald are in fine form, and if there is any competition it serves only to increase the musical yield.”
  • “… These blowing sessions (typical of Prestige’s albums of the 1950s) have their enjoyable moments with Farmer and Woods taking overall solo honors.”

This reissue is spacious, open, transparent, rich and sweet. It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording Technology, with the added benefit of mastering using the more modern cutting equipment of the ’70s in this case. We are of course here referring to the good modern mastering of 40+ years ago, not the generally opaque, veiled and lifeless mastering so common today.

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title as you will surely hear for yourself on both of these superb sides.

We were impressed with the fact that these pressings excel in so many areas of reproduction. What was odd about it — odd to most audiophiles but not necessarily to us — was just how rich and Tubey Magical the reissue can be on the right pressing.

This leads me to think that most of the natural, full-bodied, lively, clear, rich sound of the recording was still on the tape decades later, and that all that was needed to get that vintage sound on to a record was simply to thread up the tape on the right machine and hit play.

The fact that practically nobody seems to be able to make a record nowadays that sounds remotely this good tells me that I’m wrong to think that such an approach tends to work, if our experience with hundreds of mediocre Heavy Vinyl reissues is relevant.

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Jackie McLean – A Long Drink of the Blues

More Jackie McLean

  • You’ll find seriously good Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this vintage reissue – impossibly quiet vinyl too
  • Both sides have close to the best condition grade we give out, Mint Minus – there may not be another record on the site with vinyl that quiet!
  • Shockingly good All Tube Mono sound from 1957 courtesy of Rudy Van Gelder, and the high-rez, tonally correct and wide-bandwidth mastering brings out even more of the most subtle nuances of this superb sextet’s recordings
  • McLean’s sax is joined on the first side by Curtis Fuller on trombone and Webster Young on Trumpet
  • 4 stars: “Although not quite as intense as McLean’s later Blue Note dates, the ballad renditions show just how mature and original a soloist he was even at this early stage.”
  • If you’re a fan of Jackie’s, this is a Top Title from 1957 that belongs in your collection.
  • The complete list of titles from 1957 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

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Letter of the Week – “The transparency on this copy is superb!”

Hot Stamper Blue Note Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Blue Note Records

Hello Gentlemen,

I have to commend you once again. I have never heard Maiden Voyage like this before. The transparency on this copy is superb! I gave up listening to my reissue a while back. It had a heavy veil hanging over it that was obvious. Yet as the listener I yearned to hear past it because the music itself is so wonderful. Thanks for digging up this treasure. It will bring many hours of enjoyment now and in the future.

Records are a tangible investment for the listener. When you find a great copy you hang on to it because it engages you. It moves you in a real sense.

A collector who collects for value of first issue is a collector too. However they collect as one would coins, stamps or baseball cards. The value is attributed to what is perceived, not what is experienced. I do not slam anyone for this. If joy is found in this manner then, so be it.

I collect records to enjoy the music and if that means digging thru a number of pressings to find the best one or paying the bucks from someone like Better Records, so be it. If a reissue is better than an earlier pressing I will hold on to the re issue. This is a rarity but does happen. I can think of at least 20 LPs I have that I still favor the reissue over all others.

Both collectors are valid. They simply have different goals in mind.

Thanks,
Mark

Mark,

Thanks for your letter.

We know what you mean by records that have heavy veils hanging over their sound.

Here are some others we’ve found to be similarly veiled and here are some that are good for testing transparency.

Blue Note got into the Heavy Vinyl game back in the ’90s, in the days when we here at Better Records were still selling in-print Heavy Vinyl, but we thought very few of them were of much value to those looking for audiophile sound.

At the time I didn’t know it, but it turns out Maiden Voyage was mastered by that notorious hack, Ron McMaster, which explains our antipathy at the time to the Blue Note series he cut.

As I recall, the sound of his remastered pressings was clean and tonally correct, but his records were missing the analog qualities the better vintage pressings have in such abundance. In other words, his records sounded like CDs.

Who can be bothered to play records that have so few of the qualities we audiophiles are looking for on vinyl?

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George Benson – White Rabbit

More George Benson

  • A vintage CTI pressing of Benson’s Must Own Masterpiece with Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from start to finish
  • Open and transparent throughout, with wonderfully full-bodied guitars, solid bass and huge amounts of swingin’ jazz energy
  • Superb engineering by the legendary Rudy Van Gelder – White Rabbit features jazz legends Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, Airto, and more
  • 4 stars: “For George Benson’s second CTI project, producer Creed Taylor and arranger Don Sebesky successfully place the guitarist in a Spanish-flavored setting full of flamenco flourishes, brass fanfares, moody woodwinds and such… In this prime sample of the CTI idiom, everyone wins.”

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