1962-best

Ray Brown with The All-Star Big Band, Engineered by Ray Hall

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Ray Brown Recordings We’ve Reviewed

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These two sides offer bigger brass, more transparency and more presence than every other side we played save one!

This may become one of your favorite big band albums to demo or test with. Or you can just enjoy the hell out of it if you prefer. So transparent and tonally correct, this is a killer sounding copy. We put this one right up there with the best of the Verve jazz titles we’ve done to date.

This album sounds like a big room full of musicians playing live, which it surely was. The Tubey Magical richness of the 1962 recording is breathtaking – no modern record can touch it.

The best copies recreate a live studio space the size of which you will not believe. (more…)

23 Glee Club Favorites / Men of the Robert Shaw Chorale

More TAS List Records

This record is pristine and amazing! A great choral record. DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND. TAS List of course.

Here is a complete list of the Living Stereo titles we have available on the site at this time  On our blog you can find reviews for hundreds more that we have auditioned over the years.

Demo Discs for Tubey Magic

TAS Super Disc Recordings

Frank Sinatra and Count Basie – Sinatra-Basie

  • You’ll find Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides of this beloved Sinatra/Basie collaboration
  • Tubey, warm and smooth, with an extended top and solid down low, the louder you play this record the better it sounds, because it’s recorded, mastered and pressed properly
  • 4 stars: “The long-awaited first collaboration between two icons did something unique for the reputations of both. For Basie, the Sinatra connection inaugurated a period in the 1960s where his band was more popular and better-known than it ever was, even in the big band era. For Sinatra, Basie meant liberation, producing perhaps the loosest, rhythmically free singing of his career.”

A Historic Musical First!

As the liner notes mention – “sizzling tenor-sax solos by Frank Foster and Eric Dixon”, and they aren’t kiddin’!

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Rodrigo – Boieldieu / Harp Concertos – Reviewed in 2011

This White Hot Stamper pressing of DG’s recording of Rodrigo’s famous concerto for harp has amazing DEMO DISC SOUND, but only on side two. The harp is clear, with no smear whatsoever, but what’s really shocking is how huge the soundstage is, and how much depth it has. While playing this side the speakers just disappeared and a huge concert hall appeared in their place! The harmonics of the harp are rendered superbly well. It’s hard to imagine one could record a harp concerto better than this. It is superb in every way.

Heavy Vinyl

About ten years ago a Heavy Vinyl version of this album was remastered and pressed by Speakers Corner, part of their disastrous foray into the DG catalog. This title was decent, the Beethoven Violin Concerto was okay, as was one of the Tchaikovsky Symphonies with Mravinsky (#5), but the rest were just plain awful, with disgracefully bad sound.

Funny, I don’t recall reading any bad reviews of these albums at the time. Oh, that’s right, these Heavy Vinyl records never get bad reviews, no matter how lifeless, opaque and shrill they might sound. Except from us of course. We were writing about them back in the day and trying to sell just the better ones.

We have since given up in that effort as so few are really very good when you get right down to it. (more…)

Saint-Saens / Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso / Friedman

  • A nearly White Hot side two with the complete Saint-Saens work
  • Side two has explosive dynamics and near-perfect violin reproduction
  • Side one has the first movement of the Paganini Concerto No. 1
  • A Mohr/Layton Living Stereo Shaded Dog pressing from 1962

Side Two – Paganini – 2nd / 3rd Movements / Saint-Saens – Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso 

A++ to A+++, nearly White Hot. Big and lively, and so involving. Huge space, great dynamics, so immediate and engrossing. 

It’s one of the best sounding violin-led orchestral recordings we have played in recent memory, and we’ve played them by the hundreds and hundreds. (Practice makes perfect as they say.)

Side two of this copy easily puts most of the TAS Super Discs to shame. I would venture to say that there’s a very good chance that you have NEVER heard a violin-led orchestral recording as good as this one (that is, unless you own some of our White Hot Stamper violin records).

Side One – Paganini – Concerto No. 1 – First Movement (more…)

Horace Silver Quintet – Doin’ The Thing

This Minty Blue Note LP has EXCELLENT LIVE JAZZ SOUND! It’s rich, full, and tonally correct from top to bottom. Just listen to the cymbals on the track Doin’ The Thing — you’ll hear how wonderfully extended the top end is.

“This live set (recorded at the Village Gate) finds pianist/composer Horace Silver and his most acclaimed quintet (the one with trumpeter Blue Mitchell, tenor saxophonist Junior Cook, bassist Gene Taylor and drummer Roy Brooks) stretching out on four selections, including his new song Filthy McNasty… [An] enjoyable and always funky hard bop session.” (more…)

Ornette Coleman – The Art of the Improvisers

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More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone

  • With a nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side one and a seriously good Double Plus (A++) side two, this copy will be very hard to beat – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Engineered by the team of Tom Dowd (whose work you surely know well) and Phil Iehle – the pair recorded some of Coltrane’s most iconic albums for Atlantic: Giant Steps (1960) and Coltrane Jazz (also in 1961)
  • 5 stars in Downbeat – Allmusic notes: “It’s an understatement to say that Ornette Coleman’s stint with Atlantic altered the jazz world forever, and Ornette on Tenor was the last of his six LPs (not counting outtakes compilations) for the label, wrapping up one of the most controversial and free-thinking series of recordings in jazz history… far ahead of its time.”

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Sarah Vaughan – You’re Mine You

  • Vaughan’s wonderful 1962 album on the original Roulette stereo pressing makes its Hot Stamper debut with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Both sides are exceptionally low-distortion, solid and dynamic, with the natural, relaxed, analog warmth and richness missing from the Classic Records pressing (and most likely missing from whatever current reissue is on the market)
  • “This LP finds Sarah Vaughan backed by big-band and string arrangements from Quincy Jones that could easily have been used for a Frank Sinatra date. Vaughan’s voice is typically wondrous… In the repertoire are such tunes as “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “The Second Time Around” and “Baubles, Bangles and Beads.”

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Tony Bennett – At Carnegie Hall

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More Vintage Hot Stamper Pressings on Columbia

  • This superb LIVE double album debuts with a Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side three, with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound on the others
  • Our exceptional 360 stereo pressing here will bring this definitive Tony Bennett concert performance right into your very own listening room
  • Plenty of analog richness, space, smoothness and Tubey Magic, all absolutely essential if you want the ’60s to sound like the ’60s
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Recorded one week before the release of the I Left My Heart in San Francisco album that would catapult Tony Bennett’s career into the stratosphere, this album effectively sums up his accomplishments so far… it gives a broad sense of Bennett’s work, and it does so in the format with which he’s most comfortable — live in concert.”

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Ella Fitzgerald – Ella Swings Gently with Nelson

 

  • An excellent sounding stereo copy with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout
  • Here are the natural, present, wonderfully breathy vocals that can only be heard on these vintage vinyl pressings
  • “In 1961 Ella Fitzgerald recorded two albums with Nelson Riddle’s Orchestra. Her voice was in peak form and, even if the backup band was somewhat anonymous, Fitzgerald uplifted the 15 songs on this set… Although the accent is on ballads, several of the songs are taken at medium tempos and she swings throughout. Highlights include “Georgia on My Mind,” “The Very Thought of You,” “It’s a Pity to Say Goodnight,” “Darn That Dream,” “Body and Soul” and a cooking “All of Me.””

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