Hot Stamper Pressings of Pablo Recordings Available Now
For years we have been including the followinig commentary in our Hot Stamper listings for Farmers Market Barbecue:
Musically FMB is a top Basie big band title in every way. This should not be surprising: many of his recordings for Pablo in the 70s and early 80s display the talents of The Count and his band at their best.
Sonically there’s more to the story. Based on our recent shootout for this title, in comparison to the other Basie titles we’ve done lately, we would have to say that FMB is the best Basie big band title we’ve ever played.
Since so many Basie big band recordings are so good, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves; after all, we haven’t done shootouts for all of Basie’s Pablo large group recordings. To be safe we’ll just call this one first among equals.
Having recently done another shootout, our first in two and a half years, we would have to say that the album still sounds every bit as amazing as we thought it did when we wrote the above comments more than fifteen years ago.
Our notes for a shootout winning copy get right to the heart of what makes the recording so special.
For those who might have trouble reading our scratch, allow me to transcribe what Riley, our main listening guy, heard and noted as he played the two sides of this copy.