Reviews and Commentaries for Kind of Blue

Hot Stampers of Miles’s Albums Available Now

This review is from a pressing we put up circa 2010. We had never heard any clean, early pressings, and we we put some in our shootout, one of them was out of this world sounding.

In the commentary below we discuss what we think the early pressings probably sound like. Now, having heard how good the best of them can sound, we admit we clearly needed to do more research and development.

The record pictured above can have superb sound, much better than practically any modern Heavy Vinyl reissue you care to name.

The right properly-cleaned early pressings have the potential to take the sound of this music to the next level, a level we had no idea could exist until the right record came our way.

Our Commentary from 2010

To the Jazz Fans of the World, we here present one of the BEST sounding jazz recordings we have ever had the PRIVILEGE to place on a turntable. I cannot ever recall hearing a better sounding Rudy Van Gelder recording, and I have a theory as to why this tape is as good as it is: it’s MONO. It also sounds like it’s recorded completely LIVE in the studio, direct to one track you might say. As good a recording as Kind of Blue is, I think the best parts of this album are more immediate and more real than anything on KOB.

Better than the Originals?

The record combines two Miles Davis albums recorded in 1956: Workin’ and Steamin’. The 1974 remastering here by Brian Gardner is excellent. Since RVG probably would have mastered these tapes himself for the original pressings, I’m going to guess that this album sounds better than any original, for two reasons.
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