budg-re-jazz

Lee Konitz With Warne Marsh Is Yet Another Amazing Sounding Budget Reissue

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone Available Now

Here is how we described this wonderful reissue of the 1955 recording of Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh:

Incredible MONO sound throughout this reissue copy of Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh (only the second to hit the site in years).

Exceptionally spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – this pressing was a big step up over every other copy we played.

If you want to hear the Tubey Magic, size and energy of this wonderful session from 1955 – originally recorded by Tom Dowd and expertly remastered by George Piros – this pressing will definitely let you do that.

I hope these notes are able to speak for themselves. If you have trouble reading them, please drop me a line and I will translate them for you.

The horns are breathy and clear, yet full and rich as can be. There may be a good reason that this pressing sounds as good as it does: it was remastered by one of the greatest mastering engineers of all time, George Piros.

Tom Dowd is the original recording engineer, and this one album should be all the proof you need that when it comes to jazz in mono, the guy is hard to beat. Rock in stereo, there the record is quite a bit more spotty (see, or better yet, listen to Cream, The Young Rascals, Delaney and Bonnie and too many others to list).

UPDATE 2025

The listening panel for this record listened to it with the mono switch in as well as with the mono switch out on the EAR 324p phono stage we use.

Somewhat surprisingly, the sound got worse on this mono pressing playing with the mono switch activated.

That’s not supposed to be the way works, but in the world of records, when has that ever counted for anything?

Just another reminder to always stay skeptical. Never believe anything anybody tells you about audio. Test everything for yourself, and that includes our Hot Stamper pressings. Play them against the best other pressings you can find. We will happily take back any record that doesn’t trounce anything you have to play head to head with our records.

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Sonny Rollins – Taking Care Of Business (Work Time, Tenor Madness and Tour de Force)

More of the Music of Sonny Rollins

  • Taking Care Of Business returns to the site for only the second time in close to two and a half years, here with roughly Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades all FOUR sides of these vintage Prestige pressings – just shy of our Shootout Winner (side three actually won the shootout)
  • The complete Tenor Madness album is found here, with big, full-bodied, MONO jazz sound at its best, courtesy of the great one, Rudy Van Gelder
  • This is what classic 50s jazz is supposed to sound like – they knew how to do these kinds of records 70+ years ago, and those mastering skills are in short supply nowadays, if not downright extinct
  • The transfers from 1978 by David Turner are in tune with the sound of these recordings – there’s not a trace of phony EQ on this entire record
  • “Tenor Madness was the recording that, once and for all, established Newk as one of the premier tenor saxophonists, an accolade that in retrospect, has continued through six full decades and gives an indication why a young Rollins was so well liked, as his fluency, whimsical nature, and solid construct of melodies and solos gave him the title of the next Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young of mainstream jazz.”

This Two-Fer includes all of Tenor Madness and most of Work Time and Tour De Force.

Top jazz players such as Ray Bryant, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Kenny Drew, Max Roach and Paul Chambers can be heard on the album.

If you want all the tubey magic of the earlier pressings, a top quality pressing of the real Tenor Madness album on Prestige is going to give you more of that sound. David Turner’s mastering setup in the 70s has a healthy dose of tubes, but it can’t compete in that area with the All Tube cutting systems that were making records in the 50s and 60s.

Without one of those early pressing around to compare, we don’t think you’re going to feel you are missing out on anything in the sound with this killer copy.

And where can you find an early Prestige pressing with audiophile playing surfaces like these?

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Lee Konitz With Warne Marsh in 1955

More Titles that Sound Better in Mono

  • Outstanding MONO sound throughout this reissue copy of Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh (the first to hit the site in years), with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them
  • This side one is remarkably spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied, and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • If you want to hear the Tubey Magic, size and energy of this wonderful session from 1955 – originally recorded by Tom Dowd and expertly remastered by George Piros – this pressing will let you do that
  • Our most recent shootout was a tough one – our top copy had too many issues to make it to the site, as did our only second-tier copy with Super Hot stampers on both sides
  • Those of you looking for top quality sound may have to wait for a while, especially if it takes us as long to get our next shootout going as it did this last one
  • 4 stars: “Altoist Lee Konitz and tenor-saxophonist Warne Marsh always made for a perfect team. Even by the mid-50s when they were not as influenced by Lennie Tristano as previously (particularly Konitz), their long melodic lines and unusual tones caused them to stand out from the crowd. This set is worth searching for, as are all of the Konitz-Marsh collaborations.”
  • This is one of those records that we’ve “discovered” with audiophile quality sound — until we came along, who knew the album could sound this good? The originals are godawful.

The 1955 mono sound by Tom Dowd is Demo Disc quality. The horns are breathy and clear, yet full and rich as can be. There may be a good reason that this pressing sounds as good as it does: it was remastered by one of the greatest mastering engineers of all time, George Piros.

Tom Dowd is the original recording engineer, and this one album should be all the proof you need that when it comes to jazz in mono, the guy is hard to beat. Rock in stereo, there his record is quite a bit more spotty (see, or better yet, listen to Cream, The Young Rascals, Delaney and Bonnie and too many others to list).

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Donald Byrd – House of Byrd

More Donald Byrd

  • Two rare Donald Byrd albums in one, here with superb Double Plus (A++) grades on all 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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Wes Montgomery – The Alternative Wes Montgomery (Revisited)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Wes Montgomery Available Now

UPDATE 2025:

Many years ago, back in our pre-shootout days, we played a copy of this album and liked what we’d heard.

We just got another copy in and thought the sound was not worthy of a Hot Stamper shootout.

We judge it to have middling sound quality.

If you see one for cheap, pick it up, but don’t expect the sound to be anything special.

Our Old Review

This Milestone Two-Fer LP with EXCELLENT sound has 14 unreleased alternate versions of songs recorded in a variety of settings by guitarist Wes Montgomery during his period with Riverside. In many cases, the versions here are dramatically different from the versions that appear on his original albums. 

Producer Orrin Keepnews, who assembled this collection, notes, “With an artist who insisted on several takes, and the obvious need to eventually pick only one for release, we had to make some rather arbitrary, borderline decisions that at the time seemed to have doomed some excellent music to oblivion.”

This set helps to rescue some of that excellent music. The tracks feature Montgomery playing with notable musicians such as include Milt Jackson, Wynton Kelly, Kenny Burrell, Philly Joe Jones and Victor Feldman.

On compilations of unreleased material such as this, the master tapes are used to make the record. There’s no need for a copy tape to have ever been made.

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Chet Baker / Plays The Best Of Lerner And Loewe

More Chet Baker

  • This superb Riverside stereo recording boasts Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it from first note to last, pressed on exceptionally quiet OJC vinyl
  • Big, rich, smooth, open, natural, with plenty of note-like bass (particularly on side one) – what’s not to like? This copy is doing just about everything right
  • Some of the best jazz guys of the day back up Chet on this one: Zoot Sims, Pepper Adams, Bill Evans, Herbie Mann and more
  • “…the timelessness of the melodies, coupled with the assembled backing aggregate, make Chet Baker Plays the Best of Lerner and Loewe (1959) a memorable concept album.”

This is a wonderful Chet Baker record that doesn’t seem to be getting the respect it deserves in the wider jazz world. You may just like it every bit as much as the Chet album, and that is one helluva record to compare any album to. In our estimation it’s about as good as it get. (more…)

We Was Wrong about Saxophone Colossus and More in 2010

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

The album is a compilation of three major sessions from 1956, all with both Sonny Rollins and Max Roach. Allmusic describes it this way:

“Saxophone Colossus, the album that really made the jazz public fully aware of the majestic talents of Sonny Rollins, is combined here with seven other great performances from the same highly creative period in the long career of this major artist.”

In 2010 we thought this two-fer had very good sound for the music it contained. Here is what we had to say all those years ago:

This Prestige Two-Fer Double LP has FOUR GREAT SIDES with each rating an A+ or better. The standout sides here are two and four, both rating an A++. Both sides are EXCELLENT and very lively with lots of energy and presence. Side one rates an A+ and has a wonderfully extended top end and side three rates an A+ – A++ with clean and clear sound and huge breathy horns.

Well, it turns out that in 2010 we had a lot to learn.

We were about to do a shootout for Saxophone Colossus about five [make that ten or more] years ago, and we decided to pull out some of the two-fer pressings we had sitting in the backroom to see how they would hold up against the early pressings we liked, which you can read about here.

It did not go well. The album sounded like a cheap reissue, which of course it is, but many cheap reissues sound great, so we never hold the price of the record against it when deciding whether or not it is worth cleaning and auditioning.

There are scores of budget jazz reissues from the 70s and 80s that sound great, some of them two-fer pressings.

Just not this one. It’s passable at best, and a very far cry from what the best pressings can sound like.

More on Saxophone Colossus

Our last White Hot Stamper Gold Label Mono pressing went for big bucks, 900 of them in fact.

Of course, a clean original goes for many times that, which is one reason you have never seen such a record on our site.

How much would we have to charge for a Hot Stamper pressing of an album we paid many thousands of dollars for? Far more than our customers would be willing to pay us, that’s for sure.

You Say You Don’t Have Nine Hundred Bucks for This Album?

Try the DCC pressing from 1995.

The DCC Heavy Vinyl pressing is probably a nice record. I haven’t played it in many years, but I remember liking it back in the day.

It’s dramatically better than the 80s OJC, which, like many OJC pressings, is thin, hard, tizzy up top and devoid of Tubey Magic.

I would be surprised if the DCC Gold CD isn’t even better than their vinyl pressing.

They usually are.

Steve Hoffmann brilliantly mastered many classic albums for DCC. I like DCC’s CDs much better than their records.

Their records did not have to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we discussed in some depth here.

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Thelonious Monk / Brilliant Corners

More Thelonious Monk

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

  • Boasting solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from start to finish, this vintage MONO recording pressed on OJC vinyl was giving us the sound we were looking for on Monk’s 1957 release – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Rich, full-bodied and present yet still clear and spacious (particularly on side one) – we guarantee this copy sounds better than any pressing you’ve heard, and should beat the pricey originals hands down
  • With masterful horn playing from Sonny Rollins and Clark Terry, and a rhythm section that can actually keep up with Monk – made up of Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford and Paul Chambers – this is a Must Own for any music loving audiophile
  • 5 stars: “Brilliant Corners may well be considered the alpha and omega of post-World War II American jazz. No serious jazz collection should be without it.”
  • If you’re a fan of Mr. Monk, this All Tube Recording from 1957 belongs in your collection.
  • 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 the accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Brilliant Corners is a good example of a record most audiophiles probably don’t know well but would benefit from getting to know better

If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good a 1957 All Tube Analog recording can be, this superb copy should be just the record for you. Talk about Tubey Magic! The liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. 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.

No recordings will ever be made like this again, and no CD will ever capture what is in the grooves of this record. There is of course a CD of the album, but those of us in possession of a working turntable could care less.

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John Coltrane / Lush Life

More of the Music of John Coltrane

  • Superb sound throughout this vintage Mono Prestige recording, with both sides earning Double Plus (A++) grades
  • The sound is everything that’s good about Rudy Van Gelder‘s recordings – it’s present, spacious, full-bodied, Tubey Magical, dynamic and, most importantly, alive in that way that modern pressings never are
  • Finding the best sounding pressings of this exceptional recording was a turning point for us – here was sound we had never experienced for the work, and what a thrill it was
  • 4 stars: “‘Lush Life’ is not only the focal point of this album, it is rightfully considered as one of Coltrane’s unqualified masterworks.”
  • If you’re a fan of vintage small-group jazz, this Coltrane LP from 1961 surely belongs in your collection

We’d been searching for years trying to find just what kind of Lush Life pressing — what era, what label, what stampers, mono or stereo, import or domestic — had the potential for good sound.

No, scratch that. We should have said excellent sound. Exceptional sound. We’ve played plenty of copies that sounded pretty good, even very good, but exceptional? That pressing had eluded us — until a few years ago.

It was early 2016, in fact, that we chanced upon the right kind of pressing — the right era, the right label, the right stampers, the right sound. Not just the right sound, though. Better sound than we ever thought this album could have.

Previously we had written:

“There are great sounding originals, but they are few and far between…”

We no longer believe that to be true. In fact we believe the opposite of that statement to be true. The original we had on hand — noisy but with reasonably good sound, or so we thought — was an absolute joke next to our better Hot Stamper pressings. Half the size, half the clarity and presence, half the life and energy, half the immediacy, half the studio space. It was simply not remotely competitive with the copies we now know (or at least believe, all knowledge being provisional) to have the best sound.

Are there better originals than the ones we’ve played? Maybe there are. If you want to spend your day searching for them, more power to you. And if you do find one that impresses you, we are happy to send you one of our Hot Copies to play against it. We are confident that the outcome would be clearly favorable to our pressing. Ten seconds of side one should be enough to convince you that our record is in an entirely different league.

By the way, the mono original we played was by far the worst sound I have ever heard for the album. By far.

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Workin’ And Steamin’ – We Were Dead Wrong about the Originals

davismiles

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

This review is for a pressing we put up around 2010.

Up to that time we had never played a clean, early pressing, and when we finally were able to put some in our shootout, one of them had sound that was out of this world.

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 any modern Heavy Vinyl reissue you care to name.

However, 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 that right record came our way.

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