Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now
In 2010 we wrote a commentary about the album which can be found here.
It’s a long story that goes into great detail comparing the sound of the original Galaxy pressings with those of the much more common OJC’s.
Fourteen years later (!) and here we are, finally getting to the point where we have enough copies of Art Pepper Today to do a proper shootout.
Since this is a title we have not played in a very long time, we took the opportunity to give a quick listen to both kinds of pressings just to make sure that both could be expected to do well enough to be included in the shootout.
The OJCs Fall Short in a Different Way
Well, it turns out that the OJC pressings are no longer cutting it. That’s money down the drain.
It seems to be the case that they are dark and hard sounding compared to the Galaxy pressings.
This is a bit surprising because most of the OJC pressings that we don’t like are thin and bright, not dark and hard.
That’s not the way OJC’s typically sound, but in the world of records, when has that ever counted for anything?
Patterns are helpful up to a point, but on this album, the patterns we see across the label have broken down, which is why our business is built upon a foundation of playing every record we sell and judging it strictly on its own merits.
There are just too many exceptions to whatever patterns we may think we have detected.