pianotrio

The 3 Sounds / Moods – Our Shootout Winner from 2008

This Blue Note LP has GREAT SOUND. The top end is Right On The Money and the drums sound wonderful — punchy with lots of ambience. The piano is full-bodied and weighty allowing you to really appreciate the percussive qualities of the instrument. The bass is deep but not quite as tight as the very best sounding copies.

Those of you who are familiar with Yamamoto’s playing, especially on albums like Midnight Sugar, should have fun with the second track on side two, Li’l Darlin’. I think this is where Yamamoto “found” a lot of his style. It’s actually even slower than his arrangements of similar material, and I’d be tempted to say it works even better on this album.

Gene Harris, the piano player here, is one of my favorite jazz pianists. I saw him live with Ray Brown a few years back and he was wonderful. Most of his albums are long out of print and very hard to come by, so this is a real find, one that gets a Top Recommendation from Better Records.

Phineas Newborn, Jr. Trio – The Newborn Touch

More Phineas Newborn, Jr.

More Contemporary Label Jazz Recordings

  • Newborn’s wonderful 1966 release makes its Hot Stamper debut with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish
  • The timbre of the instruments in this brilliant jazz trio is so spot-on it makes all the hard work and money you’ve put into your stereo more than pay off
  • This vintage Contemporary pressing boasts exceptionally natural piano sound (courtesy of Howard Holzer) and live-in-the-studio jazz energy
  • 4 1/2 stars: “As is usual on his Contemporary recordings, the pianist explores superior jazz compositions… Newborn’s remarkable control of the piano was still unimpaired, and he is heard giving Oscar Peterson a run for his money.”

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Bill Evans – I Will Say Goodbye

More Bill Evans

  • Bill Evans’ 1980 release makes its Hot Stamper debut with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • Rich, smooth, sweet, and wonderfully natural, this is the sound we love here at Better Records
  • 4 stars: ” For his final Fantasy album, Evans, bassist Eddie Gómez, and drummer Eliot Zigmund perform memorable renditions of such songs as Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance”… Fine post-bop music from an influential piano giant.

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Bill Evans – The Paris Concert: Edition One

More Bill Evans

  • An outstanding copy of this live album, with solid Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last – reasonably quiet vinyl for this kind of quiet piano music
  • These sides are doing pretty much everything right – as befits a live concert, there’s an overall unprocessed quality to the sound and good space around all three players
  • 4 1/2 stars: “With bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joe La Barbera, Evans had one of the strongest trios of his career… The close communication between the players is reminiscent of Evans’ 1961 unit with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian.”

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Bill Evans – At The Montreux Jazz Festival

More Bill Evans

  • Evan’s Classic Live album from the Montreux Jazz Festival returns to the site with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from first note to last
  • A killer Verve stereo pressing, with lovely richness and warmth, real space and wonderful immediacy throughout
  • Recorded live in 1968, this superb release pairs Evans’ unique piano improvisations with bandmates Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette
  • 4 stars: “Evans, famous for a soft-spoken pianistic touch, seems driven to new vistas on this album. He experiments more with harmonic dissonance and striking rhythmical contrasts, making this his most extroverted playing since his freshman release, New Jazz Conceptions.”

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Ramsey Lewis Trio – Maiden Voyage

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More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

  • This copy of Lewis’ 1968 release boasts outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound, or close to it, from first note to last – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • A wonderful sounding record and all but Forgotten Classic, with Ramsey Lewis and his Trio at the top of their game 
  • Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire fame was Ramsey’s drummer back in the day
  • “The remarkable Charles Stepney production and arrangement and the brilliant rhythm section means this album is not just another jazz covers record. Highly recommended.” 

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The Great Jazz Trio / Direct From L.A. – Reviewed in 2014

Hot Stamper Pressings of Direct-to-Disc Recordings Available Now

The album features some excellent jazz with outstanding drum work by Tony Williams (one of our favorite drummers here at Better Records).

If you have a good copy of The Three on Eastwind you will note the strong similarity in sound.

Side One

Super Hot. Solid and very dynamic. Side two of this very copy takes top honors for spaciousness.

Side Two

Huge and rich, with not a touch of smear, this is the sound of live jazz!

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Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio / Blues to East – Reviewed in 2015

More of the Music of Tsuyoshi Yamamoto

On this album there’s almost none of that “introspective noodling jazz” that the Japanese are infamous for. I love Midnight Sugar as much as the next guy, but too much of that kind of music is wearying. 

Yamamoto’s Trio wants to show that it can play good old fashioned straight ahead American piano jazz with the best of them. I hear echoes of Bill Evans in Yamamoto’s playing. Supposedly he was a big Errol Garner fan as well.

You will also be hard pressed to find better sound for a small ensemble like this. Since Rudy Van Gelder was not particularly adept at recording the piano, many of the great jazz pianists cannot be heard properly on their Prestige, Blue Note and other label recordings.

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Jacques Loussier / Jacques Loussier Plays J.S. Bach Encore

This is a Japanese 45 RPM Audiocheck Pressing with DEMO DISC quality sound! This is absolutely one of the best sounding jazz records we have ever played here at Better Records!

For those of you who are not familiar with the Audiocheck 45 RPM series from Japan, these are albums remastered at 45 with some material left off by necessity, since the maximum for each side is closer to 12 minutes than the standard LP limit of 20 minutes.

These don’t come my way very often, so I hadn’t played one in quite awhile, but I have to tell you that this is one of the best sounding jazz records I’ve played in months. It sounds like a Direct to Disc recording! I knew the original albums that Jacques Loussier recorded for Philips had good sound but I never realized they had this kind of Demo Disc quality sound. (He also made a number of recordings for London previous to this one and most of those are mediocre in my estimation.) 

The music is lots of fun: Bach played in a jazzy style by a band that really swings. For music and sonics this record is an audiophile dream come true.

This is an Older Jazz Review.

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a fine art.

We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.

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Oscar Peterson – We Get Requests

This is the way it must have sounded inside the RCA Studios in New York way back in 1964, not the club shown on the cover. The legendary RCA engineer Bob Simpson was behind the board. 

If you have full-range speakers one of the qualities you may recognize in the sound of the piano is WARMTH. The piano is not hard, brittle or tinkly. It’s more like a real piano and less like a recorded one. This is what good “live” recordings tend to do well. There isn’t time to mess with the sound. Often the mix is live, so messing around after the fact is just not an option.

Bad mastering can ruin the sound, and often does, along with worn out stampers and bad vinyl and five gram needles that scrape off the high frequencies. But a few — far too few — copies survive all such hazards. They manage to capture these wonderful musical performances on their molecules of vinyl, showing us a sound we never expected. 

Both Sides

Right away you hear a solid, full-bodied piano and snare drum, a sure sign of great sound to come. These sides were simply richer and fuller than the other copies we played. That rich tonality is key to getting the music to work, to allow all the instrumental elements to balance. The natural top doesn’t hurt either.

Great space and immediacy, powerful driving energy — these sides were up there with the best Peterson albums we played.

The sound was jumpin’ out of the speakers. There was not a trace of smear on the piano, which is unusual in our experience, although no one ever seems to talk about smeary pianos in the audiophile world (except for us of course).

Ray Brown’s bass is huge. With an extended top end the space of the studio and harmonics of the instruments are reproduced correctly.

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