record-club

Billie Holiday – Music For Torching

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

  • Boasting solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from first note to last, this Verve Mono reissue is doing just about everything right
  • A superb recording of jazz standards with a great lineup and Billie in top form – plenty of Tubey Magical richness and naturally breathy vocals as well
  • Great performances for classics such as “It Had to Be You,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “A Fine Romance,” and too many more to list
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The overall feeling on this 1955 recording is strictly after-hours: the party is long over but a few close friends remain for nightcaps and, is that the sun peeking through the windows?”

You’d be hard pressed to find a female vocal album from the 1950s with sound comparable to this one. We just finished up a big shootout for the sublimely titled Music For Torching, and this lovely copy was clearly one of the better pressings we played. If you love smoky jazz standards the way only Lady Day can sing them, we think you’ll be blown away to hear her sound this warm, rich and present.

The formula is simple: Take one of the best female vocalists in the game, back her with a stellar crew of jazzmen and set them loose to knock out incredible versions of classic torch songs — It Had To Be You, A Fine Romance, Come Rain Or Come Shine and so forth.

The good news is that the performances turned out to be some of the best ever recorded by this extraordinary singer, and fortunately for us audiophiles, the mono sound turned out to be dramatically better than we would have expected from Norman Granz’s Verve label in 1955.

Both sides are blessed with the kind of mid-’50’s Tubey Magical Analog Sound that’s been lost to the world of recorded music for decades — decades I tell you!

Nobody can manage to get a recording to sound like this anymore and it seems as if no one can even remaster a recording like this anymore, if our direct experience with scores of such albums counts as any sort of evidence.

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How Does the Capitol Club Cutting of Master of Reality Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now

Somebody at Capitol did not do a very good job when cutting this album for members of the Capitol Record Club. The sound is papery, gritty, and, not to put too fine a point on it, just awful.

Did he try real hard and fail? Was he incompetent? Was he lazy? I doubt we’ll never know!

Discogs gives out the following info for the release:

Mastering at Artisan Sound Recorders and pressing by Columbia Records Pressing Plant, Scranton are uncredited on release. 

    • Matrix / Runout (Side A ): SW-1-93896 W2#1 (IAM Scranton Identifier)
    • Matrix / Runout (Side B): SW2-93896-R4 (IAM Scranton Identifier)

Hard to believe Artisan and IAM would do such a bad job, but if Discogs is to be believed, apparently it’s possible.

Not all record club pressings are bad though; that’s painting with too broad a brush.

Here’s one we are big fans of.

Of course, it helps if your record club pressings are mastered by Bill Kipper at Masterdisk.

He was one of the greats, and there is simply no one like him alive today, at least as far as we know. We had this to say about that subject many years ago:

Think what a different audio world it would be if we still had Bill Kipper with us today, along with the amazingly accurate and resolving cutting system he used at Masterdisk.

As far as we can tell, there are no records being produced today that sound remotely as good as this budget subscription disc.

Furthermore, to my knowledge no record this good has been cut for more than thirty years. The world is awash in mediocre remastered records and we want nothing to do with any of them, not when there are so many good vintage pressings still to be discovered and enjoyed.

The likes of Bill Kipper are no longer with us, but we can be thankful that we still have the records he and so many talented others mastered all those years ago, to enjoy now and for countless years to come.

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Billy The Kid / Rodeo – How Do the Record Club Copies Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical Masterpieces Available Now

Without anyone knowing, a Record Club pressing found its way into one of our shootouts a few years back. Because the person doing the listening has no idea what pressing is on the table, biases and prejudices cannot affect the grading or the outcome of the shootout.

It earned Two Pluses, not enough to win a shootout, but enough to put practically any orchestral record made in the last thirty years to shame. We noted at the time:

This spectacular Demo Disc recording is clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic – here is the BIG, BOLD sound we love. There is a note on the inner sleeve that says this was a Record Club of America purchase in 1973.

Can you imagine that a Record Club was offering records in 1973 that were better sounding than anything being made today? Astonishing.

There are about 150 orchestral recordings we think offer the best performance coupled with the highest quality sound. This record has earned a place on that list.

If you’re a fan of orchestral showpieces such as these, this recording from 1967 belongs in your collection.

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Can You Imagine Getting a Record This Good in the Mail?

tchaiconce_1412_1416845303More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

The MHS pressing seen here can have superb sound.

MHS remastered the original 1967 Melodiya tape in 1979, dramatically improving upon the sound of the version that I knew on Angel, which shouldn’t have been too hard as the Angel is not very good.

Wait a minute. Scratch that.

MHS didn’t cut the record, an engineer at a mastering house did. Fortunately for us audiophiles, the job fell to none other than Bill Kipper at Masterdisk.

Think what a different audio world it would be if we still had Bill Kipper with us today, along with the amazingly accurate and resolving cutting system he used at Masterdisk.

There are no records being produced today that sound remotely as good as this budget subscription disc. Furthermore, to my knowledge no record this good has been cut for more than thirty years. The world is awash in mediocre records.

The likes of Bill Kipper are no longer with us, but we can all be thankful that we still have the records he and so many other talented engineers mastered all those years ago, to enjoy now and far into the future. (more…)