shankandth

Bud Shank And the Sax Section – An Undiscovered Gem

More Bud Shank

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone

  • This stellar copy of Bud Shank’s 1966 release boasts Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides – open, lively and dynamic throughout
  • Full, rich, and spacious with tons of Tubey Magic and, better yet, never dry, hard or transistory — true DEMO DISC QUALITY sound 
  • An absolutely amazing recording engineered by none other than Bruce Botnick – the sound of multiple saxes playing these lively arrangements is music to our ears
  • “… the album works, largely because of Bob Florence’s arrangements and the shrewd doubling of the baritone and bass sax parts, which give the charts heft at the bottom… The overall sound remains wonderfully reedy and flighty.”

Bruce Botnick sure knew what he was doing on this session. He succeeded brilliantly in capturing the unique sound of each of the saxes. The album is really more of a West Coast pop jazz record than it is a “real” jazz record. The arrangements are very tight, the songs are quite short — none exceed three and a half minutes — so there is not a lot of classic jazz saxophone improvisational blowing going on.

Spacious and transparent with plenty of analog Tubey Magic to go around, this is a really wonderful way to hear the music. The sax sound is excellent — rich and full, with none of the hard, edgy quality we heard on the less than stellar pressings. For richness and Tubey Magic — with no sacrifice in clarity or dynamics — these sides just could not be beat.

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We Used to Sell the Dubby Reissues of Bud Shank And the Sax Section, Ouch

More of the Music of Bud Shank

I used to sell reissues of this record back in the day some twenty odd years ago. While they aren’t terrible — lackluster is a more apt description — we can clearly hear now that they are made from second generation tapes.

The stage is recessed and collapsed, and the sound never gets big enough nor lively enough to free itself from the speakers. (This happens to be our all-too-common experience with many of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we audition and consequently write mean things about. Can you blame us? We loathe that sound.)

It’s yet another example of a record we was wrong about. Live and Learn, right?

I would not buy any Pacific Records pressing with this style reissue cover. We’ve never heard one sound better than mediocre on our current system.

This record sounds best this way:

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