Hot Stamper Pressings Engineered by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now
Clearly this is a Must Own album from Horace Silver.
During our most recent shootout we ran into an early pressing that blew our minds.
Finding early pressings of Blue Note titles in audiophile playing condition is both difficult and expensive. Perhaps there is some other pressing worth a try?
Not that we know of, but we admit we have played none of the Heavy Vinyl reissues flooding the market these days. If you want to go that way, more power to you. Just don’t make the mistake of buying the 80s reissue that Capitol put out.
As you can see from our notes, it’s terrible — so thin, flat and dry.
It has the kind of sound we refer to as “modern,” and we do not mean that as a compliment.
CAUTION: Two of the pressings we played in our shootout were noisy, with a defective right channel. Both were mastered by Rudy Van Gelder. Unlike many of the other Blue Note titles we do, Rudy was still cutting pressings all the way into the White B Label era of the early 80s.
If you buy any of these later pressings, make sure you have the right to return them. The sellers who grade their records visually will not be able to recognize the invisible defects their pressings may suffer from and are unlikely to want to take them back.
Horace Silver Is The Man
If you don’t know the man’s music, this is a good place to start. It’s yet another triumph for engineering maestro Rudy Van Gelder – he refined a “live-in-the-studio” jazz sound that’s still fresh today, even after 65 years.
The really good RVG pressings (often on the later labels) sound shockingly close to live music — uncompressed, present, full of energy, with the instruments clearly located on a wide and often deep soundstage, surrounded by the natural space and cool air of his New Jersey studio.
As our stereo has improved, and we’ve found better pressings and learned how to clean them better, his “you-are-there” live jazz sound has come to impress us more and more.
