Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now
UPDATE 2026
This commentary is from many years ago. The OJC’s can be decent on this title, but some of them, the one we played and discuss here, can be awful.
The OJC versions of Contemporary Records are typically thin and somewhat opaque, as well as tizzy up top, the kind of sound one often hears on CDs (and that CD lovers for some reason never seem to notice, or bothered by, who can say?).
Some OJC pressings, however, can be excellent — when you are lucky enough to chance upon the right copy.
The pressings that were mastered and put out by Contemporary in the mid-70s (until they were bought by Fantasy) are almost always superior to the OJCs, but these rules of thumb break down so badly and so often that the only workable approach is just to play as many different copies of the album as you can get your hands on and simply let them sort themselves out sonically.
This of course is exactly how we conduct our shootouts. We make a lot of mistakes, but when all is said and done, we rarely fail to come up with the goods, the goods being phenomenal sounding pressings of important music, pressings that are dramatically superior to any others.
Although we’ve liked the OJC of Jazz Giant in the past, last time around the OJC versions were quite a bit thinner, smaller and less energetic than our real Contemporary stereo pressings. They were a big step down from our killer Shootout Winner.
The notes for that copy read “100x better” if that tells you anything (!)
A clear case of live and learn.
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