Sorry to hear some people are still having pressing problem faults with these Classics releases. I preordered 3 from the the latest batch of four and all are top rate quality for both mastering and pressing quality including ‘Home Cooking’. No clicks or pops and very quiet even in the dead wax. This was despite Amazon leaving them outside on Saturday in pouring rain when we were away. They were suppose to deliver today. The outer box pretty much disintegrated, but they were luckily in mailers as well and survived undamaged.
Jimmy Smith’s ‘Home Cooking’ sounds excellent with some nice blues playing from Kenny Burrell and Tenor from Percy France.
Glad I didn’t pass on the Kenny Cox ‘Introducing’ where I was tempted to at first after a quick listen on YouTube as this is great musically and with excellent sound quality. Sounds quite different to a Van Gelder recorded Blue Note despite noted as Re-Recording by him? Recorded at Universal Sound Systems, but still sounding good even if different. You can clearly hear a bigger space and separation between instruments with slightly drier sound. Excellent piano sound on this that is sometimes a VG recording weakness. Drum kit recording is perhaps the only slight weakness here in comparison. I expect some though will generally prefer the more far forward Englewood Cliffs VG’s though.
Interesting to compare Leon Henderson’s Tenor to his older brother Joe. Much darker tonality with a more staccato rather than fluid approach. All the musicians are good on this, but especially on the long tracks on side two. I have seen comparisons to Miles Davis’s second Quintet. While I don’t think they reach those heights this is a great Joe Harley find and reissue and it is a pity they only made one more recording as far as I know? Perhaps they will also reissue that second 1970 Blue Note sometime?
The favourite of my three though is the Herbie Nichols combined Vols 1 & 2 as I have long wanted a good vinyl version of this great music that was ahead of it’s time. I thought my CD version had fairly good sound, but this is top rate with much better detail and dynamics and Van Gelder did make an excellent job with the piano sound on this recording. What this mastering adds for me is it makes it much more apparent how much of Ellington you can hear in his sound as well as Monk, but this is no imitation he is still very much an ‘original’ voice.
This a Beautiful noise free pressing. They did a very good job on the sleeve with this one as well making it a gatefold and going as far as having the bar code on an extended hype sticker and not contaminating the sleeve. Although not a Stoughton tip on it still looks pretty good.
I’m glad my personal luck has held with these reissues.
