AAA Vinyl

Some people collect Tone Poet Blue Note reissues the way some people amass baseball cards. I know more than a few Tone Poet enthusiasts who, after buying one, had a Bert Lahr Lay’s potato chip moment and couldn’t stop buying them—at least until they encountered the late pianist/composer/arranger Andrew Hill’s Blue Note debut Black Fire (ST-84151/B0029975-01).

Fifty one later Déjà vu still delivers a powerful musical, lyrical and sonic jolt, especially on this newly remastered 50th anniversary set that includes the original record on 180g vinyl mastered by Chris Bellman, cut using the original master tape.

In May of 1913, just one year before the start of the first World War, Igor Stravinsky premiered his third ballet with the Ballets Russes in Paris: Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). The premiere would go down in history for a number of reasons, primarily due to the unruly Parisian audience that descended into what could be referred to as a riot. What was so scandalous about the Rite? Stravinsky, along with choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, wanted to evoke a picture of Russia from the distant, pagan past. A story of an ancient pagan rite where a young maiden would be chosen to dance herself to death to appease the ancestors and secure a bountiful harvest. The music, while stylistically not a huge departure from Stravinsky’s two previous and successful Parisian ballets, was dissonant, brutal, and rhythmically disorienting. Likewise, Nijinsky’s choreography was rigid, and was meant to mimic the flat, two-dimensional style of prehistoric paintings. The audience that night was not having it, but their uproar helped launch the Rite into infamy, helping it to become one of the most talked about and often performed works of the 20th century.

Los Angeles—April 26, 2021 — Verve/UMe’s Acoustic Sounds series celebrates Impulse!’s 60th anniversary, releasing May 14 two of the four titles that originally launched the iconic orange and black label:

• Ray Charles – Genius + Soul = Jazz
• Gil Evans Orchestra – Out Of The Cool

This essential, musically groundbreaking and sonically spectacular Gil Evans album recorded by RVG in 1960 and released February of 1961 will soon be issued as part of the Verve/Acoustic Sounds series, cut AAA using the original master tape.

Los Angeles, CA ( January 14,2021)—Craft Recordings today announced its first lavishly packaged and produced “Small Batch” series release: John Coltrane’s Lush Life, an original 1961 Prestige monophonic release recorded by Rudy Van Gelder in his Hackensack, NJ living room studio. The record consists of unissued tracks recorded in three sessions, two in 1957 and one in 1958.

I was asked to write a short item for a U.K. business about the high prices of today's new records. I ended up thinking they are not all that high. The Sam Goody's ad from 1973 at the top is for the Led Zeppelin catalog, that at the time consisted of five LPs. The list price was $4.98. The sale price (if you brought in the advertisement) was $3.49. Sounds cheap, no? Well, no.