⭐ Official Review Fandango [Herb Alpert]

I'm the only one in the minority here...

I bought the Shout! Factory CD when it came out many years ago. I tried very hard to like it -- and while his playing is much better than his '60s LPs (SOTB ad GP notwithstanding, of course), there seemed to be a sameness to it all: as though the "band" was laying down a bed into which Herb would drop his horn. I was hoping for more interplay. Route 101 was marvellous, however. I think I'll dig it out of the dungeon and give it another spin (once my listening room is up...still a couple weeks away).

Thanks for the recent posts on this.
 
@Vinylalbumcovers I don't know what happened, the 24/88.2 versions have been replaced with 24/44.1. The same at Qobuz. No excuse for that IMHO. As cheap as storage and bandwidth is today, those could have remained up there. At least the mastering is better than the old versions, and the 24-bit resolution is still better than 16-bit by a longshot. Still, it makes zero sense. Another album on Qobuz (different artist) was dialed back from 24/44 to 16/44. Again, no rhyme or reason.
 
Not that it's of any significance, but to close the door on my previous post...I dug Fandango out of the dungeon and spun it.

Hands down, that's Herb's most confident playing to date at that time. For those keeping score, he surely hit an early technical peak with !!Going Places!!. Then slid down hill until his '70s TjB rejuvenation. The later '70s and early '80s, from what little I've heard, show he's producing a more metallic and robust "trumpet like" tone. On Fandango, he's also exhibiting more continuous playful imagination than on any of the TjB albums...so, from a technical standpoint, the album is quite good. The material and the band, on the other hand, just don't do much for me. Aside from the brilliant single and perhaps one or two other selections, it just seems to all run the same rails. A hallmark of those classic TjB LPs was the variety -- in arrangement, instrumentation, performance, and even engineering. Such variety is absent with Fandango where the performances exhibit an overall predictable s m o o t h vibe that's just my cup of tea...and now back to WNML!
 
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