The Now Spinning/Recent Purchases Thread

Finished up downloading on itunes, the late smooth jazz & blues guitarist Jeff Golub collection of his 13 or 14 albums (except his "Christmas" album)!!! Must hear folks!! Jeff died on January 1, 2015.
 
Just leaving this here...



(Curt Smith of Tears For Fears and his daughter Diva cover "Mad World" from the TFF album The Hurting.)
 
Way back when, I never heard of "The World We Knew" which I know now from Sinatra, and "Ponteio", the Edu Lobo song was a surprise, not to mention "A Banda".

Paul Mauriat and his Orchestra recorded dozens of Brazilian and Latin tunes, a lot of which are really good although I do have a very high tolerance for easy listening MOR bossa novas. I own many of his records but never found that one in your picture. What a sleeve! Mauriat Magic indeed...
 
The late Johnny Gibbs & Orchestra also covered the instrumental "The World We Knew" (from 1972 "Sweet With A Beat" 6 record set from Readers Digest). Heard that version back then on "Beautiful 102" WGER (102.5 FM) in Saginaw, Michigan during the late 70's!!
 
The late Johnny Gibbs & Orchestra also covered the instrumental "The World We Knew" (from 1972 "Sweet With A Beat" 6 record set from Readers Digest). Heard that version back then on "Beautiful 102" WGER (102.5 FM) in Saginaw, Michigan during the late 70's!!
Readers Digest Released a lot of Those Easy Listening instrumental collections back in the day my parents had a few and I did too a couple standouts I remember were "Pop piano favorites" Popular music that will Live forever" thankfully I saved all the standout songs to tape and later digitized it I also own a more recent 10 CD set which I had to purchase separately called " The Most Beautiful Melodies of the Century" a series of compilations which I heard many songs played on Music Choice back in the Late 90s early 2000s and they might have had some Radio or online radio play albeit in a limited way
 
It's one of those days (in these times) when you need a feel good, happy song (despite the deliberately corny video :laugh: ):



Raul Malo has been hunkered down at his home in Nashville, and every few days will record another tune at the Mellotron for us. He calls these "Quarantunes." Most are on YouTube:

 
Well this is something...



The video should start around 22:30. Watch Raul's face at around 22:50 to about 22:55--his expression darkens a bit, and he's looking at one spot in the audience from that point forward.

I'll leave you with the rest. NSFW, incidentally...but kudos to Raul for standing by and not doing nothing. (Lesson: don't piss off a Cuban. 😁)
 
Time for Stoa.

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This Nik Bärtsch's Ronin album was the first for ECM, after releasing five albums in Europe.

I've tried to figure out his album names---some make sense, but others take a little digging, or with Nik Bärtsch being of Swiss heritage, I could be missing out on something. Many of his concepts deal with the martial arts...

Randori: An Aikido term roughly meaning a free-style practice or sparring. A more literal translation is "chaos against an opponent," meaning that an opponent is not going to anticipate the oncoming attack.

Holon: In philosophy, something that is both a whole and a part.

Awase: In phase/moving together.
 
I love this album when my late mom bought it for me when I was 7 years old back in August of 1972 from The Sugar Bears "Presenting The Sugar Bears" on Big Tree Records (Went to # 209 (1 week) on January 29, 1972) on Billboard's Bubbling Under The Top 200 Album Charts. The song "You Are The One" went to # 51 (Hot 100) in April 1972. The next 45 single "Happiness Train" did not chart as well as their songs ONLY on 45 single "Some Kind Of A Summer" (later done by the late David Cassidy on "Rock Me Baby" in 1972 on Bell Records) & the flip "Put Some Love Into It" failed to chart (also from 1972) & that was it!! Honey Bear is singer Kim Carnes!! Runs nearly 29 minutes. NOT available on iTunes except the song "You Are The One" (compilation album).
 
Haven't really played Aja all the way through in a while...

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I still would like to get the correct early ABC pressing if this record or if not, the Cisco vinyl remaster from several years back which was supposedly a keeper. There still isn't an ideal digital version. Then again, it could be another set of masters lost at the Universal BBQ. It's dying for a really good vinyl and SACD mastering; there was an import SACD but that one doesn't sound right.

The worst vinyl version I've owned is the Mobile Fidelity. I don't know why, but that record has a really strange tonal balance. If I didn't know better, it seems similar to how those earlier Columbia Mastersound half-speed LPs sounded--when Columbia did the mastering at 16⅔ RPM, they neglected to cut the suggested frequencies of the EQ settings in half, so those all had a really weird tonal balance. I guess the guys at MoFi heard these and laughed at the error...yet to me it sounds like they made the same error with this record.

This was written in an interview with Gregg Schnitzer, who served as Director of Product Development at Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs from 1980 to 1986.

CBS sent me a catalog and invited me to pick a baker's dozen of titles that I would like to do on vinyl. So I picked lots of neat stuff like Abraxas, Joni Mitchell, Ten Years After, Earth Wind and Fire and so on, and ordered the records for tech review. I sent the list of my choices back and they sent me records but I never heard from them again. Several months later I was cruising a record store and I see this glitzy rack with the 13 titles I had picked. It said, "CBS Master Sound - Audiophile Pressing - Half Speed Mastered." Boy, was I pissed. I bought one of each and went back to the lab. After I cooled down I called Gary to see if he could do some listening with me.

Thirty seconds after dropping the needle on the first disc we stopped and looked at each other in horror. Then we tried another of the CBS discs. We stopped that one, looked at each other, and laughed till we had tears in our eyes and cramps in our sides. CBS tried to do an end run on us by having us do the A&R work. The problem was that they, apparently, cut the discs at half speed but didn't adjust their EQ or Dolby systems down an octave. They just cut it at half speed with their real time mastering notes for processing. Man, it sounded like watermelon seeds shooting out the speakers. Those poor guys looked real bad after that and we looked real good. They never did get it right and eventually stopped trying.
 
@DAN BOLTON If you like the James Hunter Six, this might also be right up your alley. I heard his track "Smooth Sailin'" on my Pandora Blues & Soul station this evening and something about it caught my ear. Sounded like some 60s soul/blues artist I'd never heard of. Turns out this was recorded in 2015 by someone who grew up in the 90s. Check this out:



His style is a throwback to early 60s soul (think of Sam Cooke and his contemporaries, pre-Motown soul), and apparently both of his first two albums went Top 10 and earned four Grammy nominations (and one win).

I'm playing his Coming Home album right now on Qobuz, and it is indeed a style from a bygone era. Even the sound quality has that gauzy, fuzzy sound reminiscent of 60s soul albums. Great stuff! "Smooth Sailin'" is my favorite so far.
 
Haven't really played Aja all the way through in a while...

1587607427077.png

I still would like to get the correct early ABC pressing if this record or if not, the Cisco vinyl remaster from several years back which was supposedly a keeper. There still isn't an ideal digital version. Then again, it could be another set of masters lost at the Universal BBQ. It's dying for a really good vinyl and SACD mastering; there was an import SACD but that one doesn't sound right.

The worst vinyl version I've owned is the Mobile Fidelity. I don't know why, but that record has a really strange tonal balance. If I didn't know better, it seems similar to how those earlier Columbia Mastersound half-speed LPs sounded--when Columbia did the mastering at 16⅔ RPM, they neglected to cut the suggested frequencies of the EQ settings in half, so those all had a really weird tonal balance. I guess the guys at MoFi heard these and laughed at the error...yet to me it sounds like they made the same error with this record.

This was written in an interview with Gregg Schnitzer, who served as Director of Product Development at Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs from 1980 to 1986.
Could the reason be that ABC tossed the masters back in the 70’s, so the only available masters are the 1970’s vinyl masters? I also see on Wikipedia that in 1999 plans for a DTS 5.1 remix were scrapped because the multi-tracks for the title song and “Black Cow” had gone missing around 1979. Aja Album (bottom yellow section last paragraph).
 
The 2-track masters for Aja were not tossed in the 70s. Around 1982, Steve Hoffman had mastered it to CD as one of the first five CDs released by MCA. There were 5,000 pressed. But six months later, the powers that be (Becker, Fagen, Gary Katz and Roger Nichols) decided they wanted to master the CDs themselves, so most of the original 5,000 CDs were recalled. Nichols (with the help of the other) then digitized all of the 2-tracks to digital since they were deteriorating. Subsequent masterings for MCA were done from these digital versions. I know for a fact that the Citizen and the individual CDs that followed were a remastering from those digital versions, except they were EQed and run through CEDAR (an early digital noise reduction system that ran on the old OS/2 operating system) by Glenn Meadows of Masterfonics.

I don't know if it was determined that Mobile Fidelity went back to the deteriorating master tape to make their UD1 and UD2 CD gold CD releases of Aja, or if they used the band-approved digital copies. And for that matter, we don't know if the original two-tracks, any safeties, and/or the multitracks ever escaped the Universal BBQ.

The Cisco pressing is considered one of the best audiophile vinyl pressings out there. The Japan SACD (which I have) is not very good, certainly no better than anything else out there.

It's true that the multitracks for two of the songs from Aja were never located--there was a lot of speculation about that back around 2003-2004 I believe. Knowing how some of the studios kept track of tapes, they are probably sitting in a drawer or locker somewhere, unidentified. The rest of the multitracks still existed, and one or two were used for the Classic Albums video for this album.
 
Paul Winter, former A&M recording artist, flirted with the Bossa Nova on a few of his albums. This I believe may have been the first of a few albums--here's "O Barquinho" from Jazz Meets the Bossa Nova:

 
Of the other two early Paul Winter albums in a Brazilian style, this is one I am about to pick up a copy of (I have the other two):



Luiz Eça plays on this one, but is all but buried in the mix. This was recorded around the time Tamba Trio was releasing their first album (1962).

This final album features Paul Winter and Carlos Lyra. It may have some other musicians we know on it:



Aside from Winter on sax and Carlos Lyra on vocal and guitar, the backing trio is none other than Sergio Mendes, Sebastiao Neto and Milton Banana.

Three nice albums from the '60s!
 
Once upon a long ago, I had a vinyl copy of AJA. I might have even bought it. It was probably the original ABC pressing. But someone took a liking to it and either borrowed it without returning it, or it might even have been removed from my collection without authorization.

Today, I'm left with a former on-air copy on an MCA label hand-dated February of 1987. Whether that's the date it entered on-air use or the date it was tossed back to the library I can't say.

This copy came from a large vinyl purge of the WMMR record library. I'm currently attempting a needledrop to see if I can clean up the pops and ticks that caused it to no longer be air-worthy.

It's been ages (aja's?) since I've heard the album all the way through.
 
The MCA versions in the "Platinum Series" (or whatever it was called--the covers had an embossed stamp) were not good. Any of those I bought brand new were noisy and also a bit dull. I can't remember if it's the "AA" or "AB" matrix in the pressing number that marks the good one. I had bought a supposed "best" ABC version but like most others I've bought in recent years, it was too worn to be of any use to me. I don't understand how the seller never heard it.
 
This MCA has the blue sky rainbow label.

AA-1006-A-W1 then what looks like KFG/MCA and what looks like two television icons with a line running between them and a capital G in the middle.

AA-1006-B-W1, same KFG/MCA, and same G logo.

The cover is all taped up on edges to reinforce the corners and bottom from ripping, with a big "STE" on one corner for filing. There's a gold stamp on the rear FOR PROMOTION ONLY. It has a bar code of 0-7673201688-1. There are no inserts of any kind or lyric sheets, just a plastic sleeve with the record in it.
 
I think MCA at one time might have had a half-speed version of Aja. I've never seen one though.
 
Got a rare sealed copy of this 1972 record yesterday:

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It made for a good needle drop. The title track was the big hit from this record. The follow-up hit "I Believe in Music" is the Mac Davis song, which they had better luck with than Davis himself. This was on the ill-fated Sussex label, and it did have an A&M-labeled release in the UK.

This was recorded only a few miles away from me--the studio (GM Studios), and the adjacent collision shop, are both long gone. (GM Studios had their own small record label called Bump Shop Records.)
 
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Got the complete Gallery 2 albums (originally from Sussex) BUT 1 song is missing & that is "Sunday And Me" (written by Neil Diamond & a hit for Jay And The Americans in 1966) which came out on Fuel 2000 label on CD!!! Gallery also released 3 or 4 more 45 singles for Sussex (1973 - 1975) & then disbanded.
 
I cannot find any Jim Gold solo material (lead singer of Gallery) from the late 70's though. Did Jim released any solo stuff???
 
The MCA versions in the "Platinum Series" (or whatever it was called--the covers had an embossed stamp) were not good. Any of those I bought brand new were noisy and also a bit dull. I can't remember if it's the "AA" or "AB" matrix in the pressing number that marks the good one. I had bought a supposed "best" ABC version but like most others I've bought in recent years, it was too worn to be of any use to me. I don't understand how the seller never heard it.
I had a Crusaders Lp in that platinum series "Free as the wind" Great Album but it sounded a bit flat but to my ears the CD version was much better to me it appears MCA didnt seem to put a lot of effort into making some of their vinyl reissues sound as best as possible in my opinion with a few exceptions the again maybe it's just me being picky
 
I have that GALLERY LP on Sussex. It was an act that got played on the soft-adult station that I would eventually begin with in my radio career. It was a real natural for the station, whose slogan was "The Nicest Music", so a song called "Nice To Be With You" fit right in.

They had a bunch of copies of the album when they ultimately abandoned the format for more rockier stuff, and I grabbed one. It has a hole punch in the upper right and a black Buddah Group innersleeve. Label says "DJ Copy Not For Sale".

I'm sure that this station played not only "Nice To Be With You" and "I Believe In Music", but also a third track named "Big City Miss Ruth Ann".
 
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