Jazz is like caviar or lox. You need to develop a taste for it if it doesn’t immediately grab you. But also jazz as an idiom suffers in popularity owing to the myriad of mediocre musicians and styles that claim to be “jazz”.
Recommendations for a jazz record which demonstrates vinyl superiority over digital
I have not bought a vinyl record since CDs came out, but have been exposed to numerous claims that vinyl is better. I suspect jazz may be best placed to deliver on these claims, so I am looking for your recommendations.
I must confess that I do not like trad jazz much. Also I was about to fork out A$145 for Miles Davis "Kind of Blue" but bought the CD for A$12 to see what the music was like. I have kept the change!
I love the jazz in the movie Babylon, which features local Oz girl Margo Robbie (the film, not the jazz).
So what should I buy?
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Time for an update. I have just received the first vinyl music I have bought in 40 years, but is it not jazz! It is something I don’t much like, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto which really is a piano trio with orchestral backing. The four sides average 15 minutes each, but I cannot tell without playing it whether it is 33 or 45 rpm. I already had the von Karajan, Richter, Oistrakh, Rostropovich recording! This new one is the latest from Decca (London). "Beethoven Triple Concerto: arguably the least successful of any of Beethoven’s mature concertos in the concert hall. It’s one of those pieces that never seems to get a performance that does it justice. Usually, you get po-faced seriousness when a big orchestra and three star names try to out-do each other, as the cello, violin, and piano soloists fight for the limelight. On disc, it hasn’t fared much better, and there’s an infamous Herbert von Karajan recording from 1969 with David Oistrakh on violin, Sviatoslav Richter on piano, and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich: it’s a nadir of gigantic egos trying to trump each other, a bonfire of the vanities from which Karajan and the Berlin Phil still somehow manage to emerge victorious. (Richter himself said of it: "It’s a dreadful recording and I disown it utterly… Battle lines were drawn up with Karajan and Rostropovich on the one side and Oistrakh and me on the other… Suddenly Karajan decided that everything was fine and that the recording was finished. I demanded an extra take. ’No, no,’ he replied, ’we haven’t got time, we’ve still got to do the photographs.’ To him, this was more important than the recording. And what a nauseating photograph it is, with him posing artfully and the rest of us grinning like idiots.")" Now, there are 188 versions listed on Presto Classical, and for about half the price of the 1 hour vinyl, I can buy this plus the complete symphonies lasting over 6 hours on 6 SACDs. Ah well ... still ready to splash some cash on a special jazz album |
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