Listening to Kenny Burrell Midnight Blue

Snopro and Daveyf:

I wondered the same thing myself on the stage right / stage left item. And Daveyf, if you're right that this is reflective of the artist positioning at the time of recording, as I listened to it I was wondering why they wouldn't have placed the featured artist in center stage. But, if that's how they decided to do it, then so be it.

Musicpod, I don't know why many artists were featured that way, but it is certainly not uncommon. I have several other older Blue Notes and jazz LP's that are recordings of artists on stage in the same positioning.

I have not yet purchased Midnight Blue, partly because I have a copy of the original. Frankly of the Music Matters re-issues I have purchased some have more noise than the originals in my collection. All of my originals were purchased new and have been played sparingly on good equipment over the years. But this raises a question about the whole vinyl re-issue business. What exactly are we getting for what I view as a lot of dollars? Last week I compared track for track The Dave Brubeck Quartet's "Time Further Out" album. Redbook CD vs. Music Matters reissue. I picked this one for several reasons, a major one being that the Music Matters vinyl copy is one of the best sounding recordings in my collection. I took the time to level match and tried two cartridges: Ortofon 2M Black, and an Audio Technica AT150ANV. The AT sounded more similar to the CD so I went with it for most of the listening. The two formats sounded quite similar overall, astonishingly good in fact. I am not sure that there was enough difference for me to discern one from the other in a double blind test, but overall my impression was that the vinyl was a bit richer, maybe a bit more bass, the CD was quieter and perhaps had a bit more air especially on the softer passages when Paul Desmond was soloing.

The answer is that the engineers in the early days of stereo had yet to discover with two track, the phantom middle channel. Most, if not all, of the early jazz recordings suffered from this hard left, hard right/dual mono effect. From what I've been told, the first jazz LP to discover that phantom middle channel - and essentially by accident - was the Contemporary recording Art Pepper +11. Koenig/DuNann because of mixer limitations had no place to the last instrument; in the end, their solution was to mix half in the left and half in the right channel and voila the center image.

As far as the echo issue goes. I have a third gen, 15 ips copy of Midnight Blue and it's on the tape. Whether it was there initially or they got some print through because no one periodically rewound the master (upkeep of the masters is a real hit or miss operation) is anyone's guess.

Oh yes, the MM release is a darn good facsimile of the tape. Just a little bit missing here and there but the LP ismy still wonderful sonically and musically.