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Erroll's piano sounds terrible...

So I put on "We Get Requests" whilst playing cards last night with my wife. It didn't sound too good, and I was bummed since I'd remembered it sounding pretty good on my other table.

Then I remembered turning up the antiskate to 2 a couple days ago. I turned it back down to 1.5 and it cleared right up.

Thanks for the advice guys. The Trio sounded great.
 
Corbin Gross said:
So I put on "We Get Requests" whilst playing cards last night with my wife. It didn't sound too good, and I was bummed since I'd remembered it sounding pretty good on my other table.

Then I remembered turning up the antiskate to 2 a couple days ago. I turned it back down to 1.5 and it cleared right up.

Thanks for the advice guys. The Trio sounded great.
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Nice! :thmbsp:

(You have fine taste in music too!)
 
I'm not familiar with the Garner records you're asking about, but I do have a lot of jazz albums, including many original pressings as well as those high-end 45 rpm reissues. One thing that is noticeable on those is how often the piano doesn't sound great. Most of my experience is with Blue Note albums recorded by the famous Rudy Van Gelder, one of the greatest engineers in jazz history. On the whole, those Blue Notes from the 1950s and 60s are some of the best sounding jazz albums I've ever heard. Yet, the piano is the one exception -- it often sounds like it was recorded underwater -- that is, it doesn't have much of a high end; there is sometimes distortion as well, like the mic was overloaded with too much signal.

It seems like the exception on the Blue Notes is the trio records. I was just listening to a Japanese reissue of "The Amazing Bud Powell" this morning, and the piano sounded good. But on quartets and above, the piano seems to suffer (even when it's a pianist's band, like the Horace Silver quintet).

I do have original 6-eye pressings of Dave Brubeck's "Time Out" (mono and stereo) and it is a tremendously good sounding recording. Most of those early Columbia records sound excellent. Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is another one of those, and it is really fine sounding.
 
GreatTone said:
I do have original 6-eye pressings of Dave Brubeck's "Time Out" (mono and stereo) and it is a tremendously good sounding recording. Most of those early Columbia records sound excellent. Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is another one of those, and it is really fine sounding.
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Indeed.

The engineers at Columbia's 30th Street NYC studio really knew what they were doing, and they had the finest equipment and a terrific room to work in.
 
Since we seem to have veered from groove damage/distortion to recordings, let me make a recommendation for Erroll Garner's Solitaire album - solo piano. The sound has some issues (bright piano and general 1955 Mercury limitations), but the playing is just terrific. I tend to play this one more than once when it is on the platter.
 
Erroll Garner and his style...

DC said:
Since we seem to have veered from groove damage/distortion to recordings, let me make a recommendation for Erroll Garner's Solitaire album - solo piano. The sound has some issues (bright piano and general 1955 Mercury limitations), but the playing is just terrific. I tend to play this one more than once when it is on the platter.
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I was just playing the Solitaire album last night, with this thread in mind. I may go back to it tonight again. Here's a thought about Garner's playing style which may interpret some of the sonic issues with his recordings:

Garner plays "big," in an orchestral manner. There are so many harmonics going on, melodies playing in octaves, for example, rolling chords and the like. There aren't many open spaces around notes, it's a sort of wall of sound. To say his playing is full-sounding is to make the understatement of the day. It's like you're listening to five pianos rather than one.

Solitaire is a great sounding album, and in order to record Garner decently, the engineering had to be top notch, as well as the recording conditions and mastering. As noted elsewhere, piano is a really difficult instrument to record well. When you add to this fact the manner in which Garner plays, it is easy to understand why his recordings might sound lousy, if any of the variables which might contribute to bad sound reproduction are not perfectly aligned and accounted for.

This thread brings up a lot of issues about listening to piano music in general, but I'll just add that piano records are the most taxing for anybody's vinyl system. And the most difficult jazz pianists to listen to comfortably are, for me, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson. All three of them play in this "huge" approach. At the same time, when they sound good, they are amazing.

Oh, and according to the liner notes, on the Solitaire album Garner is playing without the index finger on his left hand. Apparently he hurt it and he showed up for the recording session with a splint. Incredible.
 
I found my copy of " Paris Impressions " and " Erroll Garner plays Misty ". :thmbsp:

Mercury SR 60662 (stereo)
 
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