Firstly, the technical stuff: this is another excellent HDTT transfer (we've come to expect no less) of first-rate recordings from what seems to be a "golden era" of Newport jazz. Some years back, a music and memorabilia site called Wolfgang's Vault released a tranche of gobsmackingly-good recordings from the Newport Jazz Festival, dating from 1958 to the early sixties, and - as here, featuring the introductions of legendary Voice of America broadcaster and jazz presenter, Willis Conover. I believe those tapes were made by the Voice of America themselves, but whoever was responsible, they demonstrate with stunning clarity (speaking both literally and figuratively) how little the art of recorded sound has progressed in the intervening half-century-plus. I don't know whether this present transfer stems from that same tranche of VoA tapes, but it has the same glorious realism borne of a natural sound stage, good balance and startling dynamics. On a cynical day, I find myself pondering that it was a bad idea to ever the studio geeks more than three or four tracks! Whilst 8, 16, 24 tracks and beyond may have enabled some pop and rock bands to create spectacular results in the studio (building up, layer by-layer, something they could never have attained by simply "playing live to a mike"), a misplaced broader enthusiasm for multitracking has mostly displaced the craftsmanship of realistically capturing a live soundscape, replacing it with an apparently technically clever, but ultimately unsatisfying equivalent of an electronic flower arrangement.
The old craftsmanship, however, is still very evident here. Musically this is a slightly curious mix of two halves, firstly some Teddy Wilson
24/96 PCM Flac Digital Download
