Newport Jazz Festival 1958
Title: Recorded Live at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival
Recording Info: Recorded by Columbia Records July 1958
Recorded By – George Avakian, Teo Macero
1 Louis Armstrong - Newport International Jazz Band - On The Sunny Side Of The Street 6:51
2 Teddy Wilson Trio - Stompin' At The Savoy 4:19
3 Teddy Wilson Trio - Sweet Georgia Brown 4:20
4 Teddy Wilson Trio - Undetermined 3:46
5 Newport All Stars - Jump The Blues 7:18
6 Big Maybelle with The Blues Band - Baby, Please Don't Go 5:01
7 Big Maybelle with The Blues Band - Cherry 2:28
8 Big Maybelle with The Blues Band - Let it Roll 3:29
9 Big Maybelle with The Blues Band - I ain't Mad at You 1:59
10 Beulah Bryant with The Blues Band - John Henry 4;00
11 Beulah Bryant with The Blues Band - Motherless Child 2:33
12 Beulah Bryant with The Blues Band - Shake, Rattle & Roll 3:01
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Blues Night at Newport
Blues Night, with Louis Armstrong kicking off with "On the Sunny Side of the Street". The trumpet lead in this opening track is so inimitably Armstrong's phrasing, there is no doubt about whose trumpet is taking the lead from the big band intro. And then there's that pause, Armstrong's gravelly voice comes forth, and happiness shines all around. What a treat it must have been to be in that audience on that evening. Unfortunately, this one cut is all that we hear of Armstrong on this album. Following the opening track, we have several pieces by Teddy Wilson Trio, and then Big Maybelle and Beulah Bryant singing with The Blues Band. These women are a treat to hear—both deliver a style of blues shouting not heard anymore. This may not be everyone's cup of tea, but for me it is something special to hear these classic blues shouters perform. They were giants on the U.S. blues stages in their day. And Armstrong is, by himself, worth the price of admission. As another purchaser comments, the sound is a bit left channel heavy. But keep in mind that these are live performers with the recordist having to fight for mic space on the stage.
Newport Jazz Festival 1958 24/352 DXD
Sound quality is very good, but a large proportion of the performance is left channel biased. On some numbers the right channel remains almost silent. I'm sure this is how it was recorded, with individual miking of performers. Problem with this is that most tracks feature piano on the left, with the player also being the vocalist, and these two sounds are given prominence over others, and so dominate, making for a left-channel heavy sound. I honestly feel that this doesn't replicate the experience of actually being there, and could maybe be ameliorated in a remix.
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Newport Jazz Festival 1958 24/352 DXD
Sound quality is very good, but a large proportion of the performance is left channel biased. On some numbers the right channel remains almost silent. I'm sure this is how it was recorded, with individual miking of performers. Problem with this is that most tracks feature piano on the left, with the player also being the vocalist, and these two sounds are given prominence over others, and so dominate, making for a left-channel heavy sound. I honestly feel that this doesn't replicate the experience of actually being there, and could maybe be ameliorated in a remix.
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Disappointing
Thought this would be great jazz but it is all blues. This is not my style of music. I wish I could return this, if I could. This was the first time I took for granted and I did not preview the music, my bad.
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An album of two musical halves - but none the worse for that
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
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