Hi Don, a big welcome to the WBF from me. Since you're a fan of Basie, this one's for you.
Al Grey, The Last of the Big Plungers: Named after the big rubber toilet-plunger mute (see the album cover below) used by Grey, this album shows that Basie does not have the monopoly on swing. Grey (acclaimed trombonist from Dizzie Gillespie's big band) is joined by seven Basietes - Joe Newman, Billy Mitchell, Benny Powell, Charlie Fowlkes, Ed Jones, Floyd Morris and Sonny Payne. While the 50-year-old copy I played at the show was a little noisy, the music more than made up for it. Once the music starts, you don't hear the surface noise at all. What is recorded is a driving swing coupled with relaxed ease that only excellent musicians in the groove have.
The original Argo deep groove stereo album may be a little difficult to find, but well worth the while to hunt down a good copy. Unlike many of the stereo studio albums of the era, the instruments are not panned hard right/hard left and the soundstage and imaging is very natural. I used Side A Track 2 of this album a lot to illustrate two of the characteristics of the Genesis loudspeakers:
- the fact that there is a large sweet spot - in any of the 9 seats in the room, the trombone of Al Grey images in the middle between the two speakers. Moving the head from side to side or up and down did not make the imaging or tonality vary significantly.
because the speakers generate a sound wave and does not beam, I can stand between one speaker and the listener and the image doesn't change (since the room was a little too small, it did vary a bit) and the shadow of someone standing between the listener and loudspeaker doesn't cause the soundstage to collapse. I think that I astounded quite a number of listeners when I illustrated this with the tiny G7p bookshelf on Sunday. When I do this with one of the large Genesis line-source speakers, I can see that in the minds of the listeners, they think "yah, but the speakers are so large that you aren't really blocking them". With the G7p, I completely block off the speaker, but not the sound wave, and if I am careful not to stand too close to the speaker or too close to the listener, the image and tonality does not change enough to be very noticeable.
The follow-up album to this one "A Thinking Man's Trombone" is not as well performed in my opinion, but still very good and another treasured 50-year old album in my collection.
(I've been told that my album covers are too large, so in future I'll reduce them to this size)
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+1!
Although, I consider the mono version of "Thinking Man's Trombone" a sonic treasure. It has become one of my go to mono reference LPs.
Gary - I'm starting to get the feeling that you and I are bidding against each other on Ebay