Album Reviews

The classic Phil Spector Christmas album is Sundazed’s holiday gift to us all. Mastered in glorious mono from the original mono master tape (while Phil didn’t do stereo the late Larry Levine, Gold Star Studio's premier engineer produced a very good stereo mix in the early 1970's).

Perhaps had the dulcet-toned baritone Johnny Hartman lived beyond sixty (he passed away from lung cancer in 1983) he might have experienced a resurgence similar to Tony Bennett’s&#151not that Hartman was ever as popular as Bennett.

Fifty four year old Thelonious Monk was considered “washed up” by many when this European session was recorded in 1971. He’d ended his association with Columbia Records and while he made some good records for the most commerical label with which he’d be associated, he’d not written much new material during that period.

Back in “the day,” budget labels like Seraphim (Angel), Cardinal (Vanguard) Victrola (RCA) and Odyssey (Columbia) usually released old recordings at low prices. Many of these were great performances from either mono recordings (sometimes foolishly "reprocessed for stereo") or transferred from 78rpm parts.

You gotta thank Sundazed for digging out and reissuing raw, vital stuff like this and not charging audiophile prices. For one thing, they wouldn’t be able to sell it for $30.00 and it wouldn’t be worth lavishing such care on it anyway. But that doesn’t mean stuff like this is any less worthy.

Whenever a record shows up I like to look at the lead out groove area to see who did the lacquer cutting. Sometimes there’s nothing to be found and that’s annoying, but with this double set I thought I was hallucinating because in plain view was “TML-M” a stamp not seen on a slab of new vinyl in decades. TML is the acronym for “The Mastering Lab” and the “M” means the main lathe at Doug Sax’s place.

In the early �70�s, with the second great rock era in its death throws, the rock intelligensia hungered for something, anything that might reinvigorate the softening musical firmament.