Album Reviews

The monophonic master tape of this 1958 Prestige session recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack home studio has probably had more tape head contact over the past few years than it had for the first 30 plus years of its life. Along with this 2 LP set and SACD, there’s a 180g Acoustic Sounds LP still in print, there was a 1998 JVC XRCD reissue, a 1993 DCC Compact Classics gold CD, a standard CD, a 20 bit mastered edition, a Japanese 20 bit “LP sleeve” edition and probably a few others as well. Do a search on Amazon.com and you’ll find a confusing jumble of Soultrane editions priced from $6.49 to $49.00 (the out of print DCC Compact Classics gold CD), none of which are identified in adequate detail. As you’d expect, www.acousticsounds does a better job of identifying this recording’s many iterations.

Having a good music dealer is as important as having a great accountant who knows all the funky tax loopholes, because both can steer you down the right path and save you money. Lets get real here for a minute: even if you were to spend months on end reading all the music rags out there, there's bound to be a lot of albums that'll fly well below your well-heeled radar. Add to that the sheer volume of new music coming down the pipe, and you can be forgiven for not knowing what's the latest album that'll blow your mind.