What are you listening to right now?

[tmazz]

Ella Fitzgerald: For the Love of Ella

Verve 2 CD Set

[etcarroll]

I've grown to love Ella recently.

[etcarroll]

PORGY & BESS [Double LP]
Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong | Format: Vinyl

[eleazar]

The Red Crayola - The Parable of Arable Land (1967)

[tmazz]

I've grown to love Ella recently.

Just be careful about what you pick up. There is a lot a dreadful sounding Ella discs out there. If you stick with the major labels (especially Verve) you are pretty safe, but when you get into those no-name discs there are a lot of stinkers with SQ that sounds like an old rock concert bootleg. Some decent stuff on the small labels but but you have to sort past the cr@p. If you find some no-name record label discs in a place like DDs be sure to take a minute and throw them on the audition TT and give a listen before laying out money for them.

Happy hunting.  

[tmazz]

The Red Crayola - The Parable of Arable Land (1967)

That is another really funky piece of cover art. 

Hey, it's from 1967, that explains a lot - "This is your brain on drugs."

Bill I'm beginning to think that you pick your new records by going up to Jamie and asking "What is the weirdest looking  cover that you got in last week?"     

[tmazz]

Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops play the Carpenters Songbook

Polydor LP

Well, I am a big Fiedler fan so it takes a lot for me to say this, but this record is a piece of cr@p. It is the worst SQ of anything I have ever heard from the Boston Pops. And I am not talking about bad relative to other things the Pops has done. I'm talking bad, period. Strings so shrill that I couldn't listen to more than two songs for fear that my ears were going to start to bleed. Run, do not walk away from this one.


Hey, if everything I found at the crack house was a gem that would take all the fun out of it........

[tmazz]

Pete Fountain: Mr. Stick Man

Mono LP

Ok after that horrible sounding Fiedler album this LP has restored my faith in vinyl. Nice New Orleans Jazz, nice SQ.

All is once again right with the world.

[richidoo]

Might be one that Feidler did not want to do and chose to have minimal influence on the project. Is polydor his usual label? Or it could just be a different producer than the other records you like. Is the producer listed?

I love seeing Fountain play on Lawrence Welk Show.

[jsaliga]

Is polydor his usual label?

RCA Victor.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

This is a Sundazed reissue on 180g vinyl.  Very impressed.

--Jerome

[tmazz]

Is polydor his usual label?

RCA Victor.

--Jerome

From Wikipedia:

"With Fiedler's direction, the Boston Pops reportedly made more recordings than any other orchestra in the world, most of them for RCA Victor, with total sales of albums, singles, tapes, and cassettes exceeding $50 million. His recordings began in July 1935 at Boston's Symphony Hall with RCA, including a world premiere recording of Jacob Gade's Jalousie, which eventually sold more than a million copies, and the first complete recording of Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin (with Jesús Maria Sanromá as soloist). In 1946, he conducted the Boston Pops in one of the first American recordings devoted to excerpts from a film score, Dmitri Tiomkin's music for the David O. Selznick Technicolor epic Duel in the Sun; RCA Victor released an album of ten-inch 78-rpm discs complete with photographs from the film. In 1942, he married Ellen Bottomley, and they had three children: Johanna, Deborah, and Peter.

Fiedler's June 20, 1947, recording of Gaîté Parisienne by Jacques Offenbach was eventually released by RCA as their very first long-playing classical album (RCA Victor LM-1001), in 1950. He recorded the same music in 1954 in stereo and began making regular stereo recordings in 1956. A number of Fiedler's recordings were released as 45-rpm "extended play" discs, beginning in 1949, such as Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave and Ketèlbey's In a Persian Market (RCA Victor ERA-2). Besides recording light classics, Fiedler also recorded music from Broadway shows and Hollywood film scores, as well as arrangements of popular music, especially the Beatles. He and the Boston Pops occasionally recorded classical works that were favorites, but not considered as "light" as most of the pieces that he conducted. He made but a single recording with the Boston Symphony Orchestra: Dvorak's New World Symphony. There were also recordings of chamber music by his Sinfonietta. Fiedler and the Boston Pops recorded exclusively for RCA Victor until the late 1960s, when they switched to Deutsche Grammophon for classical releases with co-owned Polydor Records for his arrangements of pop music compositions and then London Records. His last album, devoted to disco, was titled Saturday Night Fiedler."

The Wikipedia article is actally wrong Fiedler's last recording was not Saturday Night Fiedler, but rather a drect to disc recording of Cappriccio Italien/Espangnol for Crystal Clear Records.

While the RCA recordings were generally way above average on the SQ scale (especially the ones from the Living Stereo "Shaded Dog" era) The DG and Polydor albums were hit or miss with most of them being fair to average.

[jsaliga]

Sundazed reissue.  Very nice.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

--Jeorme

[eleazar]

Sundazed reissue.  Very nice.

--Jerome

Very cool Jerome I picked up the 1st two awhile back. I had the 3rd on Tower Records but I'm thinking it's a later pressing