Wow! Fantasy/OJC to start releasing SACDs

I'll quote from some press info from Fantasy:

"Before we made the decision to manufacture and market SACDs ourselves,"
says label president Ralph Kaffel, "we had licensed certain titles from
our catalog for a limited time. But the increasing popularity of the
SACD format encouraged us to get involved directly."

Go to the Jazzmatazz website at http://jazzmatazz.home.att.net and scroll down to the August 2003 releases to see what's coming. Some prime Coltrane, Monk and Brubeck!

 

Given Fantasy's recent remastering history, I'm not that enthusiastic about this announcement. It'll be interesting to compare a few of those to Steve's DCC Golds from that catalog. I know we should be glad he got to do the CCR's!

ED

 

Bittersweet for me as well (but much more sweet than bitter). Steve, can you try to license the Booker Ervin "Book" series from OJC? I desparately want those on SACD, preferably transferred by you.

One must commend OJC for taking this step to give customers state-of-the-art product.

 

Good choice Greg! This set of albums are among my favorite jazz! It would be nice to hear Steve give them the "treatment".

Let's hope they don't do a bad job on the SACDs. I am looking forward to hearing them.

 

A little bitter, a little sweet indeed!

I'll cut my teeth on the Wes Montgomery one...we'll see...

 

Steve,

What does this mean for your CCR SACDs? Get 'em while the gettin's good?

 

Well, maybe S&P should go get some of those oddball classic hard bop jazz titles that don't seem to belong to anyone in particular:

Dave Bailey Sextet - ONE FOOT IN THE GUTTER

Miles Davis - LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD

Freddie Redd - MUSIC FROM THE CONNECTION (not to be confused with THE CONNECTION on Blue Note)

I mention these titles because they seem to wander in- and out-of-print, and seem to be reissued by a lot of labels, indicating the licensing isn't too problematic. Accent on "seem," of course; I know nothing of the legal reality.

 

Very good choice from Sony Ron...heck...make it a twofer and throw in Two Feet In The Gutter as well. Both amazing albums!

 

BOy, once the specialty guys do it right, the big guys want to take over the reigns. Buggers.

Will they get to keep the SH masters for the CCRs, or will they try and do them over themselves. If so, grab those babies while you can.....

And, luckily we at least will be getting the last two CCRs before the change.

 

I guess this should be regarded positively - but my experience with regular CD reissues from Fantasy is mixed. Some of their CDs have sounded fine, while others have had strange problems. It seems to me (and I am speculating here) that they have not always done the most thorough research or checking of tape sources for their reissues - I say this because I have bought a couple of discs which had major problems with things like the music switching from stereo to mono in mid-track, and back again, or one channel dropping out completely. These are the sort of problems that may be related to the tape source, but I would think they could be fixed somehow.

Shelly Manne's "The Gambit" is a case where one channel dropped out entirely during a solo on one track. This is a fairly recent remaster.

A few years ago I bought "West Coast Jazz in HiFi" by Richie Kamuca and Bill Holman. Great music, but the transfer to CD was horrendous. I've never heard so much bass distortion. I wrote to Fantasy and they referred it to one of their mastering engineers, who came back with the view that it was the tape source. I would like to hear the vinyl to see if it has that awful phasey bass sound. This CD also had a track where it switched from stereo to mono and back again.

For the life of me, I can't see why this has to occur on a modern reissue. Am I being unreasonable here?

 

Cripes - no CCR Chronicle ala Steve - that stinks...

 

This is fantastic news! While I've been very, very happy with the AP SACDs I've bought, they are quite expensive and not very easy to get hold of (at least here in Norway). I think there's good hope that these will sell for less than the APs, perhaps for standard full price? Remember that all the regular OJCs are mid-price.

Alas, we don't know yet how well they wil remaster this stuff. At least with AP, you could be pretty sure you got a great product. Perhaps now is a good time to send them mail and commend them for their decision to move into SACD, suggest a lower retail price than the APs, and urge them to pay the same attention to sound that AP did?

Oh, and *do* include bonus tracks!! I don't have the Blue Train SACD yet, but from the preliminary reports I've seen it only has the original 5-song program. What's up with that??!! We know there are two alternate takes? All the while we're getting neither mono or multichannel mixes on the same disc, at least give us the aternate takes!!

 

I wonder if there is a possibility of Fantasy using the already available remasters from Analogue Productions for these SACDs.

 

Steve, it's too bad that Fantasy won't hire you to master their titles for SACD. If the execs. at Fantasy haven't done so yet, they should give your CCR discs a long, hard listen.

Are your Pendulum and Mardi Gras projects still on?

 

I am hoping these will sound great but I have some issues with Fantasy/Prestige/OJC. I stopped buying the Prestige 24 bit remasters after feeling that the Bright Corners and Monk's Music releases sounded unnaturally boosted in the low and high ends. I went back to buying the mid-price original.

 

This probably also explains the demise of the MoFi Big Star SACD as well.

 

GregM, thank you for the jazzmatazz link. This is the site I always wished for but never knew existed. I love the cover art on display and the release schedule way off into the future. There is no end to what you can learn in the SH forums!

 

Fantasy will release its first group of 10 SACD titles on August 26th. These SACD titles are:

Dave Brubeck Quartet - Jazz at Oberlin (Fantasy)

Creedence Clearwater Revival - The Concert (Fantasy)

Vince Guaraldi - A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy)

Thelonious Monk & John Coltrane (Jazzland)

Zoot Sims & the Gershwin Brothers (Pablo)

Gil Evans and Ten (Prestige)

John Coltrane - Lush Life (Prestige)

Bill Evans - Portrait in Jazz (Riverside)

Wes Montgomery - The Incredible Jazz Guitar (Riverside)

Albert King & Stevie Ray Vaughan - In Session (Stax)

 

I heard the rumours about this in late march:

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?postid=224776&highlight=fantasy#post224776

I was hoping since they'd always been friendly to the audiophile labels (DCC, XRCD, Acoustic Sounds), they'd at least let Steve do the mastering. I guess they figured they wanted all the profit for the hybrid issues.

 

By the way... it was luck AP still got the license for Pendulum and Mardi Gras. The last one...

 

Are any of the Fantasy/OJC SACDs going to be hybrids?

 

I had been hoping that Analogue Productions would be doing CCR The Concert. Bummer.

 

I was hoping AP would do "Charlie Brown Christmas"!