Vinyl still rules, OK?

摘要

Even if you're also addicted to music videos, there's possibly nothing closer to 'being there' than a live recording on vinyl. Pure Pleasure's new box set of Art Pepper LPs [see p82] carried me back to June 1980, and to seeing the late great saxophonist at Ronnie Scott's. In some ways, it's even better. You get the music without people talking at the next table, and without the coloured sound of the old club's PA speakers. Peter Bould, who worked for Thames Television but had also produced and engineered British jazz pianist Stan Tracey's triumphant Under Milk Wood, was the recording engineer. And it was Ray Staff, the near-legendary mastering engineer, then at Trident Studios in Soho, who cut the disc masters from those 1980 Pepper tapes for the album Blues For The Fisherman. Just 30 years later, he did the mastering for Pure Pleasure's completist edition.