Woody Herman Herman's Heat & Puente's Beat CD

 MASTERED FROM AN LP, NOT THE MASTER TAPE
Do you dig the Vice Prez, Paul Quinichette? Man, to hear him trade choruses with Al Cohn--with the Herd and Tito Puente's latin percussion behind them--let me tell you something: GET THIS CD. And another little bonus--besides the all-star band and the great charts throughout, and the gorgeous acoustic guitar guesting with the Herd--is hearing upstate tenorman Joe Romano here with the Herd. OK, so why just 3 stars? Well, unfortunately a lot of the tracks were mastered from surviving vinyl (you can hear the records' surface noise, and you can hear the crappy process used to try to hide it, albeit only during quiet passages, of which there aren't many, being that this is a powerfully swingin' and hard blowin' HERD). The notes boast that this session is restored to it original lustre for this CD. Nope. Not when you can hear the needle grinding on the record's surface during the guitar-big band features. On a couple tunes, you hear needle scrape for five seconds after the tune ends. Obviously, no one cared enough to simply fade it out. I've heard other LP-to-CD jazz CDs that actually sounded great. That's because they were mastered without using that awful, swirling-sounding digital enhancement process used throughout this CD The Everest LP reissues of this stuff through the years were subjected to fake stereo and the like, which, as I say, remains on many of these CD tracks, as they were recorded from surviving vinyl (presumably the original master tapes no longer exist--and/or Everest had permanently stereo-reverberized the masters...which is probably why the meticulous Japanese companies won't touch these). And that's why this CD, aside from having the original cover art and Hentoff notes, is not all that improved over the Everests, although the overall fidelity and Rick Pantoja's mastering certainly earn 5 stars, given that there were no master tapes to work with. I'm Mike DiMartino in Rochester, NY, USA.
Submitted by mdmartin (Rochester, NY)
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