About Coleman Hawkins & His Orchestra (Pure Pleasure) by Coleman Hawkins:
The 'Hawk' Talks Of Many Things:
"Actual playing experience on the job is the best way to learn to think. Improvising is playing with a lot of thought behind it; but none of the hard work that goes into thinking should show up in your playing. Too often improvising is really copying. To really improvise, a musician needs to know everything – not only his instrument, but harmony, composition, theory, the whole works. It’s more important than ever today. ('Today' being 1960)"
"When you don’t have control (of your instrument), you can’t incorporate the ideas that you hear and feel into your style. That’s what’s wrong with so many of the players coming up today. Sure … I was advanced for my time in those early days, for just that reason – I had studied hard since I was five, and studied classics all my life, and it gives me an advantage over the other fellows I was playing with."
Musicians:
- Coleman Hawkins (tenor saxophone)
- Thad Jones (trumpet)
- Eddie Costa (piano, vibraphone)
- George Duvivier (bass)
- Osie Johnson (drums)
Recording: April - June 1973 by Glen Kolotkin
Production: Carlos Santana, Maitreya Michael Shrieve and Tom Coster
About Pure Pleasure
At the beginning of the 90s, in the early days of audiophile vinyl re-releases, the situation was fairly straightforward. Companies such as DCC, Mobile Fidelity, Classic Records and, of course, Pure Pleasure all maintained a mutual, unwritten ethical code: we would only use analogue tapes to manufacture records.
During the course of the present vinyl hype, many others have jumped on the bandwagon in the hope of securing a corner of the market. Very often they are not so ethical and use every imaginable source to master from: CDs, LPs, digital files, MP3s – or employed existent tools from the 80s and 90s for manufacturing.
A digital delay is gladly used when cutting a lacquer disc because tape machines with an analogue delay have become quite rare and are therefore expensive. When cutting the lacquer, the audio signal is delayed by one LP revolution against the signal, which controls the cutter head, and for this a digital delay is very often employed. Of course, the resultant sound signal is completely digital and thus only as good as this delay.
We should like to emphasize that Pure Pleasure Records on principle only uses the original master tape as the basis for the entirely analogue cutting of lacquer discs. In addition, the pressing tool is newly manufactured as a matter of principle.
We only employ existing tools for manufacturing if an improved result is not forthcoming, e.g. the title Elvis Is Back, which was mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray, or several titles from our Philips Classics series, which in any case Willem Makkee cut from the original masters at the Emil Berliner Studios in the 90s. It goes without saying that we only used the mother and that new tools were made for our production.
To put it in a nutshell: we can ensure you that our releases are free from any kind of digital effects and that the lacquer discs are newly cut.
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