Moanin

This edition is quite a beast: The sound opens up immediately. Nothing is pushing or pulling for attention. The piano has full body and clean transients, the drums are clear without being aggressive, the cymbals have presence without the hard edge that afflicts the compressed editions. The saxophone is warm. The room is audible around the players, not as an effect but as a natural consequence of a session recorded well in a room that had character. Morgan's mic issue is still there, reduced enough that it registers as a period detail rather than a fault. The bass is slightly set back in the mix, which means it is not as immediately prominent as on some editions, but what you lose in weight you gain in note clarity: you can follow the line. There is no compression that intrudes on the dynamics. The session breathes.

The age of the tape is the first thing you hear. There is warmth here, and the analog character of the original session comes through in a way no official digital release can fully replicate. But the tape has clearly been through its life. There is an audible fragility to the sound, a slight wearing at the edges that keeps you at a small distance from the music. The bass carries a low-level distortion that I suspect is the condition of the tape itself rather than anything introduced in the transfer. The air from Morgan's trumpet hitting against the mic capsule is plainly audible. This edition seems to reveal more of what that particular copy of the analog tape used for transfer sounds like today, not the music.

The compression announces itself within the first few bars. There is no adjustment period here: you immediately hear that something has gone wrong. The brightness has been pushed up across the board, too, and while this sharpens the transients on paper, in practice it compresses the whole session into a wall where the space between the players has been closed down. The studio, which should feel alive around you, is barely present. The bass is frequently reduced to a single indistinct note, impossible to follow, which I think comes as a result of the lows being pushed during a mastering process that treated the bottom end carelessly. The compression forces sax and drums into sonic collision. Morgan's trumpet has sharpness without tone. The warmth has been processed out of the piano. The whole session feels like it has been photographed under harsh overhead light.

Interesetingly, the compression here is heavier than the 2013 remaster, and the overall volume is significantly higher, but my impression of this edition is far more positive than of the 2013 remaster. This edition also uses a slightly different mix with instruments drawn toward the centre of the soundstage rather than spread across it. There is also what sounds like a slight reverb added to the session, though it is subtle. Some of the cymbal detail is more present here, and the bass, despite the heavy processing, is at least followable note by note, which the 2013 remaster cannot claim. Morgan's mic issue is reduced almost to the point of inaudibility, which is interesting and a welcomed edit.

Very quiet, and essentially flat. There is no sense that any mastering has been applied. The bass is the clearest it appears on any edition, which is genuinely useful, and Morgan's mic issue is the least intrusive here, an evidence that the problem elsewhere is mastering amplifying a recording artefact rather than the artefact itself. But the trade-off is that the session has no life. Nothing reaches out. The music sits behind the speakers rather than filling the room, and even the details that are cleanly preserved do not reward the way they should.