Customer Reviews

The Name Is Makowicz (ma-ko-vitch)

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My copy of this album is on real vinyl (for those who remember turntables) from the Consumer Electonics Show in 1983. The band has five members, playing real instruments -- nothing electronic here. Jazz piano, saxophone, precussion (vibes), drums and upright bass. What is here is easy listening jazz -- not big band, not the electronic fusion of DeMeiola or Weather Report, and not the complex jazz of Chic Corea. You can close your eyes and listen or use it as background music.

What is so cool is the care that Sheffield Labs puts into recording music. Sheffield's albums were not recorded for the mass market, but for audiophiles. No tape recorders or digital equipment or transformers were used in making the original recordings. The masters from which the albums were pressed were cut live as the music was played.

Many of the Sheffield albums received Grammy nominations for their engineering. No noise. No distortion. Transparent. Dynamic. You can close your eyes and sink into the performance. You hear the echo of the room, and when a cymbal is hit or a sax gives you a blat, you know that is the way it sounded. It is so close to the real thing, that even my cat was listening. As the other reviewer noted, this album is so well recorded, they use it as their reference.

The biggest problem with Sheffield's albums was that only one pressing disc could be made, thus, these were limited edition records. Only about 250,000 albums could be pressed. The other problem is that vinyl is easily scratched. CDs fix these problems, but, unfortunately create their own because they don't have enough data to sound right. Hopefully, Sheffield will get about to putting it on SACD or DVD-Audio in the near future.

Adam Makowicz is rated as one of the best jazz piano players in the world. This CD contains some of his own compositions and is one of the best recorded CDs ever. We use it at Digital Recordings as one of our quality reference recordings. It also contains very good music.