Customer Reviews

The Pearls

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I thought this was OK until I heard better, namely the JSP 5-CD set. True, John R.T. Davies leaves in more surface noise, but he also leaves in more music. RCA's remastering is tolerable but very far from exemplary. Robert Parker's "Great Original Performances" series is also preferable. There are two of these for Jelly Roll Morton.
There's also some overlap with another RCA single CD product, "Jelly's last jam : original music from the motion picture". I don't know if that one's still available.
The "Victor" in RCA-Victor comes from the Victor which recorded Jelly Roll in the Webster Hotel in Chicago in 1926 with state-of-the-art electronic equipment. Suddenly we could hear everything the musicians were doing. And what musicians!
RCA-Victor (or is it "BMG" these days?)should live up to this heritage.

They made a muddy mess of the sound of these great recordings. There is no excuse for this shoddy restoration. Even the last 2 tracks (10 years newer-from the late 30's) are enhanced to pieces so they sound like the others. Come on RCA, you can do better than this!

Of course Morton's music is superb. The trouble here is that you hear so little of it because the transfers are strangled to death. A big disappointment. The JSP box offers far better sound and value and does justice to the music.

This would be a five star CD as it contains essential songs from the Hot Peppers and rare Jelly Roll piano solos, but the mastering is completely unnecessary. I've compared the songs of this CD to Birth of the Hot, and the songs all sound like they are muddy and if you listen to Freakish on this, it sounds like a bass guitar more than an actual piano, that is how compressed the mastering is. Some songs aren't too bad and listenable, but others just sound nothing like the way they were intended. I would avoid this and just get the JSP box set or Birth of the Hot as it contains almost all the songs in this and the mastering doesn't take out the harmonics or sound fullness that was meant to be on these songs.

Wynton Marsalis picked The Pearls for one of his ten examples of "real jazz", in Sweet Swing Blues on the Road (p 140). He did, however, warn his readers to listen to the music, and not the quality of the sound!

I'd rather not rate this myself, but the stars are a "required form field", so I'm giving it the average rating of the other reviewers.