Various Artists
Paris 1917-1938 / Dorati

This vintage Mercury pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Paris 1917-1938 Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1967
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren't veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record. We know, we've heard them all.

Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack their full complement of harmonic information.

Tube smear is common to most vintage pressings. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.

Learning the Record

For our shootout, we had at our disposal a variety of pressings that had the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman'd it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or more copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what's right and what's wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the other pressings do not do as well, using a few carefully chosen passages of music, it quickly becomes obvious how well a given copy can reproduce those passages. You'll hear what's better and worse -- right and wrong would be another way of putting it -- about the sound.

This approach is simplicity itself. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle -- or fail -- to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

It may be a lot of work but it sure ain't rocket science, and we've never pretended otherwise. Just the opposite: from day one we've explained step by step precisely how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection. Not the good sounding pressings you happen to own -- those may or may not have Hot Stampers -- but the records you actually cleaned, shot out, and declared victorious.

What We're Listening For On Paris 1917-1938

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Powerful bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit - Darius Milhaud
• Concertino For Piano And Orchestra - Jean Françaix
Presto Legggiero
Lent
Allegro; Rondeau

Side Two

• Ouverture - Georges Auric
• Parade - Eric Satie

Check out the lengthy and humorous producer’s notes for the sessions below. And people think The Beatles discovered experimental sounds in the studio.

Harold Lawrence, RECOLLECTIONS

The Story of the Recording:

Apart from the percussion, we should have no special problems with Parade.” So Antal Dorati assured me a few days before we began to record. There was no reason to doubt him. The music in question was a ballet score by Erik Satie ( 1866-1925), the eccentric French composer who dressed in grey velvet from head to toes, lived in a poor workingman’s suburb of Paris, and represented for composers like Ravel and others the new post-impressionist movement in French Music. Satie’s ballet is ‘easy’ to perform. The-15-minute work, composed for Diaghilev in 1917, moves along at an unvarying metronomic rate of 76; the thematic material is uncomplicated to the point of naivete; and the orchestration is lean, despite the large forces involved. In fact, for some players in the London Symphony, it was perhaps too easy. Remarked Barry Tuckwell, the orchestra’s superb first hornist: “When are you going to give us some semi-quavers to play?”

But James Holland, the principal percussionist, was not so complacent. It was his job to assemble a battery of seventeen instruments, most of which belonged to the traditional percussion family. They included snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, woodblocks, small drum, lottery wheel, xylophone, triangle, sirens ( high- and low-pitched ), revolver, faques sonores, and bouteillophone. First, Holland tackled the bouteillophone.

As its name implies, the bouteillophone consists of tuned bottles, fifteen of them whose range extends from D above middle C upwards for two octaves – a typical Satiesque ‘instrument .”I’ve never heard of bottles actually being used in a performance of this score,” explained Holland. “The vibraphone is the closest we percussionists can come to the sound of tuned bottles. But we’ll try.”

The manager of the Watford supermarket began to fill two “shells” (English for “cases” ) with empty ginger-beer bottles.

“What do you plan to do with these?” he said as he lifted them into the counter. “Why, I’m going to ‘prepare’ them for a recording session,” Holland replied; and he placed his strange purchase in the trunk compartment of his car and drove to the Town Hall. In the kitchen, he and his assistant poured varying quantities of water into the bottles, carried them into the auditorium, and began hitting them with mallets. With the vibraphone standing by, Holland began to ‘build’ the required scale. He tapped, listened, poured off water from one bottle, added some to another. Finally, the percussionist had to admit defeat. Standing in a puddle and grasping his wet mallet, he reported that the bottles could not encompass the entire range. The vibraphone was rolled into position and the bottles put back in their shells.

For the second time, water was to spell frustration for the percussion section. In the movement, Prestidigitateur Chinois ( Chinese Conjurer ), Satie scored a brief ~passage for “flaques sonores” ( literally translated: “resonant puddles” ), which are written to resound 15 times. When asked which instrument he planned to use for this, Dorati skirted the puddle and asked me to conduct an investigation into the exact nature of the composer’s ‘instrument.’

I first discussed the problem with Felix Aprahamian, music critic of the Sunday Times and an expert in French music. “I haven’t the slightest idea of what Satie could have had in mind,” he protested. “But why don’t you contact Rollo Myers. He’s written a book on Satie. He’s your man.” I phoned Myers in Sussex. “Plaques sonores! ( Pause ) Probably one of Satie’s jokes.” He liked to invent instruments, you know.” Editions Salabert, Satie’s publisher, was no more helpful. Apparently the choice of instrument is left to the percussion player, I was informed.

Holland and I put our heads together. What would most resemble a resonant puddle? “A small cymbal might do it,” Holland said, whereupon he jangled through his trunk of small percussion instruments and came up with a cymbal which he struck several times. The sound of metal was too dominant. “Choke it this time and use a different stick,” I said. After some experimentation, Holland achieved exactly the right fortissimo splash.

On hearing it, Dorati agreed that the effect was correct, but he said: “Look, gentlemen, why don’t we try to simulate the sound of a real puddle? We have nothing to lose; if it doesn’t work, we’ll return to the cymbal.”

Within minutes, a large roasting pan was located in the Town Hall kitchen, filled with water, and brought into the auditorium. While the recording staff listened in the control room upstairs, the percussionist slammed his cymbal into the “puddle.” The sound of water being agitated was plain, but no splash. Dorati suddenly hopped off the podium, rolled up his sleeves, and, his eyes gleaming with boyish delight, slapped the water vigorously. A dozen first violinists were instantly splattered with the flaque. Over the microphones it sounded as if someone had plunged into a large bath tub. Much laughter. It was decided unanimously that, in this case, imitation of life was preferable to the real thing.

The bottles and roasting pan were put aside, leaving the percussionist free to devote himself to a ‘dry’ Parade. He turned his attention to the six revolver shots in Petite Fille Americaine, the second and third of which were to be fired in rapid succession. After several ear-splitting rehearsals, Holland discovered that the trigger mechanism of his revolver would not allow him to fire off the two shots rapidly enough. He therefore assigned the third shot to an assistant. “Bang . . . Bang-Bang . . . Bang . . . Bang . . . Bang.” Perfect!

Typewriters were now required for the same scene. A pair of office machines had been transported from the headquarters of the London Symphony early on the morning of the first Parade session, along with two typists, male and female. The typewriters were placed on a table near the first violinists, much to the distraction of the players (all male) who kept stealing glances at Sarah Park, the attractive young London Symphony secretary. Feeling that the typing should sound purposeful, Dorati instructed the typists to copy items from daily newspapers, preferably one which they had not yet read. Miss Park, however, alternated between the obituary page and a remembered lesson from typing school: ‘”Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party Cremation private no flowers please now is the time to come to the hospital but no flowers please, etc.” The typewriters were to sound continuously for 16 bars, with a precise start and finish.

The other percussion effects posed no unusual problems, and the section as a whole was deployed in the following manner: bass drum, tambourine, snare drum, and cymbals were placed slightly to the right of center, between the woodwinds and trumpets; lottery wheel, tam-tam, revolver, xylophone, vibraphone, sirens, triangle, and woodblocks were arrayed along the outskirts of the violin sections from left to center; and typewriters and faques sonores were located left of the podium.

As Satie’s gently amusing score unwinds with clocklike regularity in the completed recording, with each percussion effect turning up at the appointed second, it all must seem so effortless to the listener. The chief percussionist, however, will always remember it as the time he was as busy as the sound-effects in an in a Gangbusters radio serial.