Caldera
Sky Islands

*NOTE: Track 3 on side 1, "It Used To Be," plays a little noisier than Mint Minus Minus.

This White Hot Stamper Caldera album has Demo Disc sound, big and bold, wall to wall and then some! Listen to the monster drum at the opening of "Sky Islands" -- it’s not deep like the bass drum in an orchestra, but it’s solid, punchy and way up front in the mix where it really grabs your attention right from the get go. It’s the perfect introduction to a band that wants to get in your face and knock you over with the power and energy of their music. The immediacy of the recording is like standing at the front of the stage where the music is its loudest and clearest, exactly where I like to be.

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 Sky Islands 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 1977
• 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.

Produced by Larry Dunn of Earth Wind and Fire fame (he also lends a hand on keyboards), Sky Islands is the pinnacle of the group’s output. AMG really nails the Caldera sound in their bio for the band:

One of the most innovative and chance-taking jazz-fusion outfits of the late 1970s, Caldera was a Latin band that combined jazz, funk and rock with a wide variety of Latin music. 1970s fusion explorers like Return to Forever and Weather Report influenced Caldera, but its members were also influenced by everything from Earth, Wind & Fire’s soul/funk to Afro-Cuban salsa, Brazilian samba and Andean/Peruvian music.

Any band that tries to emulate Weather Report, Return to Forever and Earth, Wind & Fire gets high marks in my book, assuming they can pull it off; those are some seriously talented musicians, groups that have made some of our favorite albums of all time, Desert Island Discs even. If you can keep up with them you’ve been doing your homework.

I would add one more band to that list: Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66. Diane Reeves fronts two tracks which sound very much like classic Sergio Mendes (when Lani Hall was still in the band, pre-Stillness). I’m a total sucker for albums with female vocalists backed by jazzy latin ensembles, been that way for decades and see no reason to change now. Especially when they have, as is so often the case, audiophile quality sound. A top copy of this album is to die for, but not many had the goods.

What We're Listening For On Sky Islands

• 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.
• Tight, full-bodied 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.

"Carnavalito" is a track that really comes alive when you crank up the volume. I played it full blast on two different occasions for audiophile friends of mine just to show them what happens when a big speaker stereo meets a large scale recording with absolutely amazing audiophile quality sound -- big and bold, wall to wall and then some.

It’s my favorite track not only for the album as a whole but for the band’s entire recorded output. It just doesn’t get any better than this if you have the system for it.

Hearing the megawatt energy in the section when the soprano saxophonist jumps in, right into an ongoing orgy of wild percussion, who then proceeds to blow his brains out -- now that is a thrill beyond belief. Played really loud it’s about the closest to the real thing -- the live event -- that you will ever hear in your living room. (Unless you have a very large living room and lots of latin jazz musician friends.)

Even a year ago there was no way I could get that music to play that loud, that cleanly, and that tonally correct, from the deepest bass to the highest highs, with the wild swings in dynamics that the recording captures so well. The Audio Revolution is alive and well and making progress all the time. It’s never too late to join in the fun.

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.

A Latin Jazz Fusion Masterpiece

We consider this Caldera album their masterpiece. Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• Sky Islands
• Ancient Source
• It Used To Be
• Pegasus

Side Two

• Carnavalito
• Seraphim (Angel)
• Indigo Fire
• Triste
• Pescador (Fisherman)

AMG Review

Caldera's second album, Sky Islands, found the fusion band working with a vocalist for the first time. Singer Dianne Reeves, who had yet to record a solo album and was little known in 1977, is featured on Eduardo del Barrio's haunting "Ancient Source" and provides wordless background vocals on the Earth, Wind & Fire-minded title song (which Reeves would cover for Blue Note ten years later).

Nonetheless, this is an instrumental album first and foremost, and intriguing cuts such as "Pescador," "Pegasus," and the Andean-influenced "Carnavalito" give the soloists enough room to stretch out. With musicians like guitarist Jorge Strunz, keyboardist Eduardo del Barrio, and saxman Steve Tavaglione on board, it would've been regrettable if there hadn't been some room for blowing.

While Caldera's first LP was produced by Wayne Henderson, Sky Islands finds Strunz and del Barrio doing the producing with Earth, Wind & Fire keyboardist Larry Dunn -- who was a logical choice considering that EWF was among Caldera's many influences. At times, they tend to over-produce. But the writing is consistently superb, and all things considered, Sky Islands makes good on the promise of the band's previous album.