Copland
Rodeo / El Salon Mexico / Danzon Cubano / 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 Rodeo / El Salon Mexico / Danzon Cubano 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 1959
• 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 Rodeo / El Salon Mexico / Danzon Cubano

• 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

• Rodeo (Four Dance Episodes)
Buckaroo Holiday
Corral Nocturne
Saturday Night Waltz
Hoe-Down

Side Two

• El Salon Mexico
• Danzon Cubano

Rodeo - About this Piece

Aaron Copland’s America is rural, somehow softer and more manageable to our psyche than Bernstein’s West Side Story (even though Copland the composer was just as much a product of the city as Bernstein). Copland’s ballet Rodeo is a celebration of the American West and reflects an important image we have of ourselves. The commission for Rodeo came, surprisingly enough, from the classically-oriented Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with the music by Copland and the choreography and scenario by Agnes de Mille. The ballet was precedent setting – there were said to be 22 curtain calls at its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House on October 16, 1942 – and the success of this ballet insured that dance would thrive as an integral part of American musical theater. In 1945, Copland made a symphonic arrangement from the ballet, the Four Dance Episodes.

The genesis of the scenario is told by Agnes de Mille in her memoir Dance to the Piper. According to de Mille, the idea of doing a ballet for the Ballet Russe, a company with a decidedly 19th-century bent, did not immediately inspire Copland in their first meeting. Nor did Copland inspire her; instead, he laughed out loud at some of her ideas for a scenario. De Mille invited him to “go straight to Hell” – an inauspicious beginning, to say the least. Something in their bantering and frank exchange seemed to work, however, because the very next day he called back to see if she would meet him for tea that afternoon. Ultimately, their collaboration was momentous in American dance history.

The ballet’s scenario takes place at Burnt Ranch, where a Cowgirl finds herself competing with visiting city girls for the attention of the local cowboys, especially the Head Wrangler. The four “episodes” Copland extracted trace the narrative effectively. The “Buckaroo Holiday” bursts forth like a herd of wild horses. It quickly shifts to a lilting melody which announces the Cowgirl making her bid for the Head Wrangler, but she makes a fool of herself by trying to ride a bucking bronco and getting thrown. The American folk song “If He’d Be a Buckaroo by His Trade” (a trombone solo) is quoted by Copland in this dance. The jaunty “Holiday” section ends with as much vim and vigor as it began.

“Corral Nocturne,” the second of the Four Episodes, is moody, yearning, and melancholy. The Cowgirl’s sadness is portrayed by Copland as he quotes the ballad “Sis Joe.” In this movement, the Western woman of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose comes to this writer’s mind – the indispensable Western heroine who prevails against the harshest of circumstances, in spite of the violence and narcissism of the men folk.

The moodiness continues in the “Saturday Night Waltz,” as Copland quotes the song “Old Paint” and paints a picture of the Cowgirl’s isolation, but also gives us hope that her plight is only temporary.

The famous and beloved “Hoe-Down” begins with dynamism and verve, signaling the Cowgirl’s rebirth: she has suddenly put aside her cowpoke duds and reappeared as the prettiest girl in the room. Copland borrows two square-dance tunes – “Bonyparte” and “McLeod’s Reel” – to aid in this romp, a fanciful and uplifting take on the American square dance. We have a typical, stand-up-and-cheer Hollywood Western ending, too, as the girl gets the right guy for her, not the aloof and snooty Head Wrangler at all, but Another Cowboy who has shown her respect, kindness, and honor.

Of course, it is all a bit ironic, really, that two New Yorkers whose Jewish families immigrated from Eastern Europe – Bernstein and Copland – captured the soul of America, from sea to shining sea.

But it’s a classic story.

— Dave Kopplin, LAPhil.com