Miles Davis
Green Haze ('The Musings of Miles' and 'Miles')

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it.

This IS the sound of Tubey Magic. No recordings will ever be made like this again, and no CD will ever capture what is in the grooves of this record. Based on what I’m hearing, my feeling is that most of the natural, full-bodied, smooth, sweet sound of the album is on the master tape. I suspect that all that’s needed to get the vintage sound correctly on to disc is simply to thread up that tape on a reasonably good machine and hit play.

The fact that nobody seems to be able to make an especially good sounding record these days -- certainly not as good sounding as this one -- tells me that I’m wrong, in fact, to think that such an approach would work. Somebody should have been able to figure out how to do it by now. In our experience there is almost no one working today who can make a record that sounds like this.

What The Best Sides Of Green Haze 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 1955
• 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 these records are 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 pressings that sound as good as these two do.

Talk About Timbre

Man, when you play a Hot Stamper copy of an amazing recording such as this, the timbre of the instruments is so spot-on it makes all the hard work and money you’ve put into your stereo more than pay off. To paraphrase The Hollies, you get paid back with interest. If you hear anything funny in the mids and highs of this record, don’t blame the record.

This is the kind of record that shows up audiophile BS equipment for what it is: audiophile BS. If you are checking for richness, Tubey magic and freedom from artificiality, I can’t think of a better test disc. It has loads of the first two and none of the last.

Warning: Stereo Editorial Follows

The same is true for audio equipment, as I’m sure you’ve experienced first-hand. Some stereos can bore you to tears with their dead-as-a-doornail sound and freedom from dynamic contrasts. Other stereos are overly-detailed and fatiguing; they wear out their welcome pretty quickly with their hyped-up extremes.

As Goldilocks will gladly tell you, some stereos are just right; they have the uncanny ability to get out of the way of the music. Some equipment doesn’t call attention to itself, and that tends to be the kind of equipment we prefer here at Better Records.

After forty-plus years in this hobby I’ve had my share of both. 90% or more of the stuff I hear around town makes me appreciate what I have at home. I’m sure you feel the same way.

What We're Listening For On Green Haze

• 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.
• Then: presence and immediacy. Miles's trumpet isn't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. It's front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt -- the one and only Rudy Van Gelder in this case -- would put it.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

The Players

• Oscar Pettiford, Paul Chambers - Bass
• Philly Joe Jones - Drums
• Red Garland - Piano
• John Coltrane - Tenor Saxophone

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.

Must Own Jazz Records

These are recordings that belong in any serious Jazz Collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• Will You Still Be Mine?
• I See Your Face Before Me
• I Didn’t

Side Two

• A Gal In Calico
• A Night In Tunisia
• Green Haze

Side Three

• Just Squeeze Me
• There Is No Greater Love
• How Am I To Know?

Side Four

• S’posin’
• The Theme
• Stablemates

AMG 4 Star Review

This two-LP set combines together sets originally known as The Musings of Miles and simply Miles but could have been jointly retitled “The Birth of a Quintet.”

The great trumpeter is featured in top form with pianist Red Garland, bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Philly Joe Jones on two of his originals and four standards for the first session, and with Garland, Jones, bassist Paul Chambers and a tentative-sounding tenor-saxophonist named John Coltrane on five standards and the initial version of Benny Golson’s “Stablemates” a few months later.

Since Coltrane is not heard from much here, it is for the excellent rhythm sections and the playing of Miles Davis that this two-fer is highly recommended.