The copy we are selling is similar to the one pictured above.
Sonic Grade
Side One:
Side Two:
Vinyl Grade
Side One: Mint Minus Minus
Side Two: Mint Minus Minus*
- It took us years, but we finally found a few outstanding copies of My Point of View, and here is an awfully good one one
- This 70s Blue Note reissue will be very hard to beat, earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades from first not to last
- The overall sound is lively and dynamic with wonderful transparency (thanks, RVG!)
- Both sides here are superb — rich and warm with a huge bottom end and lots of space around the instruments
- Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings - there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
- 4 stars: "Takin’ Off was an impressive debut effort from Herbie Hancock, and his second record, My Point of View, proved that it was no fluke."
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*NOTE: There is a mark that plays 13 times lightly at the start of track 2 on side 2, "The Pleasure Is Mine."
This is a great album, with a killer lineup that includes Grant Green, Donald Byrd, Tony Williams, Hank Mobley and more. If you’re a fan of Herbie’s debut album Takin’ Off, you’ll find much to like here. The typical pressing leaves much to be desired though -- many copies we’ve played sounded a bit hollow and flat. Hot Stamper copies give you richer, fuller sound and more energy, qualities that really help this music shine.
This vintage Blue Note 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 My Point of View 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 1963
- 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.
A Big Group of Musicians Needs This Kind of Space
One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small -- they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.
Other copies -- my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” -- create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.
And most of the time those very special pressings are just plain more involving. When you hear a copy that does all that -- a copy like this one -- it’s an entirely different listening experience.
What We're Listening For On My Point of View
- 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.
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
- Blind Man, Blind Man
- A Tribute to Someone
Side Two
- King Cobra
- The Pleasure Is Mine
- And What If I Don’t
AMG 4 Star Review
Takin’ Off was an impressive debut effort from Herbie Hancock, and his second record, My Point of View, proved that it was no fluke. Hancock took two risks with the album — his five original compositions covered more diverse stylistic ground than his debut, and he assembled a large septet for the sessions… . It’s a little more relaxed than Takin’ Off, but in its own way My Point of View is nearly as stunning.
LondonJazzCollector Review
Hot on the heels of his debut album Takin’ Off Hancock piled on the punishment with another must-have recording, My Point of View. He assembled an astonishing septet for the sessions – Byrd,Mobley and Grachan Moncur III gave him three brass voices to play with, the contrasting luminous flow of Grant Green, with free-swinging Anthony Williams and Chuck Israels at the anchor. On top of that you get Herb: if music is food for the soul, it’s celebrity come dine with me, under Master Chef Hancock.
The album’s promoted feature track Blind Man, Blind Man is a Watermelon Man shoe-in, which can be overlooked if you prefer, or enjoyed for itself if you like. I prefer the more adventurous and slightly more challenging King Cobra and Tribute to Someone. Not that I am in using the term “challenging” in the sense embraced by free jazz apostles out there, champions of unstructured cacophony, Post-Postbop, but in stretching the modern jazz genre towards greater freedom in improvisation, to include the unexpected.