i'm curious,
1.) how do you rate MFSB's "Summertime"? its the only one of their 70's records i've never heard, from sample clips on iTunes it sounds kinda different to their other albums?
The post-1975 MFSB albums have a breezier, more disco-influenced sound. Obviously the times were changing, but also so was MFSB's personnel - a bunch of them were disgruntled (is the opposite of disgruntled...gruntled?) left in the middle of the decade to join Salsoul's house band. The new cats that came in had a bit more of a dancefloor-influenced vibe, so you lose a bit of the grittiness of the earlier years, but there's still lots to like. I think about half the album was produced by McFadden and Whitehead, later of
Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now fame. I think the album was a kind of loose concept album around the idea of "Summer" which may account for it sounding slightly different than their other albums.
The real star of the show though of course is
Philadelphia Freedom, which as you've pointed out so many times, was previously only available as an SQ-encoded LP. This new reissue is likely the first time the discrete quad master tapes have been played since Arthur Stoppe mixed them in late 1975. It didn't do anything in the charts really, but I think this album is right up their with their best and the quad mix (like all the other PIR quads) is gold standard. I particularly like the two tracks that open side two written and arranged by Dexter Wansel, which seem like something of an audition for his own solo albums - if you like these I highly reccomend checking out his four PIR albums released from '76 to '79.
2.) what's the surround mix like on the Donald Byrd Quad? the SQ LP was an unmarked Blue Note Quad (wow!) and i never found the Q8, so never heard it before!
It was actually never released on SQ LP, I think that's someone on discogs (or elsewhere) mistaking the 'This Album Also Available on Quad Tape' sticker (I posted a photo of one in my UA/Blue Note thread
here) for an actual quad LP. The mix is excellent, one of the most discrete of the UA quads and plenty of swirling pans and front/back movement. I think this may be the real revelation of the bunch, given Mike's remastering prowess and the fact that the UA Q8 tapes are hot garbage, even by Q8 standards - they were oversaturated to the point of distortion and their frequency response barely extended above 6kHz. Straight from the master tape with full-frequency range reproduction is going to be something special.
Also, someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this might be the first "pop" (or non-easy listening, or whatever you want to call it) quad mix that UMG has ever licensed out, which I think is a big deal in itself. I hope enough people buy this disc that it gives D-V the imperative to go through the Liberty/UA/Blue Note catalogue the same way they've started to do with CTI and PIR with Sony. At the very least it would be nice to get Donald Byrd's other Blue Note quad (
Street Lady) and Lou Donaldson's
Sassy Soul Strut which are just as good as
Black Byrd in terms of both mix and content.
3.) do you know what sources were used for "Sextant"? is the discrete from Q8? is the SQ a needledrop?
I'm not sure, but I would assume that for safety's sake - Mike only told me that it was "a dub, but a very good one". I know there have been other possible reissues he's had the opportunity to license where the quad masters were unavailable that he's passed on after having professional-grade Q8 transfers done that didn't meet his quality standards. So if he's happy with the sound of whatever's been used for the Sextant multi-channel layer, you can be assured that it sounds very good, indeed.
hr
ps. are there any of your liner notes in this new batch?
I did the liner notes for the Guess Who 2fer - the MFSB disc features liners from Record Collector/Mojo contributor Charles Waring. I'm not sure about the others but I presume Oliver Lomax may have done some of them.
So does "Guns, Guns, Guns".
And except for other compilations, I don't think "Albert Flasher" appears anywhere else
Guess Who's
Greatest Hits Vol. II is actually a real treasure trove for the quad collector - first off, having seen the master tape boxes, I can confirm that the whole thing was newly-remixed for quad by the band's longtime engineer Brian Christian (who also did the superb
Road Food quad mixes) even where tracks had been previously mixed for albums that were released in quad.
The tracks making their quad debut here include
Broken/Albert Flasher (a non-album double A-side single),
Rain Dance, Sour Suite and
Life in the Bloodstream (from
So Long, Bannatyne),
Runnin' Back to Saskatoon (from
Live at the Paramount), Orly and
Follow Your Daughter Home (from
Artificial Paradise, which was released as an entirely FAKE quad - to quote Seinfeld, the quad mixes of the two tracks on
GH Vol. 2 are "real, and they're spectacular"). The only tracks getting a second go-round in quad are
Heartbroken Bopper and
Guns, Guns, Guns (from
Rockin') and
Glamour Boy (from
#10) and to my ear the
GHv2 mixes are all not only more discrete, but superior mixes...and the
GHv2 version of
Glamour Boy is the single edit, so again somewhat unique.
I'm guessing that Michael did a great job with Sextant. I'm certainly willing to take the chance. I have a few titles (e.g. Rick Wakeman Journey) that are sourced from commercial copies and they honestly sound fine, to me.
Of course the standard should be the masters, but more HH quad, in the best quality possible, is a good thing.
Completely agree with you, and everyone reading this should be assured that every effort was made to locate the quad master (or
a quad master) including searching tape vaults internationally, a process that took more than a year's time. I think that article about the UMG vault fire gives you a sense of how difficult locating tapes can be sometimes, especially ones that haven't been used in more than four decades and D-V and their partners are making herculean efforts to locate these treasures. A similar situation existed with the MFSB quad masters, which couldn't be located at this time last year, so sometimes these things do pay off in the fullness of time.
Hopefully I've covered most of the questions about these here - if anyone has any further inquiries, or I've missed anything, let me know and I'll try and address it.
) I'll jump on this...
