Our favorite things: recordings.(Staff Picks)

Once again, we have asked our staff to pick their 10 favorites from among the many recordings they have encountered during the past year. We think you will agree that this is quite an eclectic list, and we hope that you find it useful. Enjoy!

Steven G. Baird

Although most audiophiles who have gotten onto the SACD bandwagon have applauded the onslaught of new labels that have adopted SACD, many of the new reissues I've heard in the format have had disappointing sound. I would have hoped for better sound from Concord, Blue Note, Fantasy and Verve for my jazz, for example, and I would have hoped that Universal insisted that their Deutsche Gramophone division go that extra step to, at last, give us that extra measure of excitement upon hearing some of their near-definitive classical music performances with sound to match. The Dutch label, Pentatone, consistently offers the best sounding classical reissues of the Philips recordings, but I would be hard-pressed to choose just one for this list. The ones I have heard have not disappointed me in the least, so my pick for the best new classical reissue of the yea r goes to all of the Pentatone Classics RQR reissues.

For the best-sounding jazz reissue this year, my award goes to Sony for the remarkable work their engineers in Japan did with Miles Davis' Some Day My Prince Will Come (Sony Japan SRGS 4544, single layer SACD, stereo only). Unfortunately, this release is not generally available in North America except through a few small importers at a higher than average price. I paid almost $43 for the copy that came to me from an importer in Canada. What is so special about this particular disk is that it produces a far more natural sound than any of the Davis SACD reissues Sony remastered here for the USA market. From a musical standpoint, this recording offers one of the very few instances in which the legendary tenor sax player Hank Mobley appeared with Miles.

Runners-up in this category are The Gene Harris Trio Plus One (Groove Note GRV1019-3, hybrid stereo) and The Sonny Clark Trio (Audio Fidelity AFZ 006, hybrid stereo). Both of these recordings should serve as examples to the major labels of just how good an analog to DSD transfer can sound. Groove Note had a far better sounding master tape than Steve Hoffman had for the Audio Fidelity reissue, but the music on each of these is most enjoyable.

For the best sounding pop/rock music reissues, I had so much hoped that I would have listed a few of the Bob Dylan SACD remasters here, but that will not happen (see Reissue Roundup). The new 30th anniversary reissue of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was, as reported earlier in my column, quite disappointing too, but, fear not: my recommendation this year is for the best sounding pop recording I might have ever heard in my life, and it's not an SACD.

This album has been a favorite of mine for almost thirty years. It first appeared in 1973 at the time that the artist was reaching the apex of his career. I don't doubt that there were many of his fans that, upon hearing the album, felt that the singer had abandoned them. Since the album offered his interpretations of some vintage tunes of the past--such as "For Me and My Gal" and "Making Whoopee" complete with a full orchestral accompaniment led by Gordon Jenkins--it was a far cry from the work that had made him famous, including "Everybody's Talkin'" from the film, Midnight Cowboy.