KEITH JARRETT The Koln Concert VG++ HOT STAMPER 1975 ECM 1064/65 ROBERT LUDWIG

$

130

Vinyl:  VG++ Play Graded.  Sounds great!  HOT STAMPER!  Has some marks that don't affect the sound quality.  Super high gloss vinyl.  ECM Labels are Clean and Bright. This is the audiophile acclaimed pressing, Mastered by Master Masterer, Robert Ludwig at Sterling Sound, NYC!!! This is the 1975 ECM 1064/65 Double Album 1ST PRESSING!

In an audio shootout with 3 other copies of The Koln Concert, this one won out, handily!!!  The album's sound is open, spacious and transparent, with a huge three dimensional soundfield!  Beautiful analog warmth within a large acoustic space that makes you feel you're right next to Jarrett's piano.  Natural tonality in the midrange, crisp highs and deep, resonant lows. 

Keith Jarrett's Magnum Opus!  Enormously influential and its popularity spans legions of different kinds of music fans, from Jazz afficionados to Deadheads! This is a true and lasting masterpiece of melodic, spontaneous composition and improvisation that set the standard. A truly inspired work and entirely improvised...Bravo, Mr. Jarrett!!!  all music gives it 5 stars!!! 
See Review Below!
In the Dead Wax:  matrices, etched.  Also in the Dead Wax:  STERLING and RL  ((Mastered by Robert Ludwig at Sterling Sound, NYC)).  Complete Dead Wax details cheerfully provided upon request. 
Cover: VG+ (see photos)  Gatefold.  Nice matte print on cover. Front, gatefold and back of cover artwork and text are rich, clear and bright, with some ring wear.  Seams, corners and spine are solid and clean.  No splits. No writing.  No stickers.  Spine print is crystal clear.
Goldmine Standards.   I play grade every used record that I sell on eBay as I have found you can't rate a record accurately by just visually inspecting it.  I wipe the dust off of every cover with clean, unscented baby wipes.  I professionally clean the vinyl.  (I also operate a Vinyl Record Cleaning business for your dusty/dirty records--if interested, send me a message).
U.S. Shipping:  FREE domestic shipping! Combine any additional albums and they're also shipped FREE!   If you wish to take advantage of my COMBINED SHIPPING deal, simply select your records by clicking on "ADD TO CART" on the main listing page.  Do this for all of your selections and then go to your cart to checkout. Your combined shipping discount will be computed automatically.
  All records are packaged securely with the vinyl outside the jacket (to avoid seam split in transit). The vinyl and jacket are sandwiched between two cardboard stiffeners and shipped in a custom cardboard record mailer box. 
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Why buy a first or early pressing and not a re-issue or a ‘re-mastered’ vinyl album? 
First and early pressings are pressed from the first generation lacquers and stampers. They usually sound vastly superior to later issues/re-issues (which, in recent times, are often pressed from whatever 'best' tapes or digital sources are currently available) - many so-called 'audiophile' new 180g pressings are cut from hi-res digital sources…essentially an expensive CD pressed on vinyl.  Why  experience the worse elements of both formats?  These are just High Maintenance CDs, with mid-ranges so cloaked with a veil as to sound smeared.  They are nearly always compressed with murky transients and a general lifelessness in the overall sound.  There are exceptions where re-masters/re-presses outshine the original issues, but they are exceptions and not the norm. 

First or early pressings nearly always have more immediacy, presence and dynamics. The sound staging is wider.  Subtle instrument nuances are better placed with more spacious textures. Balances are firmer in the bottom end with a far-tighter bass. Upper-mid ranges shine without harshness, and the overall depth is more immersive.  Inner details are  clearer.  

On first and early pressings, the music tends to sound more ‘alive’ and vibrant.  The physics of sound energy is hard to clarify and write about from a listening perspective, but the best we can describe it is to say that you can 'hear' what the mixing and mastering engineers wanted you to hear when they first recorded the music.  

The Köln Concert Review

by Thom Jurek

Recorded in 1975 at the Köln Opera House and released the same year, this disc has, along with its revelatory music, some attendant cultural baggage that is unfair in one sense: Every pot-smoking and dazed and confused college kid -- and a few of the more sophisticated ones in high school -- owned this as one of the truly classic jazz records, along with Bitches Brew, Kind of Blue, Take Five, A Love Supreme, and something by Grover Washington, Jr. Such is cultural miscegenation. It also gets unfairly blamed for creating George Winston, but that's another story. What Keith Jarrett had begun a year before on the Solo Concerts album and brought to such gorgeous flowering here was nothing short of a miracle. With all the tedium surrounding jazz-rock fusion, the complete absence on these shores of neo-trad anything, and the hopelessly angry gyrations of the avant-garde, Jarrett brought quiet and lyricism to revolutionary improvisation. Nothing on this program was considered before he sat down to play. All of the gestures, intricate droning harmonies, skittering and shimmering melodic lines, and whoops and sighs from the man are spontaneous. Although it was one continuous concert, the piece is divided into four sections, largely because it had to be divided for double LP. But from the moment Jarrett blushes his opening chords and begins meditating on harmonic invention, melodic figure construction, glissando combinations, and occasional ostinato phrasing, music changed. For some listeners it changed forever in that moment. For others it was a momentary flush of excitement, but it was change, something so sorely needed and begged for by the record-buying public. Jarrett's intimate meditation on the inner workings of not only his pianism, but also the instrument itself and the nature of sound and how it stacks up against silence, involved listeners in its search for beauty, truth, and meaning. The concert swings with liberation from cynicism or the need to prove anything to anyone ever again. With this album, Jarrett put himself in his own league, and you can feel the inspiration coming off him in waves. This may have been the album every stoner wanted in his collection "because the chicks dug it." Yet it speaks volumes about a musician and a music that opened up the world of jazz to so many who had been excluded, and offered the possibility -- if only briefly -- of a cultural, aesthetic optimism, no matter how brief that interval actually was. This is a true and lasting masterpiece of melodic, spontaneous composition and improvisation that set the standard.