![]() ![]() ![]() Quiet Kenny features three Dorham originals: “Blue Friday”, “Blue Spring Shuffle”, and “Lotus Blossom” - not to be confused with “Lotus Flower”, another Dorham composition, a ballad that premiered in 1955 on the ten-inch Blue Note LP Afro-Cuban (BLP 5065). Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey I also have a leaning toward more gentle styles of playing, which, as the title suggests, this album epitomizes. ![]() Though the music didn’t immediately draw me in, I soon grew to appreciate the minimal arrangement and the big, empty, dark sound of Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio. Shortly after I got into jazz, I came across the OJC CD reissue of Quiet Kenny at a local library, and going off the album’s 3.5-star rating in The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings and its elite status among collectors, I decided to give it a try. The artwork and packaging are hit or miss with OJCs, though I think they did a good job with this release, and the fact that the labels mimic those used for the original New Jazz LP is an added bonus. ![]() So I gave these reissues a chance, and by and large they have lived up to my expectations. I then read about how OJC reissues were by and large considered to be of exceptional sound quality, with the earliest of them guaranteed to be all analog as well (my copy had the original shrink wrap complete with the long rectangular OJC sticker characteristic of OJC albums released in the mid-80s). Though I avoided Original Jazz Classics reissues for a while for this reason, I eventually relaxed my naïve original pressing snobbery and began considering reissues of favorites that were much too expensive in their first pressing form. There’s always something about reissues causing them to fall short of the excitement an original provides. (According to Discogs, Prestige released a Dorham album in 1970 simply titled 1959 with different album art but the same track listing as the OJC reissue, which includes the originally unreleased “Mack the Knife”.) To give the original even more allure, the tendency for reissue producers to have an overwhelmingly strong preference for stereo has rendered the original the only mono version of this album ever released. pressing until this version, the 1986 Original Jazz Classics reissue. More specifically, in the case of this overlooked album, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that it didn’t get a proper second U.S. What makes an album a holy grail? Simply put, a combination of being very rare and very in demand. After a couple years of collecting on a budget, the reality of the situation starts to sink in: you won’t be acquiring a first pressing of a holy grail like Kenny Dorham’s Quiet Kenny any time soon. ![]()
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