Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds Series

Six key albums from the Contemporary Records catalog reissued on 180-gram vinyl!

Titles featuring Art Pepper, Barney Kessel, Benny Carter, Hampton Hawes and Shelly Manne

Featuring all-analog mastering by Bernie Grundman

Pressed at Quality Record Pressings

Stoughton Printing old-style tip-on jackets

Continuing Craft Recordings’ 70th Anniversary celebration of Contemporary Records!

Craft Recordings and Acoustic Sounds are proud to announce the Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds series, which begins with six album releases from the Contemporary Records catalog, celebrating 70 years of the legendary jazz label. The releases are supervised by Chad Kassem, CEO of Acoustic Sounds, the world’s largest source for audiophile recordings.

Each title, originally engineered by Roy DuNann and/or Howard Holzer, features all-analog mastering from the original tapes by legendary engineer Bernie Grundman (himself a former employee of the label), as well as unsurpassed audiophile pressing on 180-gram vinyl at Quality Record Pressings, presented in a Stoughton Printing old-style tip-on jacket.

The series highlights gems from Contemporary’s extraordinary catalog and features artists who both defined and expanded the sound of West Coast jazz.

Kicking off the series is Art Pepper’s +Eleven: Modern Jazz Classics. Throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Lester Koenig’s artist-friendly Los Angeles-based audiophile jazz label documented career-defining performances by some of modern jazz’s most influential and accomplished improvisers, including Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Harold Land and Benny Golson. No musician is more closely identified with Contemporary than Pepper, whose cool tone and simmering lyricism made him one of the very few mid-century alto saxophonists to forge a path independent of bebop patriarch Charlie Parker’s pervasive influence.

Produced by Koenig and recorded in 1959, Art Pepper +Eleven: Modern Jazz Classics is one of the saxophonist’s masterpieces. Featuring brilliant arrangements by Marty Paich, the album elaborates on the lush but lithe sound introduced by the epochal Birth of the Cool sessions, which Miles Davis started to record almost exactly a decade earlier (like Birth, +Eleven kick offs with Denzil Best’s “Move”). Surrounded by the cream of the LA scene, including fellow saxophone masters Herb Geller, Bill Perkins and Med Flory, Pepper brings all his scorching lyricism to a program of modern jazz standards by Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan and Sonny Rollins.