Apart from the two I’ve already pre ordered I’ll be very interested in the titles below some of the Free Jazz stuff is just a bit to out there for me.
Ahmad Jamal - The Awakening
Gábor Szabó - The Sorcerer
Dorothy Ashby - The Rubáiyát Of Dorothy Ashby
Blossom Dearie - Blossom Dearie
Yusef Lateef – Psychicemotus
Yes. GZ had a bad rep in the past but to be honest I’ve not had many problems
Morning @Endon
Thats a good question and in a nutshell no there isnt always an easy way of telling. However at the risk of sounding patronising (not my intention) we can through experience learn to decode the marketing double speak and misleading BS sometimes used.
Specialist websites and forums are great places to learn and share information and often doing a little bit of homework/research can be helpful.
As I say, a lot just comes down to experience and accumulated knowledge of which labels/companys tend to care, are honest and reliable and which to avoid.
Making vinyl records is a very skilled artisan process with many stages for things to go wrong. So for example a company states “Cut direct from the original analogue master” and credits a reputable name brand mastering engineer (Gray, Grundman etc) along with a reputable pressing plant. Ok, we cant always be 100% sure that the original master was used, but the other ingredients like mastering engineer etc can often be easily confirmed. Now, reputable mastering engineers have quality reputations for a reason and its not in their interests to do crappy mastering work from a poor source, so taking all the ingredients as a whole we can see this is a recipe for a quality record which doesnt come cheap.
We have to be very careful and excercise a healthy degree of cynicism when considering the marketing blurb relating to mastering. In my example above, using words like “Cut direct from the original master tape” assuming all the other manufacturing ingredients bode well from a reliable label, at least strongly suggest that these are people who know what there doing, “Cut Direct…” being the important descriptor as it suggests that the master lacquer was in fact just that.
Of course, the above is the purist approach in an ideal world, for various reasons an original master tape might not be available or useable and this is where some record companies get tricky.
Many use ambiguous marketing descriptions like for example “remastered from original tape” which on the face of it might look good, but what it could and often does really mean, is that way back when an analogue tape was digitised and transferred to CD and a vinyl record is now being made from the CD file.
Beware public domain semi bootleg labels like WaxTime, Doxy, Dol etc
Similarly just saying a record is mastered from an analogue tape tells us nothing, what analogue tape? If the company had actually used an original master and cut from that or even a fresh HiRes transfer then you would reasonably think the company would trumpet the fact in its marketing.
At the end of the day though a good sounding record (or as good as it can be) is a good sounding record and once released we can hear if the company did a decent job or not. Which brings me to the current trend for Pre Ordering records, which in most cases imo is just another marketing ploy to get us to buy records we havent heard and for companies to shift crap on to the less discerning punter. Back in the day iirc pre ordering records was unheard of, you might get a friendly shop to hold a copy for you, but now it seems that almost everything is up for pre order and people are happy to go along with it, buying records blind (deaf?) And then hollering in dissapointment when what they recieve sounds terrible or is horribly pressed etc.
So unless a record is genuinely very limited (the vast majority aren’t) and its probity can be relied upon its better in my view to wait until its released and see how well its recieved.
Hope this goes some way to try and give you an answer and for me to have a bit of a ramble
I’ve mentioned it before on the forum, if you’re interested there is a video tour of GZ with Mikey Fremer on Analogue Planet Youtube
@Dreadatthecontrols thank you so much for your incredibly helpful answer to my question.
I rather thought it would be “complicated” and it clearly is! Your narrative is very instructive at my level of understanding- and hopefully for others too.
In regard to pre- ordering- I completely agree- another marketing ploy to separate us from our money!
Best wishes
Jonathan
I havent come across any information one way or tother. There was some speculation on Hoffman that as the recording took place at her home a decent tape might still exist. However, if that were the case I would think Verve/Third Man would be making a song and dance about it
One thing Hoffman Forum taught me - learn the matrix codes and ciphers. Aside from the marks of US pressing plants (US records of course), really top-notch mastering (KG/CB/BG) will most times be there, even if not definitive proof of AAA. Any of those guys should be cutting good sound irrespective of source.
Exactly the point I was making 
And dont get me started on “limited coloured vinyl”, “180g audiophile pressing” etc 
Not if you order from Amazon if the record isn’t as described or sounds inferior then there is a no quibble return policy which according to some posts on this forum cannot be said for all online sellers.
There is a lot of old fart written on this subject but there is one universal truth if it sounds good it sounds good you pay your money you take your chances.
Alternately you can wait for other people to buy it and post their views which is like not buying cheese and onion crisps when you’ve never tasted them because someone else says they didn’t like them.
I know you like to recommend Amazon but plenty of other outlets offer no quibble returns (which is a consumer right when buying online anyway) and are proper record shops but this is not the point.
Cheese and Onion crisps are not vinyl records.
I have often read your comments advising people to check reviews or indeed yourself buying (or purporting to buy) records based on a review.
I also think its fair to point out that you have often recommended pressings that have turned out to be terrible.
I’m guilty of all of that and probably more besides but I enjoy this forum mainly for the music threads and have picked up on many artists and genre’s I might never have heard and so to return the favour I enjoy posting (quite a lot admittedly) records I have bought or seen pre order.
Outside of that anyone who listens to me does so at their own peril I’m a middle aged bricklayer who has been known to talk b******s and I know this hard to believe I am sometimes wrong, make mistakes and am liable to change my mind completely.
Quite refreshing, keep it up. 
Tim
Sun Ra and his Arkestra - Prophet, Modern Harmonic (2022)
I did listen to the one piece of music I could find from this record and was very intrigued by it though I’d have to sample more to find out if it was just interesting or something I’d actually listen to before I committed to buying it. Below is the promotional material uploaded to Amazon .
Featuring what may be his only recordings on the Prophet keyboard, these once lost performances expand the omniverse of Ra across a stellar set of lengthy cuts! All recorded in a single day and finally making their terrestrial debut, pressed on colored vinyl and packaged with a Prophet keyboard brochure plus notes from Ranthropologist Brother Cleve!What happens when a Prophet meets a Prophet? The answer lies within these grooves.Amongst the hundreds of recordings issued by Sun Ra and his Arkestra, under their various guises, the majority were recorded in concert or in makeshift studios such as their early 1960s set-up at NYC’s Choreographer’s Workshop. Beyond those, roughly 22 albums were recorded at Variety Recording Studio in New York’s Times Square. However, on August 25, 1986, Sun Ra and cohorts entered Mission Control, a state-of-the-art 24-track studio north of Boston, which was teeming with electronic keyboards and otherworldly sound generators. Nestled within that arsenal was a brand-new digital ultra keyboard the Prophet VS (“Vector Synthesizer”).Of all the keyboards Ra played throughout his half-century career, the Prophet was one of the most sophisticated. There’s no evidence that he had played either of the instrument’s earlier incarnations, the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and Prophet-10. Created using microprocessors, a then-new technological advance, under the auspices of engineer Dave Smith in 1978, the Prophet-5 revolutionized electronic music as the first polyphonic and, most importantly, programmable synthesizer.Ra was intrigued by the Prophet (surely by the instrument as well as by the name). Recorded during a single day, it’s about time that these once lost performances have now been found.It was a joy and a thrill to be sitting at the console hearing this music for the first time, especially with my fingers on the faders and knobs of the mixing desk. We watched the oxide fly off the 2" tapes during playback, making this our one chance to digitize before they metamorphosed into dust. Welcome to the new Sun Ra album .35+ years after it was recorded. The Omniverse has expanded once again. Brother Cleve (1955 - 2022)
Johnny Hammond - Gamblers Life, Soul Brother Records (2022)
Early Jazz Funkiness featuring the very excellent Mizell brothers production fresh from their work for Donald Byrd and Bobbi Humphrey on Blue Note this was originally released on Salvation Records sandwiched between Johnny’s two excellent releases on the other CTI subsidiary Kudu Records.
Have you got the Craft/Jazz Dispensary reissue of Hammond’s Gears @Bobthebuilder? Absolutely brilliant.
No Kev of course I know itbut have only ever streamed it I will keep a load ok out for a copy though.
Xhosa Cole - Ibeji, Stoney Lane Records (2023)
I believe the CD and download is released this month but the vinyl doesn’t come out until March next year.
Xhosa Cole, the acclaimed 26 year-old award-winning saxophonist, is to release his second album on Stoney Lane Records this November – Ibeji, a collaborative project of duos featuring seven eminent percussionists of African descent.
Following his celebrated debut K(no)w Them, K(no)w Us in 2021, Cole’s new project features a series of disparate saxophone and percussion duets, set alongside exerts of conversations and interviews between Cole and his seven collaborators woven into the narrative of the album. Ibeji takes its name from the Yoruba orisha (West
African spirits) for ‘twins’, exploring the themes of duality, double consciousness, codes, clave, masks, brotherhood, ancestors, rituals, racism, identity, and the diverse expressions of African traditions and music throughout the diaspora.
Recorded in his home city of Birmingham, the album brings Xhosa together with percussionists Adriano Adewale, Lekan Babalola, Jason Brown, Corey Mwamba, Mark Sanders, Ian Parmel, and his brother, Azizi Cole.
