Duke Pearson – The Right Touch (UHQCD)

According to many experts, the unjustly underrated career of Duke Pearson can best be rediscovered with the 1967 album “The Right Touch”, whose title perfectly matches its content. The album is considered by many to be the most valuable gem in Pearson’s discography, as it clearly expresses his phenomenal talent as a pianist, composer, and arranger. The program of “The Right Touch” includes six unforgettable pieces written by Pearson himself and arranged for a dynamic eight-piece band – including trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, trombonist Garnett Brown, alto saxophonist James Spaulding, alto saxophone and flute virtuoso Jerry Dodgion, tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, double bassist Gene Taylor, and drummer Grady Tate. AllMusic awarded this hard bop album, spiced with Latin elements and described as “one of the best recordings of Duke Pearson’s career,” the rare five-star rating.

Among the most notable tracks on this record are the spicy “Chili Peppers”, the light swing of “Make It Good”, in which Pearson showcases his elegant piano style, the charming bossa nova ballad “My Love Waits (O Meu Amor Espera)”, in which Hubbard’s flugelhorn is particularly effective, the nostalgic blues “Scrap Iron,”, which seems to have been written for Turrentine’s melancholic tenor saxophone, and “Rotary”, the sparkling finale that is bursting with swing as all the musicians play their rousing solos.

As part of the extremely popular “Blue Note 85th Anniversary Reissue Series” Universal Music Japan presents the sonically impressive remastering of this jazz classic by the legendary Kevin Gray, who is also responsible for Blue Note US’s analog reissues such as “Tone Poet” and “Classic Vinyl” – as a limited Japan only UHQCD with OBI stripe. The original recording session for “The Right Touch” took place on September 13, 1967 at Rudy Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

UHQCD stands for Ultimate High Quality Compact Disc and is a joint development of the Japanese CD replication company Memory-Tech and the Audio Quality CD Company from Hong Kong. Unlike conventional CDs, UHQCDs are not pressed from polycarbonate, but cast from a photopolymer and cured with UV light. Another layer of high-purity polycarbonate is applied to the softer photopolymer for scratch protection. The combination results in significantly reduced reflection of laser light inside the CD and an unmatched precise edge transition between pits and lands of the CD. UHQCDs are 100% compatible with standard CD players. Musically, the result is a sound image strongly reminiscent of analog master tapes.

While Universal Music Japan’s first UHQCD series relied on the DSD data of previous SHM-SACD releases, with increasing popularity, albums that had not previously been released as SHM-SACD are now appearing. Typically, the Universal Archive master tapes are re-converted to DSD for this purpose. UHQCDs are ideal for music lovers who want to get as close as possible to the sound of the recording, but do not own an SACD player.

Lista pieselor

1.    Chili Peppers
2.    Make It Good
3.    My Love Waits (O Meu Amor Espera)
4.    Los Malos Hombres
5.    Scrap Iron
6.    Rotary