Here’s the thing...

Our mission at Music Matters has always been to get lovers of Blue Note jazz as close to the music as possible. We are obsessed with bringing listeners back to that studio in New Jersey, back to the very sessions when the musicians came together and played. The musicians brought all their hardships into that studio - the struggle to create art - a living, breathing art, while having to endure the endless injustice and insult of racism, as we have seen in countless anecdotes and biographies. But they also brought hope and dignity and discipline and genius and joy, too. They brought it all, the terrible and the sublime, into every session. And time after time they transformed it all and put it back into the world as some of the most beautiful and profound art created in the United States or anywhere else ever. And Rudy Van Gelder got it all on tape, every timeless bit of it.

The only reason we would come back with more would be if we heard those sessions again in a way that struck even veteran pros like us with the force of new revelation, in a way that gave us the sensation of hearing more fully and deeply from within the music itself than ever before. Put simply, we felt like we had to share it with you.

So, we’ve found that reason….. And it’s the vinyl! We’ve long wanted to get our all-analog re-masters of the original Van Gelder tapes onto something quiet and revealing, something that surpassed any vinyl formula ever developed. So, for the past two years, in collaboration with Record Technology and TPC Plastics we’ve been working on a vinyl formula that not only matches but surpasses the quality of the quietest vinyl ever put into production. Friends, we’ve finally achieved that goal!

We call it “ SRX Vinyl.” SRX stands for “Silent Running Xperience.” SRX is our own proprietary formula, conceived and developed by Rick Hashimoto of Record Technology and manufactured by TPC Plastics. Its noise floor is fathoms lower than any other vinyl we know of out there past or present. Records pressed with it look like normal black discs until you hold them up to the light and see that they are translucent and smoky, silvery gray in color. What matters most though, is the sound of the music. The near-perfect silence of SRX Vinyl virtually frees the music from groove noise and draws you further into the listening space, setting it in relief so distinct, full and spacious it’s nearly sculptural. You hear more of what’s on the original tapes, not only of the notes played on the instruments but the sense of the event itself. There’s a richer sense of being in the presence of human souls breathing, plucking, blowing, pressing …. Working on and out via their instruments. You hear them searching together, conjuring the music with one another, putting that beauty into the world once again, right now, right here.

That’s our reason for continuing and we can’t think of a better one. This time around and for the time being we’re doing 12 titles, released all at once. All twelve titles will be available to purchase starting on January 1st, 2019.

With The Music in Mind,
Happy New Year!
Ron & Joe
musicmattersjazz.com