......
| If you ever
go to the Artists' Quarter, you know that one of the walls is covered entirely with
album covers. When I was in the club recently, I noticed a cover that I didn't recognize.
I noticed familiar faces ... Kenny, Bob Rockwell, Billy Peterson, Art Resnick ...
but the album was unfamiliar to me. Being a big fan of Kenny's music, I immediately
pestered him for details about the album. It was recorded at Knutone Recording in 1981. After pressing, the album inventory was stored in the company's office at 26th and Nicollet Avenue, right next to the Butler Drug Store. The store caught on fire soon after, and the radiated heat from the fire warped all of the records stored next door. The album has never been re-pressed, and boxes of damaged records have been sitting in Kenny's basement for the past twenty years. Kenny went through the records and selected for me a handful that were least warped and most likely to be playable. Listening to them, I realized that I was being treated to a really cool album that only a few folks have ever heard before. So, a plan was hatched to copy the album to CD. We used Mike Cannon's Oracle Delphi turntable, which has a Wheatron tri-planer tone arm and a Monster Signa Genesis Cartridge, connected it through an Audio Research SP14 pre-amp to my Macintosh G3 Powerbook, and copied it to disk. I don't have the ability to affect great changes to the sound, so it's basically a direct copy. We cleaned the records thoroughly before the transfer, which eliminated most of the surface noise, but the discrimating ear will be able to notice a bit remaining in a few places, especially on the first track. The original recording is obviously quite good, and the playing exhibited here is even better. I hope you'll enjoy it. -- Al Iverson, February 2001 |