MEDIUM HYBRID SACD + CD CONDITION sealed 2 CD BOX M mint BOOKLET 12 Page Booklet, M mint SERIALNUMBER Yes LIMITED Yes, to 1000 MISCELLANEOUS Stereo, playable on all CD + SACD Players ! MUSICIAN HOMEPAGEmilesdavis.com
Miles Davis – trumpet
Julian "Cannonball" Adderley – alto sax (except "blue in green")
John Coltrane – tenor sax
Bill Evans – piano (except "freddie freeloader")
Wynton Kelly – piano ("freddie freeloader")
Paul Chambers – double bass
Jimmy Cobb – drums
so what - 9:26
freddie freeloader - 9:49
blue in green - 5:38
all blue - 11:36
flamenco sketches - 9:26
so what - 9:26
freddie freeloader - 9:49
blue in green - 5:38
all blue - 11:36
flamenco sketches - 9:26
With this reissue from Hemiolia Records, Pietro Benini and his team sought to go beyond a ‘standard’ restoration
His remastering work on ‘Kind Of Blue’ follows an uncompromising vision: preserving the integrity of a purely analogue chain right up to the moment of conversion to the digital domain
Not a simple transfer, but an act of the utmost precision, designed to preserve the dynamics, energy and warmth of the master tape directly within the digital medium
Whilst the audiophile reissues of ‘Kind Of Blue’ previously available on the market are based on production processes and master tape copies, which Mark Wilder established in the early 1990s, Hemiolia Records had access to an original 1/4-inch production master tape copy sourced from the Ampex backup recorder used during the 1959 recording sessions!
For this reason, Hemiolia’s remastering can be described as a fully analogue process at the correct playback speed
This means that Pietro Benini did not need to correct the speed, as the production master tape used already had the correct playback speed!
The well-known speed issues stem from the master tapes, which originate from that 3-track recorder that was running too slowly on the day of the first recording session, resulting in the first three tracks of the album being recorded with a quarter-tone overload
Furthermore, the ‘5-bar fade-out’ applied by Wilder (and by all subsequent mastering engineers), which literally wiped out almost a minute of analogue music, was not included by Hemiolia Records
The fact that this reissue includes the original ‘13-bar outro’ proves that Hemiolia Records had access to a section of the tape that other labels had either digitally edited out or cut during the mixing stage
This crucial detail has been confirmed by Enrico Merlin (widely regarded as the world’s leading expert on Miles Davis), who wrote the liner notes in the booklet accompanying this box set
Hemiolia is proud to note that it has succeeded in restoring the original analogue integrity of the backing track, thereby also presenting the music in its true light
Benini’s aim was not to add anything to the sound, but to enable each instrument to regain its own spatial position and natural timbre
Only at the end of this sophisticated analogue process was the signal entrusted to the high-precision conversion stage for digital transmission, thereby restoring a freshness and vitality to these historic recordings that enhances the emotional experience
To showcase the results to their fullest advantage, Hemiolia Records made a conscious decision to use uncompressed DSD without DST encoding on the SACD, thereby ensuring a direct bitstream from the analogue source
Miles Davis’s ‘Kind Of Blue’ is the best-selling jazz album of all time – a five-track masterpiece brimming with melancholic moods and melodies, and an album that features on every ‘Best Of’ list and has been inducted into every ‘Hall of Fame’
‘Kind Of Blue’ remains one of the most listened to and studied recordings – ‘required listening’ for many young musicians and one of the most transcendent jazz works ever recorded
Davis plays sublime trumpet with his unforgettable sextet, comprising pianist Bill Evans, drummer Jimmy Cobb, bassist Paul Chambers and saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley, with Wynton Kelly on piano for ‘Freddy The Freeloader’
‘Kind Of Blue’ is more than just Miles Davis’s most enduring album; it is a testament to Miles’s experimental approach to drastically simplifying modern jazz: in a sense, ‘Kind Of Blue’ is nothing but melody – and atmosphere
None of the musicians had played the pieces before they went into the first of two recording sessions in the spring of 1959
In fact, Miles had written the arrangements for most of the pieces just a few hours before the session
Miles also stuck to his old recording method, which involved virtually no rehearsals and just one take per piece
Hermiola Records presents this sonically outstanding reissue of this classic, which was recorded on 2 March and 22 April 1959 at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York City, USA, and produced by Irving Townsend
Originally released by Columbia Records, the album is now available as a collector’s double-disc set comprising a single-layer SACD and a CD
The box set, strictly limited to 1,000 numbered copies, reflects the label’s philosophy of rejecting the compromises in sound quality inherent in standard hybrid SACDs: Although a dual-layer disc is, in every respect, the simpler and more economically viable solution, it entails inevitable technical limitations that make it impossible to achieve absolute top quality in both formats
For this reason, the label has opted for the most demanding approach: two distinct, format-specific remastering processes for two separate physical media – resulting in two listening experiences that are absolutely uncompromising
RECORDING March 2 and April 22 1959 at Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City, USA ENGINEERING Fred Plaut LABEL Columbia / Legacy RE MASTERING Pietro Benini RE RELEASED 2026 AVERAGE RATING 5 Stars out of 5 MADE IN Italy STYLE Jazz / Hard Bop AVAILABLE as long as inventory stock
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