Vinyl Me, Please (VMP), Verve Label Group, and Impulse Records have announced the 19th entry in VMP’s GRAMMY-nominated Anthology series: The Story of Impulse! The $399 USD premium set which features 8 albums is available now for pre-order.
Established as a way to challenge the status quo in jazz LPs, Impulse! charted the evolution of jazz in the ’60s, capturing all of its disparate strands, as well as its finest composers and performers.
The Story of Impulse! charts the flow from John Coltrane beginning to push his own boundaries to Alice Coltrane expanding the palette of spiritual jazz.
The eight albums in The Story of Impulse! – John Coltrane’s Africa / Brass, Chico Hamilton’s Passin’ Thru, Lorez Alexandria’s Alexandria the Great, Charles Mingus’ Mingus Plays Piano, Gabor Szabo’s Jazz Raga, Mel Brown’s Chicken Fat, Pharoah Sanders’ Karma, and Alice Coltrane’s Ptah the El Daoud – come on 180g black vinyl and will be pressed at Vinyl Media Pressing in Denver, Colorado, overseen by Gary Salstrom.
The premium box – designed with an eye towards capturing the original spirit of Impulse!’s design – comes with a liner notes booklet written by jazz writer Ben Ratliff.
The first edition will be limited to 2,000 units, and the first six titles are AAA-mastered from tapes. The seventh, Karma, is mastered from hybrid master tapes and high quality digital sources, and the eighth, Ptah, The El Daoud, is mastered from the highest quality digital masters. Lacquers were cut by Ryan Smith and Barry Grint.
Originally teased in 2021, The Story of Impulse! has been hotly anticipated by VMP’s members and fans of jazz alike.
“As soon as we launched VMP Anthology in the spring of 2019, people have been asking us to do a box dedicated to Impulse!,” said Andrew Winistorfer, executive producer of The Story of Impulse, and VMP Senior Director of Music and Editorial. “We wanted to do it too, obviously; it’s the most daring jazz label of all time, and it was really interesting for us to try to tell the story of the House that Coltrane Built in a tidy eight album story. Beginning and ending with the Coltranes came first, but it was important for us to show the different branches of jazz Impulse! released, from the vocal jazz of Lorez Alexandria, to the West Coast jazz of Chico Hamilton, to the funky sounds of Mel Brown. The Impulse! story is one of corporate overlords–in this case ABC–backing into running the most radical jazz label of all time. It’s so unlikely, and so incredible, that it led to all this music.”
The Story of Impulse! is available now on the Vinyl Me, Please website.
VMP Members get a discount on this box. It’s expected to ship in the fall.
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ORT
July 15, 2023 at 2:54 am
As the immortal (not immoral!) Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn would say, “I am reticent, yes reticent”…Primarily because so much “classic Jazz” is naught but some highly revered musician high on the drug of the month club is blowing scales instead of paying homage to the song by actually playing the freaking song!
I went to public (as opposed to today’s version, i.e. “pubiq”) school and as such may be wrong but I ain’t aboot to risk $50.00 a record for a chance at shortly after cuing an album I will be yelling “PULL!” because said record is just an oversized target for skeet shooting enthusiasts.
As for the pretense that these offerings are “AAA”? BFD. YYY? Because my ears cannot tell a difference and I am not allowed to lie. If they are and they sound good who cares how they were recorded so long as they were recorded well. FTN.
I suppose I should just seek these out on one of my paid for music services and if I like them enough to buy them on vinyl, I can do so. If they suck at least I won’t be stuck with skeet targets.
Reticent indeed!
ORT