The fact that they are female, that there are two of them and that they can harmonize as beautifully as any two singers you’ve ever heard allows their version of the song to have qualities far beyond the boys in Blood Sweat and Tears. Eric Katz is a decent singer the two girls in Brazil ’66 are SUPERB singers. Just play this track and see which one gets the flute right.īy the way, we LOVE the version of this song that Sergio Mendes does on Stillness. Want to shoot out two different copies of this album on side one? Easy. The sound will be Demonstration Quality of the highest order. If the flute sounds right, Katz’s voice will too. When you can hear the air going through the flute, and follow the playing throughout the song, you have a superbly transparent copy with all the presence and resolution of the best. Having said that, what separates the killer copies from the merely excellent ones is the quality of the flute sound. There is a huge amount of bass which is difficult to reproduce the best copies have note-like, controlled (although prodigious) bass which is a very tough system test. This shootout taught me a lot about this track. A solo guitar opening on a pop record pressed on Columbia vinyl from the ’60s? A brand new copy would have surface noise, so it’s important to not get too worked up over surfaces that are always going to be problematical. The song is always going to be plagued with a certain amount of surface noise. Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie (1st & 2nd Movements) I put this record at the top of The Best Sounding Rock Records of All Time. You don’t find that on a record too often, practically never in fact. With the right copy playing on the right stereo, the album has the potential to sound like LIVE MUSIC. He may not be very consistent (Graceland, Still Crazy After All These Years) but on this album he knocked it out of the park.
Played on a BIG SPEAKER SYSTEM, a top Hot Stamper pressing is nothing less than a thrill, the ultimate Demo Disc.Ĭredit must go to the amazing engineering skills of ROY HALEE. In my opinion this is the BEST SOUNDING rock record ever made. Reviews and Commentaries for Blood, Sweat and Tears