This is an album with serious audiophile cred. It was recorded to analog tape on a Studer A800 MKIII at 30ips, by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio in Mount Vernon, New York. It was mixed, also at 30ips, on a custom, tubed Ampex 351, by Pete Rende. Bernie Grundman mastered it for vinyl and cut the lacquer, direct from the analog tape, on an all-tube system. The executive producer for the vinyl version is Hervé Delétraz of darTZeel, who, Sabbagh told me, helped finance the mastering and pressing. Sabbagh listened to the acetates and test pressings at Ana Might Sound in Paris.
As you might suspect after hearing all that, Sabbagh himself is an audiophile: Ken Micallef profiled him in 2018 in his “Musicians as Audiophiles” series.1 Among other cool components, he owns a Garrard 401 turntable.
But in contrast to most new audiophile LPs—I’m intentionally excluding audiophile reissues of classic records—this one features frontline musicians. First, in addition to Sabbagh, is jazz-piano great Kenny Barron, perhaps best known for the jazz ensemble Sphere, his work with Dizzy Gillespie, and his past collaborations with Stan Getz; Barron has a chapter in Gene Rizzo’s The Fifty Greatest Jazz Piano Players of All Time. Bassist Joe Martin seems to have played with every great contemporary, including Brad Mehldau, Mark Turner, and Chris Potter. He is Sabbagh’s regular bassist, a member (with Ben Monder and Ted Poor) of his regular quartet. And then there’s that current young titan of jazz drums, Johnathan Blake.
Upon listening to the album, I found the title a bit of an enigma: The songs are mostly straightforward, but there’s nothing especially “vintage” about the music (unless “vintage” means lacking any pretense of “out”-ness or experimentation). So I asked Sabbagh. “At first, ‘Vintage’ was simply the name of the song that starts the record,” he replied. “That song was written years ago. It seemed like an old-school kind of song, hence the title. Then I decided to title the album after the song. It wasn’t meant too much as a statement, perhaps more like an allusion. To me, it fits the ethos of recording all in a room, of trying to let the music happen in an organic way and not overthinking things, and overproducing things. It’s the way most great jazz records were done in the past, and it’s certainly a way that I can relate to. … But it also seemed to genuinely fit what is one of the most straight-ahead records I’ve done, especially with a true master such as Kenny Barron involved.”
was made like that, with the musicians together in a room. “We didn’t really have partitions. We tried to set up in a way to minimize bleed, using angling, mike placement, and some distance. We still had bleed, but, since we mixed the record, we could experiment with what sounded better to us. Not all bleed is bad. It’s good to get the feel and the sound of people playing in a room. Also,
