The CD version of this album was the first time I’d heard it. Musically, it’s a set of re-recordings of his best-known songs from earlier years, with a stellar cast of musicians, among them Milt Bernhart, Maynard Ferguson, Vido Musso and many others, anchored by Kenton’s ace rhythm section.  Musically, it is a good compilation of some of his best-known charts, re-recorded in mono and (then-new) stereo for the hi-fi age.  Kenton’s music never sounded this good!  Given that the CD was a mono reissue, I was curious to see what the original LPs sounded like.  I found both a mono and stereo version of the LP, and made my comparisons.

First of all, for the most part, the CD is a reissue of the monaural version of the album. While I would have preferred the stereo version, the mono is actually the better sounding of the two. On the mono LP, the mix is a lot tighter and more cohesive; the bass, especially, is balanced well with the big band. On the stereo version, the mix is indeed wider, but due to poor microphone placement, a lot of the instruments are not balanced well, and the bass line is very faint.

In those early stereo days, Capitol engineers would have set up two different microphone configurations and run them to two different recorders: being more familiar with monaural recording techniques, the mono recording sounds a lot better. On the stereo version, a few imbalances were evident, and they were not too aware of phase cancellations back then either. And it was also common practice to run the stereo mixes through the reverb chamber–many early Capitol stereo recordings were loaded up with too much reverb. (Check out “Viva Kenton” on LP, in its muddy, overly-reverbed mix, and compare it to the newly remixed version that is now available on CD. The LP is so congested with reverb, you never really hear the big band as it was originally recorded.)

You can actually compare stereo vs. mono on this “Kenton in Hi-Fi” CD by comparing the two versions of “Minor Riff”: these are actually the versions from the mono and stereo (“alternate take”) albums respectively. The stereo version is also shorter. Reason? Back then, they could not cut as much time onto the side of an LP in stereo as they could in mono. For that reason, not only was “Minor Riff” a shorter take on the stereo album, the stereo album also omits “Southern Scandal” which, unfortunaely, is one of my favorite tracks on the album.

Ideally, this could have been reissued with both the mono and stereo versions of the album on it, but other than “Minor Riff”, which uses a shorter arrangement, the songs are otherwise identical.  The bonus tracks at the end of the CD are from another recording session with strings…sort of superfluous given the big band dynamics that occupy the rest of the disc.  This CD is a great starting point for someone just getting into Kenton’s music; from here, you could explore many of his “Adventures In…” albums (Adventures In Time is a high point for me), or dig out earlier versions of the songs on this album.