New Old Stock – Errol Garner’s Campus Concert and the Octave Remastered Series

On my train ride home last night I was thumbing through Tidal looking for something to listen to when I noticed that a remastered version of Errol Garner’s Campus Concert was listed for me as a “suggested new release.” The Tidal gods know me so well. I put it on, not expecting a lot, and immediately set about the frenetic and yet painfully purposeless iPhone rituals that characterize the back-and-forth Metro North trips I am riding to my grave.

I didn’t get very far with my aimless surfing, however, before I was gripped by one of those wonderful audiophile moments, those moments when you have no choice but to stop what you’re doing and actually listen because whatever you’re listening to simply demands it.

Are Errol Garner records always this alive, I wondered, this captivating, this much fun? And do they all sound THIS GOOD????

The newly released (Nov 15th – hot off the presses) version of Campus Concert is part of the Octave Remastered Series (information here at errolgarner.com, a website that before yesterday I did not know existed) which over the course of the year will see the release of 12 classic Errol Garner records in newly restored and expanded editions. Octave Music was a record label that Garner formed with his manager Martha Glaser after he sued Columbia Records to get them to stop releasing his material without his consent, which Columbia had started doing after Garner’s 1955 Concert by the Sea album became a huge hit.

If you’d asked me yesterday to tell you something about Erroll Garner I would have been able to muster two items of note: 1. He wrote “Misty” and 2. He had this Concert by the Sea album that was a big deal for some reason. As a routine patroller of bargain bins far and wide, I have been encountering moldering copies of Concert by the Sea for decades now, and yet I do not own a copy. I have listened to it, possibly more than once though I can’t remember for sure. I never understood what the fuss was. I have no complaints with Erroll Garner’s thing – in fact I am very down with his brand of loose, rollicking, good-time swing. But to my ears Concert by the Sea is a poor recording. As live piano trio records go it just doesn’t begin to approach the kind of electricity that is available in the genre. It was remastered in 2015 into a complete edition (which was nominated for a Grammy!) and I do remember listening to that when it came out. It sounded… better than the original for sure. Still not good. Still boring to me.

This remastered Campus Concert, however, is Involving. Capital I. There’s some kind of magic that is unique in my mind to a well-recorded, well-mastered and well-played piano trio record – I think of We Get Requests… or Overseas… or Now He Sings Now He Sobs. On records like these, an irresistible kinetic energy is transmitted from almost the first moment that the drums and bass link up in the pocket and I hear it and something in my being perks up like a dog who just heard a can-opener.

So it was with the remastered Campus Concert (originally recorded in 1964 at Purdue University). It hit me in the first twenty seconds and never turned me loose. I listened to the whole thing on my train ride and then put it on the big rig as soon as I got home. What a sound, the taut yet cavernous bass, the swaggering momentum that makes you (almost) believe that PRAT is a thing, the atmosphere of the room and the crowd. Like most of my favorite live recordings it never stops feeling live for one second and yet has no consequent sacrifice of detail or tonal saturation.

For these new Octave remasters, the original analog tapes were transferred using The Plangent Process, a method I’ve read about before and that I understand involves some sophisticated DSP implementation. Many big-time reissues have been given the Plangent treatment, including a lot of the Dead catalog and the Springsteen Album Collection box set. Consensus among audiophiles seems to be that it works wonders (here’s a long thread at the excellent Steve Hoffman forum).

I can’t myself speak to what magic the Plangent Process wrought upon Garner’s Campus Concert because I don’t have an original on hand. BUT… my Spidey senses tell me that it did quite a bit. This recording just has that special sauce that characterizes a great audiophile remastering to me, the air, presence and aural fairy dust that we associate with Analogue Productions and Speakers Corner, et al.

Five of the Octave Remastered Series are already out – the aforementioned Campus Concert along with Dreamstreet, Closeup in Swing, One World Concert, and A New Kind of Love. One more will be released each month throughout June, 2020. I’ll be checking them all out and I suggest you do the same. They’re all on Tidal. Hallelujah.