Bill Evans & Jim Hall Undercurrent Universal Japan UHQ MQA CD

Bill Evans & Jim Hall Undercurrent

audiophile United Artists Jazz Universal Ultimate High Quality CD UCCU 40128

made in Japan

new, factory sealed

"Undercurrent" is the first of two excellent albums recorded during two sessions by Bill Evans and guitarist Jim Hall in April and May 1962. Arrangements exclusively for piano and guitar are rare in jazz, and even rarer is the result as inspiring and musically rewarding as in this case. Usually intuitive musical relationships develop over a period of quite a few years, but here are two musicians who clearly understand each other from the start. Both are in top form on this LP - Bill Evans was under pressure in the early and mid-60s; after the tragic death of his previous musical partner, virtuoso bassist Scott Le Faro, at the age of only 23, he was looking for a new direction. Jim Hall is a guitarist of enormous talent and great technique, with highly developed sense of rhythm and harmony radiating from this album. What is absolutely special about this recording is an almost telepathic anticipation of where the music is going - both musicians contribute equally, there is a constant exchange of ideas, each responding to the other with obvious ease, whatever the mood. This is a brilliant jazz album of great depth and impressive atmosphere, and both players show exceptional inventiveness. Highly recommended! Bill Evans (p); Jim Hall (g)

UHQCD stands for Ultimate High Quality Compact Disc and is a joint development of the Japanese CD replication company Memory-Tech and the Audio Quality CD Company from Hong Kong. Unlike conventional CDs, UHQCDs are not pressed from polycarbonate, but cast from a photopolymer and cured with UV light. Another layer of high-purity polycarbonate is applied to the softer photopolymer for scratch protection. The combination results in significantly reduced reflection of laser light inside the CD and an unmatched precise edge transition between pits and lands of the CD. UHQCDs are 100% compatible with standard CD players. Musically, the result is a sound image strongly reminiscent of analog master tapes.

The discs offered by Universal Japan are additionally MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) encoded. If you output the digital signal from the digital output of your CD player or the previously ripped data stream from your music server to a corresponding MQA-DA converter, you can generate a 24-bit signal with up to 352 Khz sampling frequency from the CD data.

While Universal Music Japan's first UHQCD series relied on the DSD data of previous SHM-SACD releases, with increasing popularity, albums that had not previously been released as SHM-SACD are now appearing. Typically, the Universal Archive master tapes are re-converted to DSD for this purpose and then post-processed with the appropriate MQA encoder. Thus, the UHQCDs are ideal for music lovers who want to get as close as possible to the sound of the recording, but do not own an SACD player.