Is this the best remastered Glenn Miller sound you can buy?
A small company is contesting official Sony releases in the music preservation field.
Bay City, Tx. July 2017 Almost 2 years after having announced the project, Rollofone Records, a small indie label dedicated to vintage jazz, has started to ship it’s 5 record set “Glenn Miller – Swing For The Jukebox”. And the customers are impressed: “..The sound is very, very good and in the cases of some songs, like “American Patrol”, the best available in any [analogue or digital] format…” comments one customer. Another Glenn Miller aficionado writes: “All I can say is Bravo on a wonderful wonderful job….”.
Michaela Merz, Rollofone’s owner and lead master engineer ties the great reviews to the painstaking process she and her colleague Mark Cederquist took to preserve and restore the Glenn Miller sound.
“We were happy to get access to the original metal masters.” Merz explains. “We didn’t run the originals through some sound restoration software. We did not aim for an average fast selling product. We wanted to create something even Glenn Miller himself would have been proud of. That took a lot of time and effort.”
But Rollofone didn’t stop there. They also released the sound in the format in which it was originally released in back in the 1940s – ten inch records that whirl at 78 rpm. Though this format has long been superseded by singles and LPs that spin at 45 or 33 rpm, for Michaela Merz, it was the right thing to do:
“This is much more than just music. It’s an homage to Glenn Miller and his orchestra, to the dance bands and to the men and women who created the music that helped America through very troubled times.”
The record set contains 10 of Glenn Miller’s famous tunes like “In The Mood”, “Tuxedo Junction” or “Moonlight Serenade”. It comes in a box set with five records and in-depth liner notes. Though a bit pricey (the set sells for about $120 on Rollofone’s web-site) it’s probably a release that is too important to ignore – if you like vintage jazz or dance band music. Rollofone has limited the release to just 200 copies so it’s almost guaranteed that the set will sell out soon. Rollofone plans more restorations and 78rpm releases. They are currently talking about Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Tommy or Jimmy Dorsey.
“Let’s see what we come up with.” Merz says.
Downloadable PDF: rf_press_release_July_2017