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Sidney Bechet: "Maple Leaf Rag," 1932

Some Beatles and Supremes LPs.

Cab Calaway. I listen for fun, and this album from 1932 is still way fun. I'll play it about four times a year.

Other than my wife's?

Deep Purple's Made in Japan. The greatest hard rock live album ever from some of the best musicians of the genre.

The oldest one in my collection that gets frequent play is a 1975 Delmark Records release entitled Hodes' Art. It features Art Hodes on piano with Raymond Burke, George Brunis, Pops Foster, Barret Deems, and Truck Parham.

The excerpts from Parsifal conducted by Muck are likely the oldest that I listen to regularly. That reminds me—time to listen to them again!

It's one I made myself of Arthur Godfrey when he broadcast from Detroit. I was 16, and the LP hadn't yet been introduced.

Louis Armstrong meets Oscar Peterson 1957

Dave Brubeck: Newport 1958 on an original Columbia LP.

Kind of Blue—a six-eye Columbia LP in stereo.

Bo Diddley.

A 27 year-old skydiving pal of mine and I just had this conversation over margaritas Saturday night. I told him of the three albumns I stacked on my record player every night as I went to sleep. The brand new Doors album, Ray Charles' Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul and Sviatoslav Richter playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concierto #2. The Doors fell off the list, Mr. Charles' record has been replaced several times and still gets me, but the Rachmaninoff record, from a boxed set, still sounds pretty good, though it is no longer my favorite rendition. I also have some very old Wagner Ring LP sets on both 33RPM and 78RPM discs, but they are new to me.

It's got to be an old Mercury mono LP of Ashley Miller at the Radio City Music Hall pipe organ playing Christmas music. It still startles me how good it sounds today!

The Quartetto Italiano from '52 or '53 playing late Beethoven quartets, or maybe Charlie Parker With Strings (late '40s?). Regrettably, and unlike Sam Tellig, I am distracted by the sound and short recording times of recordings from much before that.

I've got some stuff from the 1920s in box sets, such as The Anthology of American Folk Music. Actually, the more I listen to older recordings, the less I like most of the newer stuff. Is it too late to start collecting 78s?

First record album I ever owned was Every Picture Tells A Story and though I'm on my fifth vinyl copy, it still gets played on a regular basis!

A lot of older music from the sixties, but most are reissues.

Opera recordings featuring Gigli are favorites. Redone on Naxos they sound amazingly vivid. They were recorded from 1933 to the early '40s.

I first began attending live concerts as a Freshman at the University of Utah,in 1958: none were available in the thinly-populated areas I grew up in. This is when I began buying records. I still have many of them. The oldest I still play regularly are by Ramsey Lewis ("Hang on Ramsey") and Bruno Walter's Mahler 9th. Both were recorded in 1959, I believe. Both still sound wonderful, better than 90% of the new stuff I still buy. In spite of being plowed by my first player (a Pilot portable)and several ancient Pickerings, Shures, and the like, these furrows are still remarkably fertile...lower noise than many LP's I bought in the '70's and '80's and believable presence and soundstaging. I am convinced they will last another century, at least,even though I certainly won't.

I just listened to the RCA Living Stereo SACD of Fritz Reiner's Also Sprach Zarathustra, recorded in 1954. It doesn't exactly sound like it was recorded yesterday—actually, it sounds like it was recorded long ago in a galaxy far, far away (oooops, wrong movie). It has plenty of hiss, but the hiss is strangely disembodied from the music. Let's just say it sounds otherworldly—recorded by the gods and dropped down to earth for our perpetual listening pleasure.

It is RCA LM-86, a 10" mono LP with Mario Lanza singing the songs of his first film, That Midnight Kiss. Probably released in 1949.

A few from 1968.

Machito Afro cuban Jazz mercury 10" recording from 1950, I pulled it of the shelf today and it's in great shape! I also own some 78s, but I don't listen to them. I have no 78 stylus or cartridge. We're not talking about reissues are we?

I played a copy of Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones this afternoon. The copyright date is 1971, it has the zipper album jacket, and was actually purchased way back then during my mis-spent youth senior year in college.

Ella & Louis on original mono Verve vinyl. It gets no better.

Caruso - 1902.

How about The Temptations Sing Smokey from 1964 (41 years and counting). It's probably me reliving my tean age years, but it just sounds good. Obviously it's on vinyl. I take care of it as best I can.

A recording of Charlie Parker, ca 1950 I believe, is oldest recording that I listen to with some regularity.

I have recordings that were recorded in the 1950s. Many jazz titles by all the greats. The first CD I bought is Stevie Wonder's In Squared Circle in 1983. I still listen to it from time to time. But the recording itself is not good compared to some of todays recordings.