Jazz at the Pawnshop – Late Night (50th Anniversary Remastered Edition)

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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the legendary December 1976 Jazz at the Pawnshop sessions, we are proud to present a newly remastered edition. Sourced directly from the original analog master tapes, this release utilizes our latest, updated 2xHD Reference System to deliver unprecedented depth, clarity, and realism. The original transfer to digital was made several years ago. For the 50th anniversary, we wanted to offer the same level of quality that can be heard on the 2xHD double 45 RPM analog version of Late Night and the new 50th R2R Tape version. For this download, thanks to the evolution of analog-to-digital converters and the significant development of the 2xHD laboratory’s custom tube analog playback and mastering system – we are now able to transfer the analog master to digital with considerably greater depth, warmth, and naturalness.

Late Night resurrects a cult discovery: fifty years after the original Jazz at the Pawnshop sessions — among the most celebrated audiophile jazz recordings ever made — new reel-to-reel tapes turned up in the vault, capturing the band at the end of each of the two December 1976 evenings at Stampen, Gamla Stan’s storied Stockholm jazz club. As the musicians packed up for the night, they’d often tape one more set purely for themselves — looser, longer, more adventurous versions of the songs, played with the specific freedom that comes from knowing no one’s officially listening.

Engineer Gert Palmcrantz’s own account of the original sessions, reproduced in the booklet, describes the quirks that gave these recordings their legendary natural ambience: a handful of Neumann U47 and KM56 microphones rigged above and around the stage, a jury-rigged Nagra IV-S setup running on battery packs during a power cut, and a band (saxophonist/clarinetist Arne Domnérus, pianist Bengt Hallberg, bassist Georg Riedel, drummer Egil Johansen, and later vibraphonist Lars Erstrand) performing with the easy camaraderie of friends who’d rather play one more number than go home. Remastered by 2xHD’s René Laflamme using the label’s Fusion process — vacuum-tube playback electronics, DXD transfer, and analog warmth restored to digital precision — Late Night captures that specific, unguarded after-hours spirit: six tracks of musicians playing purely for their own pleasure.

Arne Domnérus, alto saxophone & clarinet
Bengt Hallberg, piano
Georg Riedel, double bass
Egil Johansen, drums
Lars Erstrand, vibraphone (added partway through the second evening)