Sam Cooke SACD
Collection (four initial Super
Audio Compact Disc releases)
Ain’t That Good News
Music: B- PCM
CD sound: B DSD Stereo: B+ DSD Multi-Channel: N/A
At The Copa Music: B PCM CD sound: B DSD Stereo: N/A DSD Multi-Channel: B
Keep Movin’ On Music: B+
PCM CD sound: B DSD Stereo:
B+ DSD Multi-Channel: N/A
Portrait of a Legend
Music: A- PCM
CD sound: B DSD Stereo: B+ DSD Multi-Channel: N/A
Without any doubt, Sam Cooke will go down as an all-time
great singer, and the first four Super Audio CD releases from the ABKCO Label
should help solidify that. As they did
with the early Rolling Stones albums, ABKCO has gone out of their way to
painstakingly restore and preserve the original masters as much as
possible. Then, by transferring them to
the Direct Stream Digital format, repeat and duplicate every single detail
possible from those masters. The result
is the best this material may ever sound.
The first four SACDs issued offer three titles in
two-channel stereo only studio material, while a third is live and attempts a
5.1-only mix. The latter is Sam
Cooke at the Copa LP first issued in 1965), from his triumphant return to
the very spot where he had his worst live performance years prior to this
recording. He returned for performances
on July 7th and 8Th of 1964, with interesting
results. The showmanship involved is
spontaneous, natural, energetic, and has Cooke doing a mix of covers and his
own hits. After an introduction by
Sammy Davis Jr., Cooke delves into “The Best Things In Life Are Free”,
not reaching any of his hits until a medley four tracks later. “You Send Me” ends that set, but the
most interesting thing is the choices made in covering political songs like “If
I Had A Hammer” and “Blowin’ In The Wind”. The Copa was known for its white crowd, but that did not stop
Cooke from adding politics in what were the early stages off the Civil Rights
movement. Cooke was a genius performer
and the crowd stays with him all the way.
This is the most disappointing of the four initial SACDs,
since I am not a fan of this 5.1 remix.
It sounds a bit brittle, shows the limitations of the recording that
survived, uses the split surrounds too much as ambiance or for crowd applause,
never feels fully real, and is only a marginal improvement on the PCM CD
layer’s track sin this case. Those
tracks do not show their age as well, but that is the price high definition
sound costs, when revealing too much of the wrong thing. Some may prefer the 5.1, but be warned not
to expect too much.
Ain’t That Good News (LP first issued 1964)
is the shortest of the four in content, at only 12 tracks, but it includes some
of his best tracks: “Another Saturday Night”, “The Riddle Song”,
and his greatest recording of all, “A Change Is Gonna Come”. All four SACDs have DigiPak disc holders, in
cardboard cases, with the covers offering extensive booklets EXCEPT this
one. It is a nice, basic collection,
but is really for completists only.
Keep Movin’ On is a more extensive disc with
23 tracks that repeat several of the Ain’t That Good News hits, but it
offers two unreleased songs (including the title track), and some of his more
obscure-but-popular records. “Yeah
Man” is likely the most recognizable hit not on the other SACDs.
That brings us to Portrait of a Legend: 1951 – 1964,
which is the most comprehensive of the four and has hits found nowhere
else. The thirty tracks in all include
vital exclusives like “You Send Me”, “I’ll Come Running Back For You”,
“(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons”, “You Were Made For Me”, “Win
Your Love For Me”, “Everybody Likes To Cha Cha Cha”, “Only
Sixteen”, “(What A) Wonderful World”, “Chain Gang”, “Sad
Mood”, “Cupid”, “Twistin’ The Night Away”, “Bring It On
Home”, “Having A Party”, “Nothing Can Change This Love,” and
“Little Red Rooster”. This is
THE set to own of all four easily, though the omission of “The Riddle Song”
feels like a mistake. Otherwise, it is
about as well rounded a set as ABKCO will issue on Cooke, though the other
SACDs still have their advantages and tracks not here. There is also a hidden bonus track of Cooke
talking that ends
the disc.
The CD tracks on each are impressive for recordings their
age. The older materials recorded at
Keen Records show their age much more than the later music from the RCA era,
but that gap narrows somewhat on the SACD versions of the tracks, most noticed
on the 51 – 64 set. If there
were complications with the 5.1 mixes and condition of the live Copa
material, the two-channel DSD is a completely different matter.
The CD tracks impressive enough on their own, but the SACD
tracks are remarkable in some remarkable ways.
If Cooke sounded good in PCM, he sounds much more present in DSD, but it
does not stop there. It turns out these
masters yielded far more detail than the PCM tracks could ever hope for. “You Send Me”, a victim of
trivialization form years of being a popular golden oldie, has a whole new life
here as the beautiful pop/soul classic it is.
The strings are much clearer, the bass much fuller without any
muddiness, the background singers much more a part of the arrangement. In DSD, there is suddenly more than enough
soundstage for the musicians and backup singers to stand beside Cooke, which is
a revelation indeed. Only in DSD do you
get the full studio effect, which has the bonus in this case of the warm
feeling of tube-based recordings long gone.
Many audiophiles are spending thousands of dollars to get receivers with
tubes, but the high definition sound here recaptures that elusive quality track
after studio track.
Another DSD triumph is “Cupid”, which has a string
arrangement that is glissando-like, trying to conjure up an ideal musical
vision of heaven. Of course, this is
also a metaphor for love, and the song succeeds on both levels. The Spinners’ more soulful remake in 1980 is
not awful, but misses the layers of sound Cooke and his producing/engineering
team assembled, so much so that the remake should sound especially flat as
compared to the original, even if it comes out in a high-definition disc
version. This is a true work of art
that can now be heard that way.
“Chain Gang” benefits in DSD from clarity that
brings out the interesting use of backup vocals that are almost “cut-out” to
feel like instrumental add-ons. Of
course, there are those who may recognize the title as something The Pretenders
might have been addressing with their hit, “Back On The Chain Gang” in
1983, which references this Cooke song and was featured in Martin Scorsese’s
underrated The King of Comedy the same year. Scorsese is one of the few filmmakers alive who would understand
the weight of any of this music, so that song in that film makes sense. The original has an exceptional sound
rhythmically and the subtle details make it one that bears repeat listening.
The same can be said for “Sad Mood”, “(What A)
Wonderful World” and especially “A Change Is Gonna Come”, which is
the most well recorded work Cooke ever made in a studio. Listening to it decades later and as
compared to the other often great tracks, it is even actually clearer, warmer,
more well-thought out, and more well rounded than all the other tracks. This is besides the serious nature of the
song or the political leanings. It is
simply Cooke reaching a new level of recording excellence that could have
challenged The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and innovations in other genres like
Soul, Jazz, and Classical music if he had not died so soon. I had to listen to this one a few times to
make sure my hearing was not deceiving me.
In order to respond to Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind”,
he went all out to match and even on some levels surpass Dylan’s classic. Cooke had superior musical tastes, which
served him very well, even if he was sometimes too anxious to tackle new sounds
and innovations before he had thought them out. That hurt him in his first Copa appearance, but he would not make
that mistake again for this song. I
would have not noticed this as much on the regular CD tracks, but in DSD, you
can catch the brilliance of the phrasing that was the next evolution of a
singer who already was an exceptionally skilled vocalist.
Here was an artist who fought and won to control his music
and catalog like no other artist before him.
He has all this freedom, but knows how much lack of real-life freedom
there was in the world he lived in. He
therefore takes advantage of his position and Gospel background to reach into a
new direction no one had ever gone to before.
No one has said this, but like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On as a
forerunner of Rap, Hip Hop, and newer R&B forms to follow, Cooke may have
been onto a new music genre with this single record. He would never complete that journey musically, but there is a
new honesty and freshness that overrides the conventions of his previous hits,
that though fun, seem to show their age much more. Here is a man crying out like few could ever hope to, finding a
new voice he had never demonstrated before.
The content of the lyrics, as classic and heartbreaking as they are,
still cannot seem to sum-up the feelings he is trying to convey. A new door had opened, but unfortunately for
all of us, it closed in what is an immeasurable loss.
Even if Cooke had not been on the way to a new musical
awakening, his loss would still be one of the most devastating in music
history, but it is made far worse by the realization of what this single song
offers. Like the other songs so
incredibly full and musically layered in DSD, it is a song that DSD gives us
the sound truth that makes music the universal language. One can now understand why music diehards
stuck with vinyl all these years, but with SACD, a whole new era of great music
of the past returns. The Sam Cooke
SACDs here and to come will offer some of the greatest, strongest reasons to
celebrate the world of great music opening up like never before. It is nothing short of an historical event.
- Nicholas Sheffo
