George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band
Greenwich House
New York City, N.Y.
Oct. 9, 1987


01. stage & band intro 3:55
02. Inner Urge 10:57
03. song intro -> :34
04. Novelette 12:04
05. talk (cut repeatedly) :39
06. (unknown) (cut, tape flip) :38
07. talk 2:45
08. Happening Now? 14:02
09. talk 1:01
10. It's You Or No One (cut, tape change) 11:11
11. talk :41
12. Emergency Call (Ecology-Song) 16:20

Total: 74:52


source: unknown mics > Aiwa cassette recorder > Shelly Rosenzweig's master cassette (TDK D-60)
last two tracks: unknown mics > Aiwa cassette recorder > Shelly Rosenzweig's master cassette > Tommy Stevenson's first-gen cassette (TDK SA 90)

transfer: master and first-gen cassettes > Nakamichi CR-7A (head azimuth optimized) > Metric Halo MIO-2882 > Macintosh MacBook Pro > MIO Console 5.6 > wav > MacBook Air M1 > iZotope RX 12 Advanced (see below) > xACT 2.59 > FLAC (24/48)


Notes
This is from the Sheldon Rosenzweig collection. The last song is from a tape in Tommy Stevenson's collection. Special thanks to Shelly and Stevenson's son, Thomas, for sharing their tapes. Both transferred by Richard Russell.

There were two performances on Oct. 9. It's unclear if this is the early show or late show.

This was recorded on two cassettes, however the master of the second tape is missing. Amazingly, a first-gen copy was among the few dozen surviving tapes in Stevenson's collection, and I used it to complete the recording. (Stevenson & Rosenzweig lived in the same town.) There's virtually no difference in sound quality between the two sources.

This performance occurred about 10 days before two shows in Fort Worth, Texas, that were recorded and released the next year as "Happening Now!" by the "George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band '87."

Evidently the batteries were weak in Shelly's recorder, and the recording speed drifted repeatedly, resulting in a number of tempo and pitch problems. I used Anthropic's AI assistant "Claude" to analyze the recordings so that I could correct these issues as well as repair a short damaged section of the recording at the end of Side 1 (Tracks 5-6). I used the "Happening Now!" live album as a guide to determine correct pitch, since it was recorded with the same performers with virtually the same set list less than two weeks later. It became clear that this recording started near the correct speed but slowed considerably over time (resulting in the recording generally sounding too fast). Each time the recording was paused and restarted, the speed picked back up but then slowed again. This happened repeatedly. The AI tool mapped out the changes (sampling pitch and tempo every few seconds because the recording speed issues were inconsistent over time and varied considerably) and provided a guide to correcting the problems by speeding up (or slowing down) very short passages of audio, piece by piece. I used the SoX (“Sound eXchange”) command-line audio editing tool to implement the changes. I verified everything by ear, though it's probably far from perfect. All edits were done in 24 bit mode.

The last +/- 60 seconds of Side 1 (Tracks 5-6) were almost unusable. Track 5 featured Gruntz speaking at length. But the recording was paused repeatedly, with harsh spikes, mic noise and cable noise throughout. I edited out most of the noise and softened the transitions using iZotope RX Advanced, but Gruntz's words are incomplete and the section is still disjointed.

Just a few seconds into the next track -- really only a snippet of repeated piano chords (the tape ran out within about 24 seconds) -- the recording paused again, interrupting the music briefly. With the AI tool's guidance, about 2 seconds was trimmed at this break to preserve the tempo.There were two or three additional, less-intrusive pauses and breaks later that were repaired with trims as well as a roughly 1-second splice from a similar passage.

The last two tracks are from the first-generation copy of this recording.

I did not apply any noise reduction or make any EQ adjustments.

-- Richard Russell, October 2026




George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band:
piano, arrangements
George Gruntz

trumpets, flugelhorn
Franco Ambrosetti
Enrico Rava
Manfred Schoof
Marvin Stamm
Kenny Wheeler

french horn
Sharon Freeman
Tom Varner

trombone
Ray Anderson
Art Baron
David Taylor

saxophones, reeds
Howard Johnson (also tuba)
Larry Schneider
Lee Konitz
Ernst Ludwig Petrowsky
Joe Henderson

bass
Mike Richmond

drums
Bob Moses

vocals (Tracks 8, 10)
Sheila Jordan


Images for all shows as well as full size images for this show.

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