Ahmad Jamal – Live at the Pershing: But Not for Me
Released: 1958
Label: Argo Records
Notes:
Front cover: This was just painful. I added a “before” pic on Twitter and Instagram that you can see (here). As you can see, it is ROUGH. It’s from about 1958 (not a reissue or anything as you can see from the label) and it belonged to my mom. She would have been fourteen or fifteen when she got it. I had no clue she was into Jazz and always assumed this was my father’s. She’d always been into softer, simpler music so I was surprised to know this was actually hers. Wonder what made her pick it up? Sadly, I can’t ask her as she’s been gone for nearly thirty years. Anyway, the album is well-loved and has all kinds of problems. I used the “cloning” tool for all it was worth to get rid of the cracks and the copious amount of ring wear. I also replaced all the black where the artist and title information is. It looks as good as I can possibly make it and I took a lot of time on it.
Back cover: This is equally trashed but easier to fix. The first thing I did was “remove color cast” to deal with the age-related yellowing. Once that was done, I replaced all the white areas when the cover was at its largest size so as not to harm the text. This worked well but it left a lot of spots behind so I manually painted each one out. I also removed my mother’s name from the upper left-hand corner. I have it here for my nostalgia but it’s nothing you’d want to see, I’m sure. Like the front, all of this took much time.
Labels: Labels are in very good shape. Some minor scratches but nothing too severe. Thankfully, these were far easier to deal with than the covers.