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.