[salannelson]

How about the stuff by The Black Keys prior to Attack & Release? From what I understand they recorded those albums themselves.

 

[LFF]

There are very few RAW performances. Even the old ones mentioned usually had some kind of tinkering either by way of tape edits, EQ, cutting masters, etc. Unfortunately, the vast majority of RAW performances committed to a recorded medium were old recordings made directly onto wax and the fidelity of those remaining isn't exactly great.

 

[bigshot]

In the fifties, editing and overdubbing was rare. Pop vocals, jazz, classical, popular, easy listening, rock n roll and country music were almost always recorded and mixed live to tape in complete takes, or at the most mixed down from three track masters. The only real post processing was assembling the selects into album order and fixing fade ins and outs. In the sixties, editing and overdubbing became more common in pop music, mostly after the Beatles' Sgt Pepper. Before that, overdubbing was limited to Les Paul and a handful of novelty pop records.

In the late 40s, many recordings were cut live to high fidelity 33 1/3 lacquer master disks, with multiple 78rpm length takes on a single disk. After the beginning of the LP era, these recordings were dubbed to LP live on the fly DJ style. If you listen to the very earliest classical Columbia LPs, you can hear slight miscues And speed fluctuations as the engineer slip cues and pots from one master disk to the next.

 

[tnmike1]

you may also want totry Miles Davis' "Live at the Cellar Door"  Don't know if it qualifies as quite "raw" but the multi-CD session live-taped over several nights is one heckuva performance and features an 18 yr old bass guitarist who, according to the CD notes, Miles stole from Stevie Wonder.  Walked into Stevie's recording session and said, "I'm stealing your (expletive) bass player" and off they went.
 
spectacular set if not a bitboring in the fact that they do"Honky Tonk", "What I Say"  and several other Davis classics more than once throughout the CDs.  Still, a really great sessions-tape

 

[non-entity]

Jazz Icons? I'll check out one or two of these DVDs, if I can.

I just listened to a handful of these soundboard recordings by Grateful Dead and did like some of them... These are authorized bootlegs, right?

@markbrauer: Do you mean Sheffield Lab Catalogue numbers? Some minutes ago I tried to listen to samples, but apparently there are none online anymore on their website. Anyways, I'll check an album out somehow. It seems that Sheffield LPs aren't SO expensive on ebay.

The Black Keys are great. Not exactly unedited, but still "raw", if you ask me.

Miles stole a bass player? Sounds interesting! How do they call this? Stagelifting?

 

[tnmike1]

according to the liner notes, Miles walked into the recording session and just said, "I'm stealing your mother....fng bass player" and walked out with him.  Gotta remember, this when Miles was a walking living legend and would suppose anyone would give him anything.
 
The amazing part was: this was an 18 yr old kid that one of Miles' people had heard and said "you gotta get him". SO he did.  And WHAT a bass player.  His beats on "What I Say" are amazing.  This CD set gets little attntion and it's one of my favorite Miles recordings, and I have most of them

 

[markbrauer]

Sampling is good.
 
Town Hall Records does have some online samples for Sheffield products.
 
The King James Version is available on CD:
http://www.townhallrecords.com/cgi-bin/townhall.pl?detail=SL10068
 
But Still Harry After All These Years is out of stock (has samples though):
http://www.townhallrecords.com/cgi-bin/townhall.pl?detail=SL10071
 
The other two Harry James recordings Comin' From A Good Place and Harry James & His Big Band also offer samples (I never liked these as well):
http://www.townhallrecords.com/cgi-bin/townhall.pl?detail=SL10070
http://www.townhallrecords.com/cgi-bin/townhall.pl?detail=SL10057G
 
Town Hall also has samples for many Sheffield releases and I suspect others might be great too.  My favorite guitar album is not included but there is a guitar duo album that you could check out.
http://www.townhallrecords.com/cgi-bin/townhall.pl?detail=SL10057G

 

[bigshot]

Sheffield Lab put out some real klunkers. Not from a sound standpoint, but from performance. The direct to disk process wasn't suited to everyone. The best direct to disk records I got were the Lincoln Mayorga ones, Buddy Rich and Dave Grusin. If you like the "Baked Potato" style jazz, Lee Ritenour would always record very direct with great sound. But his music isn't raw. Super smooth.

I have the direct to disk of the first Harry James LP mentioned there and it's as limp and flaccid a big band performance as I've ever heard. Awful.