The Five Satins - The Original Master Tapes Collection, vol. 1 and 2

Review by Bruce Eder [-]



For audio quality alone, this 23-song collection is worth picking up -- the Five Satins' vocals always sounded good, but you get the real sense of the presence of the backing band as well as the richness of all of the voices on this edition (except on "All Mine": the band never showed for the session, and the track was released a cappella as a result, and may be the prettiest song here other than "In The Still Of The Night"). The 22 songs on this CD, all derived from the earliest extant session masters of each, cover the bulk of the Five Satins' history with Fred Parris as lead singer -- this is the group's classic period, making this release all-but-essential when the quality of the audio is taken into account. This disc is about as close as Collectables Records has gotten to matching the quality of the workmanship on such releases as Bear Family's Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers, Cadillacs, and Orioles boxes -- about 50 years of hiss and degrading sound is stripped off of the songs at hand, though one must concede that the group's Ember Records sides, from late 1956 and 1957, benefit more from this treatment, as they were better recorded than their early Standard label sides.