Capitol Recording Studios–Abbey Road’s Sister

As I type this I am listening to the incomparable strains of Sting singing my arrangement of his “Burn For You”. We did sessions here today for a commercial to promote the upcoming tour. He is not using the recording of “Burn For You” but he agreed to let me arrange it because it has always haunted me. I had a idea a long time ago to write a chart on it for just strings where the strings are broken down into small groups, not quite all separate parts but multiple divided sections. Each section would have little grains of music to contribute. Only by hearing the whole did the harmonies make themselves clear. It worked out well I think.

Capitol Studios is quite a place. Al Schmitt, the multiple Grammy winner who has recorded a million records has his own room here and Studio A is obviously the room Sinatra made his own. The building itself is a legend and is now protected from ever being torn down, not unlike Abbey Road it’s sister. A great place to be and I have had some special moments here.

Musically directing and arranging Shelby Lynne’s Dusty Springfield project for Phil Ramone. Doing the vocal arrangements for Tony Bennett’s Bennett Sings The Blues, again for Phil Ramone, and watching him run like a bat out of hell towards the tape machine (yes, it was recorded on tape) when Ray Charles started singing. Sometimes you only get one take with Ray before he leaves. Indeed we got a take and a half and if Phil Ramone hadn’t run at the age of 70 faster than a 16 year old kid at a track meet, no one would have ever heard it. Arranging some large Horn and String stuff for David Foster on a Peter Cincotti record and now……………Sting.

Paula Salvatore runs the place and I am working with Steve Genewick, who has been Al Schmitt’s assistant engineer for years but is also a chief engineer now. He is an astonishing engineer, combining a number of traits, incredibly fast comping and Pro-Tools abilities (for the layman that’s is getting around the technical elements of modern recording as if it is second nature) and a real knowledge of the best mics and the tradition of recording brilliance from the past. It sounds so good and most of that is Sting obviously, his voice, his melodies and the songs themselves. My arrangement doesn’t hurt but Steve is mixing the hell out of it.

Another great engineer will mix these tracks; Elliot Scheiner, who, among other records, mixed Steely Dan’s Aja and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours I believe??? An embarrassment of riches.

I love Colette Barber, who is Abbey Road’s studio manager and the Studio Empress of London as I call her. She makes my life great in London as now Paula Salvatore has now done here. Jill Dell’Abate is the original Studio Empress of New York, the recording industry’s greatest production coordinator and also a world class music contractor so a shout out to Jill. I have not allowed anyone else the name Jill but it is now a Tri-Coastal thing. Paula Salvatore–Studio Empress of the West, Jill Dell’Abate–Studio Empress of the East, and last but certainly not least Colette Barber, Studio Empress of the Empire and the Union Jack.

Great studios. ENDANGERED!!! No you cannot do everything in your bathroom. Live orchestra, a world class room sound for drums, horns and other insundry items. I know….I love the fact that the landscape is open and anyone can make great art for cheap but AHHHHH!!! To sonics and audio wizardry, Capitol Recording Studios and Abbey Road are what St. Paul is to Cathedral Architecture. Incredible to believe that there is no large room to record a Symphony Orchestra in Manhattan with the exception of Manhattan Center which is an old ballroom that is not run like a professional recording studio. Sign O’ The Times

More soon……… have some words still to say about Corigliano’s Circus Maximus as promised and a word of two on notoriety and fame and art making. In the best of cases is it always a combination of those three combined………??? Maybe not??? Ears to the ground…R

Coltrane, Ades, Religion and Politics–What the hell am I talking about???

Blogs….you have to love them. Why should my blather matter? Who knows? Maybe I have a tidbit that may be worth checking or scoping or considering but….take all of it with a vat of sodium.

Taste right?

You love Iggy Pop. She loves Katy Perry. He loves The Velvet Underground. They love Webern. Those guys over there love Tchaikovsky. He loves Stan Kenton. She thinks Stan Kenton was a stiff over stuffed and swingless academic. They love Coleman Hawkins yet those guys over there love Eric Dolphy. This huge group of people adore The Beatles yet that batch of guys think they destroyed music as opposed to revolutionizing it. TASTE! It all comes down to taste.

Recently a number of my friends and acquaintances from Nashville have been blogging about how the Health Care thing is the takeover of our world by the government. At the same time my friend, the great engineer Joel Moss who I met working with Tony Bennett, blogs in an almost violent manner for the opposite view. Joel writes that anybody who denies the right of every man and woman to health care must be a fascist and should be taken out and shot (not literally but Joel is pretty hard core). I tend towards Joel’s view and am extremely pleased that SOMETHING passed, however ignorant that may be. That said, DAMN!!! These days the whole Religion and Politics rule should be exercised at all times. Keith Olberman and Sean Hannity in the same room talking. NAH!! Seen that on CNN every night. No thanks.

Discourse is good but the kind of discourse that I love is normally anyone speaking with David Gergen. Do you remember the days on the The MacNeil/Lehrer Report on PBS when they had Mark Shields and David Gergen?? Now THAT is the sweet marjoram! People passionate but respectful. We liberals secretly know that the Private Sector can get things done better and quicker when they put their minds to it (unfortunately they don’t always p………). At the same time I think many conservatives would secretly admit that if it weren’t for liberals there would be no Civil Rights Bill, no Medicare and perhaps greed would run rampant and destroy everything in its path.

What the heck am I talking about though??? Politics….? Shouldn’t I take my own advice. Shut up Rob! Back to music.

I was wrong for doubting Ades. Tevot is just plain thrilling. What sounds??? Ah, new sonorities. Thomas Ades: Tevot. Scope it. Coltrane’s Alabama??????????? Go find it and pull it out again. Coltrane channeling the Four Little Girls tragedy in Alabama and making a musical comment on it or a prayer or a lament in reaction to it. However he approached it, it is essential listening.

Mason Bates….Bad Ass….DJ who writes for orchestra and laptop. Sign me up for that *&^! Michael Tilson Thomas’s Keeping Score series on DVD??? MUST OWNS! Tchaik 4. The Rite Of Spring. Ives Holidays Symphony. Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique (a work that still eludes me), Beethoven’s Eroica, Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 and life under Stalin, and Copland. Buy now! I met Michael working with the New World Symphony and Vanessa Williams in Miami for a benefit about 5 years ago. Terrific mind and guy. Loved talking Mahler with him. He recorded Mahler 8 three times just to get it right and performed it about a dozen times before he would allow the record to come out. It paid off for him and he won the Grammy for Best Classical Album I believe.

I still think Bernstein’s Mahler 8 on Video with Vienna is still the best Mahler 8 ever BUT….. Tilson Thomas kills it. Wonderful. The final Chorus Mysticus??? One of the glories of music my friends.

Next time I want to talk about the miracle that is John Corigliano’s Circus Maximus. It deserves a whole blog.

Rob

Ades Tevot—Billie Holiday and Tom Waits–Sufjan

Music…………….Today I was in Barnes and Noble in Union Square and Billie Holiday was coming out of the stores music system. Damn! Old microphones. People playing live in the same room. No overdubs. A PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTED. NO FIXES. NO TUNING. NO FLYING AROUND TRACKS! As a music producer I am thrilled technology allows us to tweak tracks and edit and have the tracks be more like clay than law but…………..

You can hear it when it is a performance and not a set of carefully manicured overdubs. Pretty extraordinary. It makes you realize that Sgt. Peppers and Dark Side Of The Moon also ushered in things not always wise, chief among them endless artistic navel gazing. Tom Waits still records pure old school and sometimes self consciously, allowing his bassist to purposely play off mic and out of tune. A little goes a long way but damn, I do love the concept behind that dedication. The recent Tom Waits stuff is so timeless because of this. Ah to write a few arrangements for him. Mmmmmmmmmmmm….. Keeping it off the cuff.

This approach obviously won’t work for big, brand named, glistening Pop music but for the listener inside of us that yearns for a little Bessie Smith, I say “Amen”. Performance!!! Documenting a performance (the FIRST Beatles record and the Sinatra records from the 50′s, all great big band records prior to 1970 etc etc etc.)

Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall, Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall, Miles Davis at The Plugged Nickel. The list goes on and on. And one from the present. Any Keith Jarrett Trio record with Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock. LIVE.

The new Thomas Ades record on EMI is fascinating. I do think certain composers become critic’s darlings. John Adams and Magnus Lindberg are two that come to mind recently (both deserving in many ways.) Ades is one of those and the reason is his rigorous mind, intellectual and probing and constantly surprising. He has his own sound world utilizing the same instruments that have been used for 200 years. NOT EASY.

That said, I am not entirely convinced in 50 years his music will be quite as well loved as Britten’s is now. Bottom line though: he is a certified genius. “Tevot” and especially, as I have said before in these blogs, his Violin Concerto called “Concentric Paths” featuring the insanely gifted Anthony Marwood, are both deserving of time spent with the stereo on and your brain on input.

Another record that is so great, and it’s one I just heard, is called “Run Rabbit Run” by the String Quartet OSSO. It is filled with absolutely uncanny arrangements of Sufjan Stevens’s electronica stuff. Nico Muhly does one great one but there are a few others including Year of The Horse arranged by the first Violinist Rob Moose. REMARKABLE use of harmonics and CLEARLY written by a player in the best of senses (Mozart and Britten were Violists). Buy this record. It is the coolest thing I have heard in a while. Love to all. I’ll be back.

Rob

Sting–Sacred Love and other forgotten felicities

Listening to Sting’s Sacred Love record and finding some real gems. I have been asked to write some orchestrations for the new Sting tour and he wanted me to listen to a song called “Never Coming Home” which I had maybe heard once. It is a great track, fast and flinty with a great lyric about a woman who gets out before it’s too late—-”and she tells him that she’s never coming home.” I love this line “There’s a clock upon the table and it’s burning up the hour
And you feel your life is shrinking like the petals of a flower”.

I realized that sometimes a great project goes by unnoticed because of where your head may be at during a particular time. Kipper produced this record with Sting and the sounds, the pads and sonic design in general are both gorgeous and multi-layered. To my ears at the time though, going through a roots period listening to early Dylan and other like minded things, it was just too much.

I remember also having discovered a bunch of early Blues music like Blind Willie McTell and especially Blind Willie Johnson (I also listened to people with names other than Blind Willie). Indeed I was listening to music that instrumentally never made use of electricity. Therefore I missed this and couldn’t get next to it. After that I went through a period of listening to things like Corigliano’s Symphony No. 2 and Olivier Messiaen’s St. Francis Of Assisi, a million miles away from this universe.

I wonder how much music I have missed because of periods of exploration and shifting personal taste. I remember buying OK Computer during a time when I was listening to only singer/songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Patty Griffin, Neil Finn and Chris Whitley. Can you believe that record went by me without registering at all??? Needless to say I discovered it later as I have now discovered “Stolen Car” and “Never Coming Home” off Sacred.

People are still incredibly surprised that my favorite Radiohead record is “In Rainbows” (including the remarkable B sides “Down Is The New Up” and “Bangers and Mash”—unbelievable). I understand why that puzzles some because The Bends and OK are such wonderful surprises considering what was going on in music at the time. When In Rainbows came out though, I was ready, receptive and planning on losing myself in it. I listened to that record about 100 times and it is now in the pantheon along with “Soul Cages”, “Hejira”, “Shadows and Light”, “Blood On The Tracks”, and “Abbey Road”. I went back to Pete Towshend’s “Psychoderelict” recently and it has a few lovely things on there also. “English Boy”???? YES!!

I missed that the first time also. I also originally never quite got Wilco or Spoon but have since discovered the error of my ways. Both bands have new records (not so new in Wilco’s case) that are great. Ah…..music!!!

Today it is Sacred Love and Stravinsky’s Duo Concertante played by Thomas Ades on Piano and Anthony Marwood on Violin. What can be said???? Stravinsky, Stravinsky, Stravinsky!!!!!!! Endless. Britten’s A Boy Is Born too. It is his OPUS 3!!!!!!! Early Britten and by early I mean EARLY! Yet…….It has 8 part choral writing as felicitous as humanly possible. Immortal stuff. Like a pool that leads to a distant cavern that leads to an underground stream that leads to a river and then the sea.

More soon, Rob

Sorry, it has been a while—-the major wind storm of 2010

Hey All,

I have blogged more in the first week of my new site than the entire lifetime of my last site and yet it has been almost a week since my last blog. We lost power on Saturday the 13th and won’t have it until perhaps Saturday the 20th. I’m working on both this Orchestral Commission and Sting charts at the same time. After the storm I could REALLY use some 40 hour days. It is getting to be a bit ridiculous time crunch wise. I am being particularly self critical about this batch of work also. Sting was an artist I grew up on and is both an extraordinarily dedicated artist and a genuinely lovely man so I want to make sure it’s right. I am sure I will lose my footing at times and disappoint but then, this is Planet Earth and such is life.

Listening to an English Choral composer named Tarik O’Regan just to keep my ears open. A brilliant writer for Chorus. Very impressed. I read the article in The New York Times about the new Brad Mehldau/ Jon Brion project. Brad, for those of you who don’t know, is a brilliant Jazz pianist but is also a composer and someone who has really studied Mahler and Berg and Strauss, perhaps not as much as Uri Caine who is the ultimate hybrid Classical/Jazz conceptualist, but Brad is the real deal. He has written some highly intricate music for 20+ separate instruments playing very much like Strauss’s Metamorphosen. In that piece you just don’t have 16 Violin Ones, 14 Violin Twos, Violas etc etc etc…(in most symphony orchestras there would be 5 separate string choirs when you add the Celli and the Double Basses and you would occasionally divide them into multiple parts but not always); you actually have 23 separate string parts which is pretty unique and wondrous. He wrote the piece after the destruction of the Munich Opera House at the end of WWII. It represented the end of an era of Germanic Supremacy from an Artistic Standpoint i.e. THE GREAT LINE>>>>>Bach. Mozart. Haydn. Beethoven. Schumann. Brahms. Wagner. Bruckner. Mahler. Strauss and then Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. In it he weaved the theme from the Funeral March movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony (No. 3) and he didn’t even realize it. Anyway………… Brad was influenced by it and invited Joshua Redman to be the soloist.

I admit I got sad for a second because I was up to possibly do an orchestral record with Joshua Redman and was about to call him up to do that project together for the Britten Sinfonia (this would have been our first—I have never worked with him before). Turns out Brad and Joshua will be playing this work with the Sinfonia in the Fall. Small world.

What this reminds me is that ideas and concepts in artistic work are fluid and exist in the air, in our collective sub-conscious so to speak. We all think that our brains are completely unique and that our ideas are OURS. I have found many times that I had something in my head I thought was a new idea and then I read about it in the paper days later coming from someone else’s mouth.

Synchronicity and the humming of the human experience. A bit scary and both exciting and, in this case, somewhat odd for me. I feel like a bit of an also ran I admit. That said, I can’t wait to hear the Mehldau project. It sounds fascinating and both Brad and Joshua are supremely gifted musicians. Two of our finest.

My writing for Joshua would have been a bit more traditional and perhaps a meeting of a kind of Gil Evans approach (like the great New Bottle, Old Wine project Gil did for Cannonball Adderly) allied to my kind of mid-period Stravinsky meets the Mahler Song Cycles orchestration. Anyway….maybe Branford or Joe Lovano would be interested in a kind of suite for Sax and Orchestra (a possible artistic sand trap but could be beautiful.) For those interested in that kind of a sound, check out the beautiful and timeless Claus Ogerman project that he wrote for Micheal Brecker. It is called Cityscape and it’s wondrous.

Back to my dark house. I must work by candlelight (actually I found a good generator and have a few lamps—I am cool and grateful.) ‘Til the next blurb.

Rob