How did the idea arise that you wanted to record music?
It wasn't planned, it just happened. I was interested in music, but parallel to that when I was a young teenager I was also interested in ham radio. The technical part of that is building transmitters, receivers and audio amplifiers. It was my interest in music, as well as the technical aspects of radio, which brought me to sound recording.
So fooling around with ham radios led right to recording?
Exactly. I used to go to downtown New York and buy gear. Used to build things myself... mixers, amplifiers and so forth. Actually the first mixer I used for recording I built myself.
Did you go down to Chinatown and pick up parts there?
Cortlandt Street, not Chinatown. What was not available were complete audio recording consoles. What you had to do in that time — and I was not the only one from what I heard — you had to modify radio consoles. Consoles were manufactured for radio broadcast use, and you had to modify them to record music. There was no such thing as a console manufacturer as you know it today.
As an overview, for a mixer you had to exactly think of what your needs were even from day one.
Right.
So that's during high school?
Yep.
Wow. So when you built that did you just use a regular reel-to-reel that was available at the time?
When I started recording it was just before the advent of tape. So my first recordings as a hobbyist were done on disc.
Wow. Acetate?
Acetate, exactly. You would buy your discs. And the machine I had at that time was called a Presto disc recorder. I would go down to Cortlandt Street, New York, to buy components to build a mixer to feed that. That was my first recording console. You wouldn't call it a console.
Were you recording musicians from high school?
My friends. Classmates.
Did you play an instrument yourself?
Early on in high school, not too far from the time I got interested in recording, I played trumpet in the high school band.
Wonderful.
It was terrible, really. [laughing] I learned quick enough to record rather than to play music.
You were in the big band in the high school?
No, no, the marching band. I ended up taking tickets at the football games instead of playing in the band. The teachers had to give me something to do.
So you weren't playing in the impromptu ensembles that the kids would do?
No. All my friends did, though. I was focused on the recording.
So they would come over to the house and you would record them.
Yes, often. And the neighbors would complain in the summer because the windows were open.
Little did they know.
Right. One time the famous child actor Jackie Cooper came over. He was all grown up and loved to play drums. So I recorded his little band. The musicians called him Skippy. As I look back it was awesome. This was before I did real sessions for the record companies.
When did you start getting serious musicians to record on your recordings?
One friend of mine started to work with bands and he had friends who were musicians, jazz musicians too, and they would come over to my parents' house and have sessions, jam a little bit and I would try to record it.
As I understand it as this was building up you actually asked your parents, made arrangements with your parents, to allow much more recording in the house?
That developed over time. When I got busier recording neighborhood musicians and then jazz musicians it became an imposition, but they were very tolerant about it. Before my parents built the house in Hackensack, I was boring holes in the walls of our old house for the cables to go through. But when they built the house on Prospect Avenue in Hackensack, the control room was incorporated into the design of the house. They knew how involved I was and incorporated that into the home they designed.
How large was that studio?
It was a fairly large living room. It was the living room of their house. Fairly high ceiling and there was an alcove in one wall and a hallway going toward the bedrooms and other rooms. It turned out that musicians were very comfortable playing there. Even today when I meet someone who played there they say they have good memories of it.
Was there actually a control room?
In the Hackensack house they allowed me to have a control room with a big double-paned glass window between the two rooms.
Besides those two rooms then, were there any other rooms?
Sure, private areas of course — kitchen, dining room, bedroom, etc. There was a patio outside. One of the Blue Note covers has a Francis Wolff picture of Elmo Hope and my dog outside. Elmo's the one writing the music. [laughing]
That's incredible that your folks were so understanding.
I still think it's incredible. They were very tolerant and understanding.
They saw that this was so important for you. Clearly you must've shown much promise.
Well, to them, I guess so.
Indeed. So in this house you were actually bringing in pro situations, these name acts?
Oh, sure.
How did that happen?
It was difficult, because that's what really motivated me to build my own studio. Blue Notes' Alfred Lion wanted to record at night. That didn't work out too well — there was some pressure about that. Most of the pro sessions I did in Hackensack were done in the daytime. Actually I don't remember any sessions at night. I might've done a few demos at night in the early days, but that was it.
So you would be finished by five or six?
Yes. At that time sessions weren't as long as they are now. The requirements with regard to the amount of music that had to be recorded weren't nearly as demanding as they are now. When it got to be a commercial date, for a label, they only had to record 15 or 20 minutes of music per session.
In the Hackensack studio, how old were you around then?
I was in college before the Hackensack building was completed. During the time I was in college, the Hackensack house was under construction. By the time that was finished I had graduated from college.
How many records do you think you accomplished in that studio?
Too many to count. Comparing the years that I spent there to the time spent in the studio here now, it was a relatively short time. There was a lot less time spent recording in Hackensack than here.
So do you think that would encompass two to four years?
A little more than that. Probably eight or nine years there.
Do you know how many sessions a week you were doing in the Hackensack house, when things were really humming along?
Well, there was a time I had an Optometric practice going, so I could really only record two days a week. If I were to look in my book at those days, I was routinely doing two sessions a day. So if I did nothing else, the maximum would be like four sessions a week I could do. But remember a session was about three hours.
And you were saying that you realized that you needed to record in the evening and you wanted more space.
For larger bands. That was a big pressure on me.
They wanted to get you with 22-, 24- piece bands?
Yes. Some of the later sessions were like ten-piece, and that was pushing it a little bit for Hackensack. I had gotten Gil Evans there, which I just wish I could have been able to do here. That was the pressure. And of course I had to formulate in my own mind what kind of studio I wanted to build. It was just the opposite of Hackensack. In Hackensack the control room was an incidental part of the building. It was primarily a residence. Now I was planning a building that was primarily a studio with a residence being incidental. It was just the opposite.
When you decided on the Englewood Cliffs house/recording studio, what was your thinking about the aesthetic and overall functionality of it?
That was a lucky series of events. I was also married at this time and I had my wife, Elva, and we were planning a life for the two of us. This would be our home. That was part of the equation, too. And of course, limited funds for what I could build as opposed to what I wanted to build. So my wife read an article in the New York Times about a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition in New York City in one of the museums where they reproduced one of the Wright houses. We saw pictures in the paper and she went to meet the people who built it for them. There were a lot of Wrightian principles, his concept of what architecture should be, that fit in with our thinking. They seemed to define what we were looking for. Without going into many details, it was a masonry construction of the studio, the shape of the studio, and also the fact that if we were to adhere to his concepts without using him as a designer by going to one of his apprentices instead, I could actually afford to do it and complete it. Otherwise I might get drawings, which are works of art but I couldn't afford to build. So that was my thinking at that time and that's what I did. And there are some aspects of the design that I could point out to you.
Who was the man that designed the building?
David Henken. He's no longer alive and neither is Mr. Wright. By visiting places during this time period — recording studios, concert halls, places like that — I formulated what I wanted relative to the studio. My wife also agreed that the general appearance of the building should be represented by the works of Mr. Wright. So one of the basic concepts, for example, was if you have masonry wall and finish it in such a way that it has a pleasant appearance, you could use the same masonry for both an interior and exterior wall at the same time. You wouldn't have to finish it one way on the inside and then go ahead and finish, or process it another way on the outside. That's what you see here. It sounds so simple now, but try that on the local Board of Adjustment in 1960. [laughing]
It's so quiet in here and there's definitely a highway a few miles away.
There's a highway 200 feet from here, but the building is surrounded by many small trees. They're great at sound absorption. Airplanes are sometimes a problem, not too much, luckily. I didn't want to expand it to a big studio requiring a large staff. I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to stay small, which of course is inherently limiting to what I could do. I wanted to have one studio and one control room and also one operator. It was that way for many years — one engineer. But now I have an assistant and she's the only one I ever had associated with recording sessions. She's been with me since 1989. Her name is Maureen Sickler. She first worked with me on the CTI Dizzy Gillespie movie, Rhythm Stick. We work together now. She has survived many bass solos. [laughing] Her session notes are works of art, and I'm claiming for her the title of world's greatest tape op.
All these years you engineered and produced all the records single handedly?
Engineered, yes — produced, no. The labels did the producing. I never hired the musicians. I'm an engineer, not a producer. I've never hired a musician in my life. It's the record labels that do the producing. I also do the masters, by the way. That's another part of my work.
[What led you to] add mastering as a service?
Well, I long ago realized that in order to achieve what you and your clients want from the mixing, you should also do the mastering, otherwise things can get murky. I'm speaking only for myself now. This is what works for me.
Did you have to design some of the equipment for that? I think the only things available back then were disc cutters from Neumann.
Well, I can show you. There's also a lathe that's called a Scully lathe. I used the Scully all during the LP years for the mastering. I enjoyed cutting LP masters, but I was also glad to see it go. Preparing a master for the light beam recorder at the CD plant is a lot better than sending a lacquer master to a former swimming pool in the Bronx for electroplating, and then having someone drop a screwdriver on it.
I imagine.
But I just don't feel that I should sit here and do the hard part that is sessions, recording, mixing, editing and whatever else is involved, and then turn the whole thing over to someone else to do the masters. It just doesn't make sense to me. Mastering is a critical step.
What were your considerations for mastering?
Well, I had the same considerations then as now. That hasn't changed. How is this going to sound on the radio? In the very early days (perhaps you don't recall) it was all mono. The term "sounds like AM radio". Have you heard that expression?
Oh sure.
Right, that's quaint and antiquated now, actually. But that's what the musicians heard up to the '60s. And the producers, that's all they knew. So when they were recording and judging, and mixing the balance and the overall sound, they were hearing all their stuff in mono. A lot of the musicians didn't care about the whole recording end of it anyway. They just played the music and let someone else think about that. But the producers were really mono oriented on all of those sessions.
Were you able to take some of your mixes and play them in a car?
We used to do that in quite elaborate ways. To do it now is very simple. Burn a ref and put it in the car. I remember thinking before CDs, "How can we do that?" I actually built a little RF transmitter. We would broadcast on the AM band out to the car and hear it that way. There was always pressure to do that.
Your ham radio days came right back.
It sounds funny doesn't it?
Can you name some of the labels that you were recording for?
Sure. All of them. [laughter] No, seriously, most of the jazz labels that were out there: Blue Note, Prestige, Savoy, Atlantic, a couple of things from Riverside and Vox Classical. You name the labels. Not the majors. No major labels.
I would've asked for you. "Let's get that guy."
I doubt if anyone at the big companies was aware of what was going on. There was nobody there to say, "Oh, what a sound that is, let's go to that guy." That's not the way it was. If you signed with a major company their own engineers recorded you. That went on for a long time. Also in the early days of Columbia, RCA and Decca there was a strong union situation. Not only did they build their own equipment, they dictated how many engineers were in the control room. If the management wanted to record elsewhere, they required at least one union engineer to be present. You had to have one extra person as tape op, if you'll forgive the expression.
Sure. [laughter]
The other guy was the mixer.
That's so funny... It's so apparent how audiophilic and pleasant your recordings are. Even in those days, nobody was recognizing that.
No. In the early times they didn't even put an engineer's name on a record. The first time that ever happened I had recorded a few things for the pianist Lenny Tristano. He put my name on the label as an engineer and I don't think that had ever happened before. Bob Thiele used to kid me about that. He would say, "Rudy, you know in Europe engineers wear white coats."
Really. That was in the '50s?
Yes. Even in the sixties I did some things that don't have my name on them. The Ray Charles album, Genius + Soul = Jazz that I did for Creed Taylor, had no engineering credits.
When you had the studio and stuff, did you ever do any scouting for the labels?
Through the years I've gotten a lot of phone calls from people who think that I have some influence in that way. No, I like to stay clear of all that kind of activity. That's the last thing in the world labels want to hear from me are suggestions about who to record. I'm an engineer. I'm not a producer, not a promoter. A lot of people start as engineers and end up as producers. Tom Dowd did more producing than engineering eventually. I'm very content to stay an engineer.
The jazz era was at one point considered kind of, if you will, almost like a dangerous profession. I mean the lifestyles of the musicians.
I was never a part of that. I isolated myself from their personal life. Their personal life was none of my business as long as they were okay when they came over here to the studio.
How did you meet Bob Thiele and Alfred Lion?
Alfred Lion began my continuity with a record company, rather than doing a session here and there. I had recorded a band for a small label owned by Gus Stateris. He had recorded a baritone saxophone player and arranger named Gil Melle. I wasn't present when this happened, but Alfred Lion purchased the 10" LP of this band and released it on the Blue Note label. It was successful. So the time came when Alfred wanted to do another session. Up until that time, Alfred had been recording at a radio station studio in New York City. WOR maintained a commercial recording studio in addition to the radio station. Alfred went to the engineer who had been working for him, making all the Blue Note albums up until that time and said, "We'd like to make another one, here's the LP. We need to do another session and we want it to sound like this." So he played it for the engineer. The engineer listened to it and he says, "Gee, I don't think I can get that sound. You better go to the guy that made it." And that's exactly what he did. He came to me. Told me what he wanted to do and that started it all. I recorded for him right through to the end. Alfred was the first, then Prestige followed. Savoy followed. I can't really think of them all for the moment. Many records. Labels seem to come and go.
Let's talk about the musicians and stuff. Which situations of people and recording stand out?
People-wise, I guess it was Duke Ellington and Count Basie. In my youth they were giants. Just to have them in my studio was a thrill. I still remember it clearly. Not as a recording engineer, but hearing their music as a kid and then having them record here. Recording-wise, of course, it was Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, with Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Wynton Kelly, Lou Donaldson, Lee Morgan, Herbie Hancock, Jimmy Smith, Elmo Hope. Those are individual musicians among dozens at that time. That would be the Blue Note scene. And then the Prestige artists would include Miles Davis, Red Garland, Gene Ammons, Arthur Taylor, and Esmond Edwards' productions of Coleman Hawkins, Kenny Burrell, King Curtis, Sonny Rollins, and Eric Dolphy. They can literally fill a book. The Miles Davis and Red Garland albums I made for Prestige were done in Hackensack. And of course John Coltrane in Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs, Duke Ellington produced by Bob Thiele, Count Basie, Quincy Jones' Walkin' In Space produced by Creed Taylor, Wes Montgomery, Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto's Getz Au Go Go. Also, Walter Wanderly's "Summer Samba", Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Wave", Bill Evans with Symphony Orchestra, Gil Evans' Out Of The Cool, Deodato's 2001, Grover Washington, Jr.'s Mister Magic, Ray Charles' "One Mint Julep" and "Outskirts Of Town", Paul Desmond, and Chet Baker's "She Was Too Good to Me".
Do you have any anecdotes or funny stories that happened?
Well, it's not exactly a funny story, but it gives an insight into Monk's personality. There was the scene between Monk and Miles in Hackensack. Incomplete versions of this have been told. I'm going to try to give you more details about it. Are you aware of the tension between Monk and Miles?
