What is good sound?
Good is in the eye of the beholder, as they say — or in the ear of the beholder. Generally speaking, with a music background — being exposed to musicians and understanding arrangers — and working with great people over the years, you come to realize what "good" is. Or what the starting point is, anyway. That's where the art comes in, not the science. You can't read a book and say, "This is the starting point." When it comes to aligning a machine and the technical stuff, I leave that to the professionals. I'm a musician. I want to be a musician.
How do you feel your musicianship approach to engineering is different from a technical approach?
I'm not really an engineer like Wally Sear and other guys. I consider myself an audio mixer. Engineering is a science. You really have to know something. And a mixer is sort of like a cook — you can learn all the ingredients, but putting it together is an art. It's more art than science. I can't see how you could do this job without being somewhat inclined to music, so that you can relate to what the musician or singer wants to accomplish.
Tell me about Nola.
I got here in '76. Originally, Nola's was a rehearsal studio over Lindy's Restaurant on Broadway. All the big bands would rehearse upstairs there — all the name acts that were going to be at the Roxy, the Paramount and the Palace. I guess the lease ran out. I'm not sure — this had to be the early 1940s. They started to come up here to the Steinway Building. Vincent Nola was the man. He took the third floor, which was small rooms for piano and voice, and Steinway Hall. There was a recital center for Steinway on the third floor. It sat about 200 people. And then he took this floor up here and the guys would come and rehearse. Vincent Nola, the old man, had a son, Tommy. Tommy Nola had a radio board and he would record the rehearsals. So that's how Nola Recording Studio got started.
Over the years, you've done sessions with some pretty incredible people. Liza Minnelli, Blossom Dearie... Who are some others? Dave Brubeck-didherecordhere?
Yeah — something for Jamey Aebersold.
You mean one of those play-along tapes?
Something like that. Elvin Jones recorded here. I also had the great fortune of working with a lot of female singers. Gloria Lynne. I just did an album with Ernestine Anderson. Then of course, I did two albums with Lena Horne, and we became great friends. I do a lot of jazz.
Describe some of the more memorable sessions that you've worked on here.
I really liked working with John Pizzarelli when he was BMG. We did a great Beatles album. Don Sebeski did the arrangements. Lena's albums, Blossom's albums. I did a nice album with Dianne Carroll. It's hard to say. I used to do a lot of Latin albums. I love Latin albums. I did a couple of Polish albums that were great. Really swingin'. It's the music! James Galway was wonderful. I just did something with Sebeski and Hubert Laws — "Ave Maria" — playing flute with strings, string quartet. Sesame Street. Been doing that for 18 years. Great stuff! Worked with Joe Raposo — great songwriter. "Used To Be A Ballpark There" and "Nowhere" and "It's Not Easy Being Green." I worked with a lot of great guys. Benny Golson was up here once and he said [pointing], "Dizzy Gillespie played trumpet right there!" You know, this was the rehearsal room for all the jazz guys. Jamal at the Penthouse, Ahmad Jamal playing piano.
That album was recorded here? That's amazing! Are there any albums that you've done here that you are particularly proud of, fidelity-wise or recording-wise?
The ones that I really like are the ones that were done live. Without overdubs. I like my big band work. I like Sebeski's albums. Moving Lines and the Duke Ellington album that he won a Grammy for. Pizzarelli, that Beatles album or Our Love is Here to Stay. It's the big band work that I really like.
You started out as a musician. What made you get into engineering?
I worked for Leslie Gore. I wound up being her pianist and later on conductor — way over my head! Great experience! Went to California, did the Shindig show. Did a whole bunch of clubs. Quincy Jones wrote the charts for her. Don Costa did some charts. Marvin Hamlisch wrote one. There was money behind her and she was a great singer — more of a jazz singer, really. Her influences were Chris Connor and Anita O'Day. She was a rock ' n' roll singer with a cry in her voice and she was fun to work with — a great boss. I was paid more than I should have been! So I went to do the Shindig show, and that was really the first recording studio I was in. When Leslie went back to school, I was out of a job. I said to myself, I gotta get into the studios! I wanted to start being a studio player. Another friend of mine, Rod McBrien was an engineer — he was working for Roulette and Sounds on Broadway. I went to see him and he said, "The only place I know that might be hiring is Bell Sound on 54th Street." He introduced me to the manager there, Dave Teig, and they put me on the list to be an assistant, to be affectionately what they called a "button pusher". You do everything but push buttons. You make coffee, you clean the bathrooms, stuff like that. At that time, there was no automatic start on the tape deck. You had to physically hit the record button and the play button. I started working at Bell. I couldn't touch anything for six months. My first record date that I did on my own, where I actually set it up, ran the clock and did the take sheet, was Len Barry's "1-2-3", in whatever year that was [1965]. And it was just a great place to work! There were great engineers there. Eddie Smith was my mentor. There was Phil Macy, who had been an alto player in the Glenn Miller Band. He did the Isley Brothers. He was a wonderful engineer — these guys were all musicians. Eddie Smith was an arranger, a piano player who had studied Schillinger [a theoretical system for music composition, very popular among jazz artists]. I attached myself at the hip to Eddie. I wanted to be his assistant. I would change shifts to work with him. We did strings and horns. It was just great! He would bring out the sheet music and put it over the console — the production chart — and never look at the meters, do everything by ear. And we ran a 4- track tape as a safety. This had to be '65 or '66. The mono, the actual live mix, was the master. He would go right to mono. The 4-track tape was there. When I got there, it was 3-track and then they added the fourth track, so we put the rhythm section on one and the strings and horns on three and the singer in the middle, and put the background group or whatever on the fourth track — but the actual record was the mono off the date. They'd take the mono down to the cutting room, cut the record, and that's what went onto the radio.
You did "Walk On By" and "...San Jose."
We did all the Bacharach things: "Walk On By" and "...San Jose," at Bell Sound. Somebody else takes credit for the album although they only did a cabasa overdub. I was the assistant on "...San Jose." Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, a lot of stuff. Sammy Davis and Ferrante and Teicher. We did "Hang On Sloopy", The McCoys. We did Bob Crewe, a lot of stuff with the Four Seasons. Mitch Ryder and Detroit Wheels. I did a lot of hand clapping and stamping my feet on a lot of records! "Devil With the Blue Dress On". I'm a whistler on somebody's album — singing background, playing tambourine on somebody else's album.
I want to talk about the importance of getting a sound.
Earphones are the most important thing. To the guys wearing earphones, that's what they hear. What they hear is the way they play. You know you're working with professionals when you hear them say, "I don't hear enough of the drums. I don't hear enough of the bass." You know you're working with amateurs when they say, "I don't hear enough of myself." I basically control the way they play by controlling what they can hear. If they're playing loud, I turn them up in the headphones and they play softer. If they're playing soft, I lower them in the headphones and they play louder. I control the level. That's how you get the sweet sound. People don't come here for the sweet sound, anyway. They come here for the pastrami sandwiches, and they come here because I try to make people feel comfortable, which is more important, I think, than anything recording-wise.
With your sense of humor and the vibe here, people probably get in and out of Nola's more efficiently than they would at some other studios. I imagine you must also get better performances because the musicians feel comfortable.
I'm working with a singer now. I don't want to mention names. We're doing an album. The girl is a wonderful singer, but she doesn't do it as a living — it's a vanity project. She's in the session and makes a mistake. They're talking — "It should be a B flat, it should be an F, the phrasing here, do this, do that." Her husband is the producer, telling her these things — and she's standing here with all this instruction going on. There's a pause and I go, "Sing the fucking song!" Now in that moment of "Sing the fucking song," it broke down all that anxiety. "Oh my God, I don't know what to do. This guy says make sure it's a B flat." All of that disappears. I say, "Stop. Don't listen to these assholes. They're telling you everything right, but you can't remember all that. I can't remember all that. If somebody is yelling at you, 'Relax!' — you know. Just sing the fucking song. So she goes in. She sings it great. Okay. Let's go — next song. That's what I do. It's easy in here [control room]. Out there [in the studio], when you're playing or you're singing, what you're saying is, "This is the best that I can do." You're not under the gun like that in any other job. You're in there singing, you're in there playing — THAT'S THE BEST YOU CAN DO AT THAT TIME. If you're not relaxed, if you're tense, you're not going to do anything good. It has to be loose and you have to be having fun. We are not curing cancer here. We're just making a stupid record. Or doing a stupid commercial, but if you're not having fun...
Let's talk about mic placement.
You learn that from musicians. There was a famous New York studio musician, Phil Bodner. I was recording him and he was playing oboe. We were doing a commercial. I shut his mic off and went out to him. I said, "Phil, how do you mic this thing?" He said, "Put the mic here, Jim," and I said, "Okay." And then he said, "Hey Jim, I'm doing this a long time and no one ever asked me where to put the mic." I said, "Maybe they knew what to do." He said, "No, they didn't." I said, "Thanks for the help." He put it up where his fingers were, off to the right — not in front of the bell. He put it off to the side, maybe a foot and a half. Well, the sound doesn't come from the bell. It comes from the whole instrument. So I did what he said and then went back into the control room and did the recording. He came in for a playback — the client and the advertising agency people were there also. The room went very silent, and he said, "Jim, that's the best oboe sound I've ever gotten." The point is, I asked him what the hell to do and he told me. I listened to him — and he came in and told me that it was the best sound he had ever gotten. He made me look great in front of other people — because I didn't know how the hell to do this. So I asked him. To me, I don't look at it like "this is my sound".
You have a very strong relationship with your assistant, Bill Moss. I've watched the two of you in action. You literally complete each other's thoughts — musically, in conversation, everything. Could you speak for a moment about the importance of the assistant in today's studio world?
The assistant, affectionately known as the "button pusher." My relationship with Bill is what my relationship was with Eddie Smith. I learned so much from Eddie that he would begin to rely on me. When we were doing Costa dates, I would sit down at the board. When you have a really good assistant, it's more than an assistant at that point. It's a second set of ears — it's an engineer. Now Bill Moss will make notes when he hears something that I don't hear. He'll say, "We've gotta check this part out." It's another guy to back you up. If you're in combat, you want somebody else in the foxhole with you that really knows what the hell they're doing. And all the time Bill has worked with me so closely, he knows how I work, but he's also developed his own style. My job is to record the music, but more importantly to make the client or the artist feel comfortable while getting the recording down. Bill's job is to make sure that everything else goes right. He's telling me when the trumpets are going to go to cup mutes, so bring them up louder. He's watching the date. He's listening to the date. In effect, he's doing the date. I'm there, sitting — maybe I'm watching what the client is doing, maybe I'm watching what the singer is doing. It's two sets of eyes, two sets of ears. He's very important.
There's a huge difference, obviously, between overdub recording and live session recording. It's fair to say that all or almost all of what you do in this room is live jazz sessions. Due to budgetary and time constraints, most project studios — and most rock, hip- hop, etc., in general — is all done in overdub. Can you talk a bit about the difference between the live studio session and the overdub studio session?
Well, the concept of the live recording is the live recording. In the old days, the mono off the date was the master. You didn't make a mistake. The caliber of musician at that time in the '50s and '60s, coming off the big bands, didn't make mistakes — because if you made a mistake, everybody had to do it again. Gil Evans once told me — his son Noel worked here for seven years — the best players in town were the guys that had started bands. Benny Goodman, Claude Thornhill — Because these were the best players, they got the other best players to work with them. And the same thing applied to the studios — the best musicians in the studios, the guys that did the record dates, were the guys who were the best musicians — because you couldn't make a mistake. When you do a live recording, the pressure's on. You have to really get it. So you set the studio up. You have everybody play a little bit. You get a sound. That's where the training comes in. Knowing what a bass should sound like — knowing what a bass sounds like in proportion to the drums, to the piano, to the trumpet. That's the instant mix. That's what I'm getting paid for.
Where does that knowledge come from?
It comes from listening to a lot of music, listening to things you like, determining why that certain sound come out the way it did. Why did that bass not sound boomy? Then you place mics and you fool around. How do you know how to balance? From all of the years and all of the dues you've paid up to that point. The engineering should not interfere with the music. The mixing should not interfere with the music. Now what sounds "good?" What's too much bass, too much treble? What's not enough? That's the art. That's what you go for.
And it changes with each piece of music.
When I was an assistant at Bell Sound doing The Lovin' Spoonful with Harry Yarmark — "Summer in the City" and "Do You Believe in Magic" and all of those songs — we would spend an hour getting a snare drum sound. It would kill me. I would die. Die! Because it was like, who cares? The jackhammer in "Summer in the City" — they played with it for about half an hour! VFOing the machine to change the pitch of the jackhammer! I couldn't take it anymore, so I walked over and I said, "Here!" It was in the key of E or whatever it was at that time. The overdub session can be productive, or it can just waste a lot of time.
Sometimes capturing it live in the moment...
Well, you get a better performance. With the overdub session, you can get it absolutely perfect, but you lose something. Like anything else, when you do it over and over, you may get the spontaneity of one performance, but generally speaking, it's diminishing returns. And it's perfect — and nothing in life is perfect.
We were speaking a bit about the rhythm section before, being placed together on one side of the room. There is obviously separation between the drum booth and the piano, but there is still sound bouncing around the room.
Sure. And you'll hear the drums. Not so much in the piano, but you'll hear it live, because the way I set it up is not totally isolated. It's a blend — but it cuts down on a lot of the leakage.
Some of your sound IS leakage — the "live" sound.
Oh, absolutely. That's where the room comes into play. There used to be a lot of live rooms. Live rooms are great — the musicians like to play in them because everybody hears themselves, but generally there are a lot of problems with recording, because you open up the trumpet mic or the saxophone mic and you hear drums or other things — which is why I have carpeting on the floor. I'm probably the only studio in town that has carpeting. The floor was originally all wood — but if I had a totally wooden floor, it would sound like an echo chamber. It's great. I can overdub if I'm doing a big band and the trumpets make a mistake. I've done bands where they're set up in a traditional pattern with trumpets in the back, then trombones and saxes. The problem with the trumpets being in the back and playing out is that you get the trumpets in the trombone mics and the trumpets in the sax mics. If you're going to do it that way, then you would have the trumpets in the front, then the bones, then the saxes. But that's totally opposite of the way guys play in real bands, so that would be disconcerting.
So you lay it out in a semicircle.
Yeah. That goes back — the first picture I saw of that was Gil Evans with Miles Davis at Columbia. A big semicircle, so everybody could see everybody. We would do that at Bell, in all live recordings. We would do trumpets and strings at the same time like that. It's the mono off the date, so you're working with the leakage. What Eddie Smith would do was to actually mix live — so if the trumpets were playing, you had the trumpets up. If the strings were playing, you'd sort of bring down the trumpets, just to take the ambient noise out of the room. That's what a mixer does.
