In the Can

I’ve had a week plus to consider the consequences of the recording. Here are my thoughts:

The studio, and the engineer who runs it, are every bit as tip-top as Eddie King, who owned and operated the studio where we recorded nearly thirty years ago. It’s a lot easier to handle the vagaries of recording a big band than Eddie behind the wheel of his Neve 3 board, going directly into two channels. The stuff we recorded last week is still in multi-track format, with virtually unlimited tracks we can add or use for experimenting with or clam fixing.

Nonetheless, Mike Hersh has a real respect for the music which shows in just how close the tracks sound now to a finished project. The tendency is to improve those tracks to perfection, which I am not interested in because every iteration seems to lose something, not in sonic quality but in feel. Mike worked great with Jimmy Shortell, who knows how to push the guys by reading the score and gently nudging them toward product.

No complaints about the band I put together. It was a real thrill having Butch (Basie's drummer for many years) and Tony Campise (who left Stan Kenton pretty much the day I joined back in 1975) there. Paul Baker and Tony Bray rounded out the saxes with me. The youth movement was the brass section with Kevin Flatt and Pete Clagett (we were on QE2 together) on trumpets and Ulrican Williams on the slide trambone. It was a bit of a youthful rhythm section too, with Ulrich Ellison on guitar, Angelo Lembisis on piano, Kris Afflerbach on bass, and Jimmy on drums. Marilyn Rucker was the canary.




The main thing a brought away from this session, though was that, despite the fact that I had a coronary and I have an ICD watching over me, I can still write all the charts, select the tunes from our massive and growing repertoire, select from among the many studios in town one that would be most big-band friendly. I selected and hired the personnel at my cost, while using the perfect combination of veterans and young studs.

Many thanks to Noreen and Larry for providing lunch.

In fine and one half hours we recorded 10 tracks, all of which we were sightreading.

Next step the clam fixes, the final mix, and we’ve doubled the size of our nearly 30-year old demo.