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Producer as artist


srellek

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Was reading an interesting piece on George Martin and his contributions to the Beatles. And when you think about the best of their work, it bears the unmistakeable imprint of the techniques and textures of studio production: layering, editing, multi-tracking, all the sundry effects, etc. The albums very much become unique documents of this interaction, as opposed to trapping bugs in amber. And it's not just the Beatles and Martin; one could name many others -- Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, Brian Eno -- where the finished work could only be the product of this kind of handiwork (or gimmickry, I suppose, depending on your viewpoint). 

This got me thinking about any analogues (sorry) in jazz. In this exercise, not necessarily being interested in miking or separation, the studio spaces themselves, editing takes together, beyond comparing the basic "sounds" of Rudy Van Gelder, Nesuhi Ertegun, or Norman Granz. But which producers made something that could only have been manipulated in the studio or used the studio to create as well as capture? 

Teo Macero stands out of course for his work with Miles (In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson) and Mingus (Let My Children Hear Music). Who else?

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But which producers made something that could only have been manipulated in the studio or used the studio to create as well as capture? 

Teo Macero stands out of course for his work with Miles (In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson) and Mingus (Let My Children Hear Music). Who else?

One of the things that i like about jazz is that it's relatively unproduced. I do enjoy heavily produced metal, hip hop, industrial, electronica etc but it's a key point of difference with jazz for me. I like the idea of hearing 5 people in a room (or rooms depending on the studio) working together and making something in real time over 1 or 2 days, as opposed to sitting in front of the iMac one at a time and doing their indivdual parts over the course of weeks or months. Of course, with jazz engineering comes in to it, the producer can have an influence and there can be splices of separate takes etc and probably the odd punch in but as i say, relatively unproduced. 

Off the top of my head i can't think of anything other than those already mentioned.

 

Edited by xybert
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You could always spot Creed Taylor's influence without even hearing the record -- it was the look and feel of the jacket.  Impulse, Verve, and CTI albums were sturdy gatefolds, with unique graphic designs and lettering, artist photos taken by top professionals, and all wrapped in a deluxe laminated sheen.  Taylor insisted the Impulses have their very recognizable 50/50 orange and black spines.  Fortunately, Bob Thiele maintained the spine color and type fonts after Taylor left to run Verve.       

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Whoever produced Howard Roberts' two impulse! records, that.

Also, Duke's recordings of his band don't really sound like other people's recordings. Nothing to do with post-production, but perhaps everything to do with knowing how to get your music to sound the way you really mean for it to sound.

Ok, editing. Richard "Dic" Bock. Nobody said it had to be good, or even necessary. Why you gonna edit down Carson City stage to <2:00 when it was barely 2:30 to begin with? Huh?

And yes, Creed Taylor, but the fact that he was given full producer's credits on Paul Desmond's Bridge Over Troubled Water, and the also-fact that that's almost a textbook example of every CTI orchestral/production trick before, after, or during kinda makes you wonder...something about Taylor having cut loose A&M, but still..

 

 

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How involved in the final product's sound and feel was Eden, though? I never got the feeling that those Turtle records were heavily edited, for example.

That is true - I don't think there was much input of that sort. His sessions have a very recognisable 'feel' though which permeates through the Derams and Turtles. Quite different to the various Fontanas of that era, for example.

 

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But which producers made something that could only have been manipulated in the studio or used the studio to create as well as capture? 

Teo Macero stands out of course for his work with Miles (In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson) and Mingus (Let My Children Hear Music). Who else?

One of the things that i like about jazz is that it's relatively unproduced. I do enjoy heavily produced metal, hip hop, industrial, electronica etc but it's a key point of difference with jazz for me. I like the idea of hearing 5 people in a room (or rooms depending on the studio) working together and making something in real time over 1 or 2 days, as opposed to sitting in front of the iMac one at a time and doing their indivdual parts over the course of weeks or months. Of course, with jazz engineering comes in to it, the producer can have an influence and there can be splices of separate takes etc and probably the odd punch in but as i say, relatively unproduced. 

Off the top of my head i can't think of anything other than those already mentioned.

 

Yeah, this is a huge point. I don't want my personal musical politics to infect too much of either this thread or how I voice my opinion, but the relative subtlety of jazz production has kind of taken on its own character. In a weird way, this posits jazz in-between popular/"sub-high" art forms (since jazz is so deeply rooted in dance musics) and "art music," the documentation of which is usually, well, pretty "documentarian" in nature. (Quotation marks here meant to undercut the potentially incendiary nature of the terms I'm using, since there's really no hierarchy in play here.)

I've often wondered about why jazz production has resisted pace with pop when so much of that music has thoroughly invaded the conceptual framework of how jazz is played, and after a certain point, it's evident that it is a choice rather than a random incongruity. In 99% of cases, this is cool and necessary, but in that last 1% of cases, jazz production feels like a box that the music is straining to explode from within.

The Blue Series stuff I talked about in the Kamasi thread is one example--if you're going to bring hip-hop into it in such a direct way, then why not just fuck up the stereo image and throw a bunch of random stuff in there? Similarly, if Prime Time is all about sonic convergence and undermining genre conceits, then why not go all out with the production? I know a lot of people hate it, but I enjoy Tone Dialing for this reason. I feel like In All Languages might be the most exciting Prime Time album for this very reason, and Denardo Coleman's production work on both of these records is admirable in that it ventures into territories that Ornette alone would not or could not journey.

Speaking a bit to what Clifford said, John Jack's versatility in working with both rock and jazz went a big way toward producing some music that exercised some of the best attributes of both worlds. Dudu Pukwana's In the Townships (co-produced by Steve Verroca, who I'm not familiar with) is extraordinary for this reason--it takes a quintet and turns it into a tiny orchestra. The overdubs and mixing on that record transform it from a "merely good" album of South African experimental dance music to something akin to a free jazz Motown album. Having that many Dudus and Mongezis ping-ponging around the recording is sensational.

As for personal preference, I know he's gotten a lot of flak, but I have to hand it to Bill Laswell for being one of the few mainstream producers savvy enough to nuance the (very flimsy) tipping point beyond which jazz freedom and pop production just don't mix. His work with James "Blood" Ulmer, Threadgill, and Ronald Shannon Jackson is excellent, and I hope I'm not one of only a few to really enjoy how much he got out of revising the Miles catalog.

That being said, his work with Tony Williams and Sonny Sharrock in particular is just unbelievable. The unreleased remix of Turn It Over transforms that record from a wacky, Metal Machine Music-type curiosity to a killer psych rock record in spitting distance of late Hendrix, MC5, and The Stooges. Interested listeners had already connected the dots, but Turn It Over Redux--with it's more sensitive mix, Macero-like studio trickery (e.g., swapping organ parts between tracks), and genuine understanding of the bottom end (waaaay more Jack Bruce on Redux, for better and definitely not for worse)--is very well-realized. It suddenly crushes both the original mix and Emergency and Ego as the best Lifetime album.

His work with Sharrock is similarly great in that it recognizes that, with a player with that much combustibility and power, a light touch is the best. Laswell also understood that Sharrock was playing an electric instrument, and his work on Sharrock's Enemy catalog in particular (Guitar and Seize the Rainbow being the best) is remarkable in how understated it is with both navigating the best tones and sonic environments for Sonny's guitar. I cannot think of another producer "of jazz" (albeit not necessarily a "jazz producer") who understands just how simultaneously versatile and fragile the electric guitar is. Laswell finds the best sounds for Sonny and then just gets out of the way--the mixing just enhances the power of the playing. It's magical stuff.

Ask the Ages is of course monumental, and it's interesting in that it undermines exactly the dynamic xybert mentions. The success of free jazz on record is predicated to an extent on the relative fluidity and clarity of the recording--too light and you have zero bottom end, like Spiritual Unity (which, I might argue, actually enhances the spectral qualities of Ayler's playing); too dense and you have Echo or Atlantis, which makes the music closer to Sunn O))) than a Dial recording. Ask the Ages is the odd jazz guitar album that retains the power and suppleness of the rhythm section while surrounding it with a sort of phantom army of overdubs; the overdubs don't get in the way of the freedom, but the recording also doesn't sound arid or slick. Sonny, who sounds strong but weirdly clunky on something like Dance With Me Montana, sounds both sensitive and powerful on Ask the Ages--every bit as expressive as Pharoah. As a guitarist, I can't underestimate just how enormous an impact this had on me when first exploring the sonic possibilities of jazz on record.

Joel Dorn, he was responsible for Rashan's 3 Sided Dream and Lateef's Part of the Search, right?

Right on--this is what I'm talking about. 3 Sided Dream is produced like a Hendrix album. It isn't as extraordinary to me as Ask the Ages in that Dream isn't quite a jazz record, but props to that guy for putting Rahsaan in so many varied and compatible contexts.

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Joel Dorn, he was responsible for Rashan's 3 Sided Dream and Lateef's Part of the Search, right?

Nice.

Glad you dug that, when I was in College I used to close my radio show with Lateef doing In the Still of the Night (the Satins', not Cole Porter's) and its attendant 'radio being tuned and signed off' sounds.

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But which producers made something that could only have been manipulated in the studio or used the studio to create as well as capture? 

Teo Macero stands out of course for his work with Miles (In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson) and Mingus (Let My Children Hear Music). Who else?

One of the things that i like about jazz is that it's relatively unproduced. I do enjoy heavily produced metal, hip hop, industrial, electronica etc but it's a key point of difference with jazz for me. I like the idea of hearing 5 people in a room (or rooms depending on the studio) working together and making something in real time over 1 or 2 days, as opposed to sitting in front of the iMac one at a time and doing their indivdual parts over the course of weeks or months. Of course, with jazz engineering comes in to it, the producer can have an influence and there can be splices of separate takes etc and probably the odd punch in but as i say, relatively unproduced. 

Off the top of my head i can't think of anything other than those already mentioned.

 

Yeah, this is a huge point. I don't want my personal musical politics to infect too much of either this thread or how I voice my opinion, but the relative subtlety of jazz production has kind of taken on its own character. In a weird way, this posits jazz in-between popular/"sub-high" art forms (since jazz is so deeply rooted in dance musics) and "art music," the documentation of which is usually, well, pretty "documentarian" in nature. (Quotation marks here meant to undercut the potentially incendiary nature of the terms I'm using, since there's really no hierarchy in play here.)

I've often wondered about why jazz production has resisted pace with pop when so much of that music has thoroughly invaded the conceptual framework of how jazz is played, and after a certain point, it's evident that it is a choice rather than a random incongruity. In 99% of cases, this is cool and necessary, but in that last 1% of cases, jazz production feels like a box that the music is straining to explode from within.

The Blue Series stuff I talked about in the Kamasi thread is one example--if you're going to bring hip-hop into it in such a direct way, then why not just fuck up the stereo image and throw a bunch of random stuff in there? Similarly, if Prime Time is all about sonic convergence and undermining genre conceits, then why not go all out with the production? I know a lot of people hate it, but I enjoy Tone Dialing for this reason. I feel like In All Languages might be the most exciting Prime Time album for this very reason, and Denardo Coleman's production work on both of these records is admirable in that it ventures into territories that Ornette alone would not or could not journey.

Speaking a bit to what Clifford said, John Jack's versatility in working with both rock and jazz went a big way toward producing some music that exercised some of the best attributes of both worlds. Dudu Pukwana's In the Townships (co-produced by Steve Verroca, who I'm not familiar with) is extraordinary for this reason--it takes a quintet and turns it into a tiny orchestra. The overdubs and mixing on that record transform it from a "merely good" album of South African experimental dance music to something akin to a free jazz Motown album. Having that many Dudus and Mongezis ping-ponging around the recording is sensational.

As for personal preference, I know he's gotten a lot of flak, but I have to hand it to Bill Laswell for being one of the few mainstream producers savvy enough to nuance the (very flimsy) tipping point beyond which jazz freedom and pop production just don't mix. His work with James "Blood" Ulmer, Threadgill, and Ronald Shannon Jackson is excellent, and I hope I'm not one of only a few to really enjoy how much he got out of revising the Miles catalog.

That being said, his work with Tony Williams and Sonny Sharrock in particular is just unbelievable. The unreleased remix of Turn It Over transforms that record from a wacky, Metal Machine Music-type curiosity to a killer psych rock record in spitting distance of late Hendrix, MC5, and The Stooges. Interested listeners had already connected the dots, but Turn It Over Redux--with it's more sensitive mix, Macero-like studio trickery (e.g., swapping organ parts between tracks), and genuine understanding of the bottom end (waaaay more Jack Bruce on Redux, for better and definitely not for worse)--is very well-realized. It suddenly crushes both the original mix and Emergency and Ego as the best Lifetime album.

His work with Sharrock is similarly great in that it recognizes that, with a player with that much combustibility and power, a light touch is the best. Laswell also understood that Sharrock was playing an electric instrument, and his work on Sharrock's Enemy catalog in particular (Guitar and Seize the Rainbow being the best) is remarkable in how understated it is with both navigating the best tones and sonic environments for Sonny's guitar. I cannot think of another producer "of jazz" (albeit not necessarily a "jazz producer") who understands just how simultaneously versatile and fragile the electric guitar is. Laswell finds the best sounds for Sonny and then just gets out of the way--the mixing just enhances the power of the playing. It's magical stuff.

Ask the Ages is of course monumental, and it's interesting in that it undermines exactly the dynamic xybert mentions. The success of free jazz on record is predicated to an extent on the relative fluidity and clarity of the recording--too light and you have zero bottom end, like Spiritual Unity (which, I might argue, actually enhances the spectral qualities of Ayler's playing); too dense and you have Echo or Atlantis, which makes the music closer to Sunn O))) than a Dial recording. Ask the Ages is the odd jazz guitar album that retains the power and suppleness of the rhythm section while surrounding it with a sort of phantom army of overdubs; the overdubs don't get in the way of the freedom, but the recording also doesn't sound arid or slick. Sonny, who sounds strong but weirdly clunky on something like Dance With Me Montana, sounds both sensitive and powerful on Ask the Ages--every bit as expressive as Pharoah. As a guitarist, I can't underestimate just how enormous an impact this had on me when first exploring the sonic possibilities of jazz on record.

Good points. Although i was generalising, I hadn't really thought of the Sharrocks, Ornettes or Threadgills, all of which i like. Could probably add some Sun Ra in there and a ton of fusion.

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Dorn, yes, and not just with Kirk, some of those Yusef albums get ver "producer"-y, sometimes more effectively than others, but Part Of The Search, a fun, fine album.

Fusion (if you want to call them that, and I increasingly don't like to), Zawinul & Shorter, alone and together, they made the music and used the studio. That part on Native Dancer where Wayne turns his tenor into a soprano, that's like on Sgt. Pepper where the cat turns into a dog, except, hey, it's Wayne.

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If we're going down that road (fusion-wise), then it's probably worthwhile to mention David Rubinson, whose role in producing the Mwandishi albums (if even/if only to give Herbie some free rein) cannot be understated. I think that those--even more than the original mixes of the Lifetime records or Weather Report--are the most exploratory and inventive of the early fusion/jazz rock records (outside of Miles, of course). Sextant is particularly off the rails, and the conjunction of pure electronic abstraction, swing, and Funkadelic-caliber R&B weirdness is a prescient one.

We've mentioned but not really delved into Bob Thiele (and Ed Michel). While I'm not really well versed in their respective roles w/regard to the Impulse! catalog (outside of the oft-mentioned thing about giving Coltrane the liberty to record with borderline irresponsible frequency), their tenures are responsible for some of the most curious artifacts of early free jazz: New Grass and late-60's Shepp, Pharoah, and Marion Brown in particular. I think it's possible to read these overtures to 60's counterculture(s) as misguided attempts at reading the aesthetic value of free jazz saxophone, but plenty of this music has wound up being influential in interesting ways (New Grass to noise rock people, Thembi to chill out/electronica musicians, etc.). Personally, I think a lot of this wave of releases is free jazz of questionable value but mixed-genre music of quality and odd beauty.

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I'm almost willing to spend the $35 or $40 to buy Dudu's "In the Townships"

I had no idea it was anything more than a mythical/legendary quintet date with Mongezi on trumpet.

Karl - thanks for the wonderful writing as always and you are the first person to put at least a bit of a finger on what makes "Ask the Ages" so special

you also have me hankering to hear those other Sharrock records I've never heard.

to all of you who've never heard "Ask the Ages" go forth - to me it is easily the best Elvin sounds on record post 1968-70.

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Thank you for the kind words, guys--but in all seriousness, this forum has been such a welcoming context for my amorphous rambling that I'm not sure I can see an alternative anymore. And in all (serious) seriousness, I feel like I've actually learned more from similar digressions on this board than I have from most articles or academic texts in the past several years--there are things that have been said on here that will stick with me for a lifetime.

As for In the Townships (and not to go on too huge a tangent)--I wonder if that was more a matter of artistic license on the leader's part of producer oversight. The thing I admire about the extended family of Brotherhood musicians is their willingness to take really wily creative risks, and whether through Dudu & the Spears, work with McGregor, Assagai (which In the Townships is sort of an extension of), or whatever, those guys had gotten proficient at making legitimate pop albums that did not dilute the creative jazz content.

If Mr. Hawkins shows up here some time soon, I'd ask him if he ever quizzed Moholo about his recordings at this time, because there's nothing quite like them. When I spoke to Louis, he made a point of noting that his playing on In the Townships was meant to be sort of an alternative to the relatively mundane drumming that prevailed in mbaqanga at that time--which is why Louis is sticking to cymbals on almost the entire record (i.e., "there's no cymbal work" on the other mbaqanga stuff, so why not be contrarian). When he does explode onto the kit (as he does on Angel Nemali), the effect is staggering and really unique in the canon. This is the thing I love about this album--it strikes a unique balance between coyness and rage, coiled intensity and unhinged power--and it does so with intention and a mastery of the studio space.

Speaking more to the issue of producer oversight and its effect on the delicate balance between genius and indulgence, compare Ubagile to Black Horse (an mp3 album of outtakes released online as part of the Black Lion reissue program). Ubagile is more of a straightforward Brotherhood album and less special because of it, IMO--consistent dynamics throughout, less thoughtful and more streamlined arrangements. Black Horse (which is culled from the same sessions with essentially the same set of musicians), on the other hand, is as close to a "mess" as any of these guys managed to make: cluttered, unstable, and actually kind of boring. It's a testament to how even middling albums take a lot of work to assemble, and how magical records (like In the Townships--again, in my estimation) are the rare work of vision, cooperation, and having the right hands on deck.

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