Issue 195

Lester Young provided the inspiration. Miles Davis has been credited with creating the genre. George Shearing and Hank Jones performed it. Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and Art Pepper helped popularize it. Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, and André Previn introduced it around America. All of these musicians were playing cool jazz (sometimes known as West Coast jazz), a style of music that became significant during the 1950s. In this context, the word "cool" had nothing to do with the weather or those finger-snapping singing dancing gang members of West Side Story. Cool jazz, with its roots in California, was relaxed and laid back...a reaction to the more aggressive bebop style that was popular in New York and other large cities. 

Here's a cool collection of cool jazz from several sources: The Great American Songbook (a canon of American popular songs and jazz standards written mostly during the first half of the 20^th century), music that sounds cool even if its relationship to that genre is a bit lukewarm, and jazz that crosses several genres. Please note: For those seeking Pachelbel's "Canon," music to accompany dying swans, or the "Hallelujah" chorus you'll have to look elsewhere.

Dream a Little Dream/Gerry Mulligan Quartet/Gerry Mulligan, saxophone (Telarc CD) Gerry Mulligan had a major impact on the development of cool jazz. During the late ’40s and 1950s a few of the original cool musicians, including the influential Mulligan, were based in the Los Angeles area. As a result, the style was accidentally identified as a regional style and dubbed “West Coast jazz.” Most of those artists were routinely called “West Coast musicians” even though some of them hadn't been born in L.A., had stayed in the area for only a short time, or left the area to perform in other cities.

Immersed in the incredibly creative scene of New York in the late forties, Mulligan concentrated on his writing and arranging. His compositions and arrangements from this period were an invaluable contribution to the landmark recording Birth of the Cool. Considered one of the seminal albums of modern jazz, Birth of the Cool was elected to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1982. The recording marked the beginning of a new direction in jazz: departing from straight bebop, Birth of the Cool emphasized improvisation in an orchestral setting. The charts were written for a nine-piece group that included such instruments as French horn and tuba. Gerry Mulligan wrote and/or arranged six of the eleven tunes on the album. But it was Miles Davis who, as Gerry explained it "put the theories to work, called the rehearsals, hired the halls, and generally cracked the whip...." Although recorded in New York, this new sound became synonymous with the cool, laid-back lifestyle of the West and became known as "West Coast jazz." [Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200153235/]

While bebop is generally regarded as “hot” (i.e., loud and exciting with a greater focus on soloists, fast tempos, and complex harmonies), cool jazz is generally thought of as being easygoing and controlled. Other characteristics of "cool" include more structure and less improvisation than bebop; straight-forward, easy to follow melodies and an understated approach to performing jazz standards; relaxed tempos, quiet drum accompaniments, and bands with a large number of instruments; arrangements that have been worked out ahead of time; and classical music crossovers.

The Classic Trio/David Hazeltine, piano (Sharp Nine Records CD) "Sweet and Lovely" is an American popular song from 1931, performed here by David Hazeltine's Classic Trio. In some ways it's similar to bebop but the way the melody is treated, the moderate tempo, the relaxed mood...in fact, every selection on this CD seems closer to cool jazz than bebop.

It seems only fitting that pianist David Hazeltine would kick off The Classic Trio album with "You Make Me Feel So Young." After all, even when Hazeltine is mining the blues for inspiration, as he often does here, his touch frequently conveys a rhythmic vitality that's infectious.

Hazeltine is not a particularly economical player. He enjoys inserting a cascading run here, a chromatic flourish there – devices which help freshen the album's familiar pieces. Yet his arrangements remain logical and uncluttered. The melodies are expressed with lyricism, the exchanges with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Louis Hayes are neatly integrated, and the collective identity forged by the trio is frequently stamped by an engaging swing pulse or colored by earthy blues inflections. That Hazeltine's own compositions fit rather comfortably alongside such standards as "These Foolish Things" and "You've Changed" says a lot for his talent as a composer too. [Mike Joyce, "Fresh 'Classic Trio' From Hazeltine," The Washington Post, March 7, 1997.]

But wait! There's more! Sharp Nine Records, as usual, provides excellent recorded sound. The quality is...well...sweet and lovely, and very realistic.

The Sheriff/The Modern Jazz Quartet (Atlantic LP) Composer Gunther Schuller invented the term third stream in 1957 to describe instances where aspects of individual classical music and jazz "streams" are fused into a single third stream that has a homogeneous sense of form, texture, melody, harmony and rhythm. (Third-stream music is also sometimes referred to as crossover, fusion, or world music.) Today, it's sometimes difficult to identify a piece as jazz, classical, or ethnic, demonstrating that the third-stream ideal of a complete fusion has at least partially been achieved. The direction third stream music used to take is no longer a one-way street with classical music moving closer to jazz  (e.g., the use of jazz by Bernstein, Copland, and Gershwin) or jazz moving closer to classical (e.g., the music of Art Tatum and Duke Ellington) but a wider avenue with both genres flowing toward each other and combining into a single stream.

The Modern Jazz Quartet (1952-1974), recognized as one of the world's finest small jazz ensembles, was noted for its delicate percussion sonorities, innovative jazz forms, consistently high performance standards, and for playing in a cool jazz style that included other genres. As a result, the M.J.Q.'s sound was often referred to as third stream jazz. (In its 1960 album titled Third Stream Music, the M.J.Q. combined bebop and the blues with classical elements.) Whatever label the M.J.Q. was given, the results were very popular.

The Guitar Trio/Paco de Lucia, Al di Meola, John McLaughlin (Verve LP) One of cool jazz's characteristics is easy to follow melodies that aren't broken into so many pieces they begin to sound like the way cubist paintings look. The style avoids anything that is raucous or challenging (like John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” – chords broken into cascading sequences of notes), and is generally restrained. In addition to challenging bebop, cool jazz is important because it influenced later styles like modal jazz and bossa nova.

"Manhã de Carnaval" ("Carnival Morning" from the film Black Orpheus) became one of the first bossa nova compositions to gain popularity outside Brazil and is considered to be one of the most important  songs that helped establish the bossa nova movement in the late 1950s. "Manhã de Carnaval" has become a jazz standard in the US and is still performed regularly by a wide variety of musicians around the world. The music is soothing, relaxing, melodic, and calming, recorded in audiophile quality sound on this Verve LP. So whip up a Batida (a Brazilian alcoholic smoothie), have a sip and a seat, and start listening. 

Focus/Stan Getz, saxophone (Verve LP) Other recordings that fall under the heading of third stream jazz include Stan Getz's Focus, a suite for saxophone and strings composed by Eddie Sauter. Getz was known as "The Sound" because of his elegant and consistent tone. His major influence was the mellow, wispy timbre of his idol Lester Young, the same musician who influenced the development of cool jazz. In Focus Getz improvises against a backdrop of darkish string charts: The result is a recording of dream-like, memorable music that sticks in your mind.

Moon Beams/The Bill Evans Trio/Bill Evans, piano (Riverside SACD) Despite being relaxed, cool jazz can still be emotional. Within this West Coast style listeners can find a wide range of emotions and different levels of complexity. It captures feelings you won't find in some other jazz genres, often instilling a soft, romantic, restful, or even melancholy quality to a piece. Two standards are suggested below, both performed by Bill Evans (another major figure in the development of jazz) with members of his trios.

California Here I Come/The Bill Evans Trio/Bill Evans, piano (Verve CD)

Skylife/Turtle Island Quartet (Windham Hill Records CD) The Turtle Island Quartet has always been adventurous, playing familiar material in unfamiliar ways and creating hybrids of jazz, classical, and rock music. Their performance of Chick Corea's "Señor Mouse" crosses over between a traditional classical string quartet (although "the band" here is composed of three violins and cello instead of the usual two violins, viola, and cello) and some of the jazz genres the musicians have been influenced by.

Header image: the Turtle Island Quartet, courtesy of  Sylvia Elzafon.

This is a fax I received from Les Paul in 1992. In it he answers a series of questions I’d asked him in researching an article for The Absolute Sound in 1991, including queries about record sales figures, why some recordings didn’t have multi-tracked vocals, his favorite guitar players and more. The last sentence refers to the fact that I was looking for a Scott 22D amplifier (I think it was an amp) for him. I never found one.

If only she’d look at me like that…from Audio, November 1963.

This Empire Grenadier sure looked pretty, and you could serve hors d’oeuvres off the top! From Audio, April 1966.

SEE! HEAR! COMPARE! Now that’s what we call in-store demo. From Audio, but I got lost trying to find the issue this ad appeared in.

This article was first published in Issue 104.

Octave Records is proud to present a brilliant new artist for the label: jazz/funk/post-fusion guitarist Enmanuel Alexander, who is showcased with his quartet on Octave’s latest release, Off the Cuff – Live at Meadowlark. The album features the band blazing through a selection of standards and originals, recorded live-as-it-happened in stunning audiophile-quality Pure DSD sound.

Enmanuel Alexander brings a fresh and inventive electric guitar sound to listeners, combining the influence of past jazz and fusion masters with his open, expansive playing and use of chorus, delay, echo and overdrive to create an expressive new approach. Alexander is accompanied on Off the Cuff – Live at Meadowlark by Parris Fleming on trumpet, Solomon Chapman on piano and synthesizers, Will Gains on electric bass, and drummer Khalil Brown.

Recorded live at the Meadowlark Bar in Denver, Colorado, Enmanuel Alexander and the band live up to the album’s title with flights of spontaneous musical explorations. As Alexander noted, “We all know the head (melody) of the tune. After that, we’ll take it and maybe decide to play it completely differently. I trust the band to make good musical decisions as to where the music should go.”

Off the Cuff – Live at Meadowlark was recorded and mixed using the Pyramix DSD 256 system. The presence and realism of the recording are truly outstanding. The guitar and keyboards are richly textured, the drums have a you-are-there presence (the “jump factor” of the snare drum alone is captured with startling clarity), the bass is articulate and deep, and the trumpet has a lively and tangible quality. The mix captures every nuance of the performers, and when they get cooking, look out!

Enmanuel Alexander.

The album was recorded and mixed by Paul McGowan, and mastered by Gus Skinas. Off the Cuff – Live at Meadowlark features Octave’s premium gold disc formulation, and the disc is playable on any SACD, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray player. It also has a high-resolution DSD layer that is accessible by using any SACD player or a PS Audio SACD transport. In addition, the master DSD and PCM files are available for purchase and download, including DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64, and DSDDirect Mastered 352.8 kHz/24-bit, 176.2 kHz/24-bit, 88.2 kHz/24-bit, and 44.1 kHz/24-bit PCM. (SRP: $19 – $39, depending on format.)

The opening suite, “In a Silent Way/It’s About Time” takes listeners on a deep journey through the Miles Davis tunes, giving the players the opportunity to stretch out with their creative virtuosity. The band puts their own twist on another Miles classic, “Nardis,” as well as songs by Ronnie Foster (“Mystic Brew,”) Herbie Hancock (“Butterfly,”) and two Enmanuel Alexander originals, “Eleven” and the elegant, meditative album closer, “Venice.”

I had an off the cuff conversation (no, really) with Enmanuel about the new album.

Frank Doris: How did the mix of music on Off the Cuff – Live at Meadowlark come about?

Enmanuel Alexander: I got my bachelor's degree in 2020 in jazz and American music, and was studying jazz for about six years. A lot of the tunes [on the album] were ones that I was introduced to during that time, like “In a Silent Way/It's About that Time.” I just fell in love with that song and how it was produced [on the original Miles Davis In a Silent Way album].

I call the band I’m in Off the Cuff, and it's generally just kind of like, we'll take a tune and [decide to] play it completely differently. Maybe with a Latin feel, maybe a different time signature.

FD: Is it your regular band?

EA: I try to play with them as much as I can, 'cause they're the ones that bring the most creative and explorative energy. I trust them to make good musical decisions on where the music should go. Paris Fleming on trumpet is a good friend of mine, and he just played live on tour with Harry Styles, so he's a cool addition to [the band]. But I really try to create with the musicians that I really feel like I can trust, and who just listen and just know.

FD: And there's a telepathy that evolves. Are the arrangements written or did you just write the heads and take it from there?

EA: The arrangements are improvised. We all know the head of the tune. And then from that point on, that's it. All we know is the head (laughs) and the [rest of the band] doesn't know how I'm gonna start it. Maybe I create an intro or maybe I don't, maybe I just come in.

FD: I thought for sure you were going to say you had some charts written out. What made you take up the guitar?

EA: It was around 2014. I was always dabbling in guitar, but in high school my main instrument was percussion and drums.

Eventually I wanted to go to school for drums and percussion, but I was too intimidated and didn't really believe in myself at the time. And I took a year off and I started producing music and kind of playing my guitar more and adding guitar into my productions. Then I felt like I was at a crossroads where I needed to get better at the guitar. I took private lessons for a couple of years. Then I auditioned to get into the Jazz and American Improvised Music Performance degree [program] at Metro [Metropolitan State University of Denver].

I really wanted to dive deep into one instrument, and the guitar was there, and I was like, well, here we go! (laughs) And almost 10 years later, I'm here now…

FD: It worked!

What kind of gear do you use? A lot of jazz guitarists don't use effects. People like John Scofield and Pat Metheny, use chorus, but you use overdrive, wah-wah and other effects.

EA: I was heavily inspired by my mentor, Dave Devine. He is the one who got me into pedals and exploring my tone. My main go-to amp is a Roland Jazz Chorus. I really love that tone.

I was at a point where I was [thinking], my guitar's in mono, and I wanted it to be wider. How do I make my guitar wider? And then I discovered chorus, and delay pedals are really my jam. Recently I've been exploring a lot of echo effects.

My guitar is a D’Angelico Deluxe Brighton solid body. That's been my main guitar for about four years now. They’re beautiful guitars. I really love them a lot. I'm getting more into exploring outside the ranges of jazz. Just seeing how I can fit different genres together.

FD: You already mentioned Dave Devine, but who are some of your other influences and who do you like today?

EA: I'm really inspired by Isaiah Sharkey, a guitar player for D’Angelo.

Wes Montgomery and Grant Green are two ones I really love, my earliest inspirations. Santana as well. In middle school I watched this live concert video of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and it was like, “oh my gosh, what is he doing?” I'm not really a classic rock dude, but I played a lot of Guitar Hero III, and that inspired my classic rock [side].

I don't know, it's really hard to pinpoint my influences, but it's a lot of everything. I listened to Jason Mraz and Jack Johnson, and they're good musicians too. I used to play a lot of bossa nova, and Antonio Carlos Jobim was my favorite. I learned the chords and I was like, I don’t even know what to name this chord. I need to go to school! (laughs). I listen to Radiohead a lot, actually. Um, they are a band that I listen to a lot. I just love the space and openness of their albums.

FD: I can hear that in your playing. You definitely have that reaching out kind of quality.

Can you tell us about the originals on Off the Cuff? Why did you name them “Eleven” and “Venice/”

EA: I named “Eleven” because of the sharp 11 voicing that I use. And at the time of writing that song, I was watching a lot of Stranger Things. [Eleven is one of the main characters in the series – Ed.] I'm a numbers guy too, and I like the number 11.

For “Venice,” it just reminded me of the beach (Venice Beach).

FD: Not Italy?

EA: It could be Italy too.

Enmanuel Alexander (left) and band.

FD: Did you do a lot of takes of the songs on the album, or did you just play the song and say, “that's it?”

EA: Oh, it was actually a live recording.

FD: Right! I forgot about the applause at the end of the songs. Okay. Yeah, that was a brain freeze.

EA: No, it's OK. It sounds like it's like in the studio 'cause you can't really hear the audience until the end.

FD: The recording quality is so good it sounds like it was done in the studio. It must have been quite a rush to hear the playback.

EA: Yeah. The first time I heard it I was like, “yo, what?” (laughs)

FD: Probably the biggest compliment I can give you is that it sounds like you, it sounds like you guys, it doesn't sound like it's Stevie Ray Wannabee or some guy trying to sound like George Benson and not quite getting there. It makes a statement.

EA: Thank you. Something that I took from music school: in my first year there was a performance class, and I noticed that a lot of people were just trying to play like [artists] they were learning from. So when I started playing in the performance class, I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna play what I hear. I'm gonna throw all of this theory, knowledge, all of that out of the way and just trust my ear and go with that. And I think I've just developed my unique sound. I keep hearing from a lot of different people: keep doing what you like, keep doing your sound. Transcribing is great and learning other people's sounds is awesome, but you have to only take whatever [from it] and then turn it into your own, you know?

FD: Les Paul would agree with you. I interviewed him in 1991 and one of the things he told me was something to the effect of, you will never sound like Carlos Santana no matter how hard you try. It's good to learn from him and try to copy his licks, but if your goal is to sound like Carlos Santana, it will never happen. So don't bother! (laughs) On the other hand, he said, no one will ever sound like you. So, concentrate on sounding like you. That might've been the single best piece of advice that any musician ever gave me.

EA: Mm-hmm! Nice meeting you and talking with you.

FD: Same here!

EA: All right, peace.

Music can be a sort of time machine. When I hear The Carpenters' version of "(They Long to Be) Close to You," I am transported back to the family television room of my youth. I can still picture Karen Carpenter on the black and white screen, seated behind her drum kit, gently biting her lower lip between opening stanzas. 

Similarly, any track from the album Deep Purple in Rock reminds me of teenage parties. Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman will forever summon forth memories of the girlfriend who ran away from her alcoholic mother. This LP was one of her few possessions, and she played it incessantly in her one-room bedsit.

I didn't own copies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's Déjà Vu, or Carole King's Tapestry, but they were everywhere at the time, and so I remain conversant with every note and lyric.

There were also live performances in my youth that still elicit vivid memories, Frank Zappa's first tour of Australia being one such example. It was 1973, and Sydney was experiencing power blackouts due to industrial action. To my great relief, and no doubt Zappa's, the Hordern Pavilion had its own generator. The crack band, including jazzers George Duke and Jean Luc Ponty, was road-testing the material which would later appear on the album Apostrophe (').

I also have vivid memories of Pink Floyd's 1971 tour down under, where they were forced to play on a makeshift stage at Royal Randwick Racecourse with a gale force wind nearly blowing them onto the racetrack. Mind you, the weather added a certain frisson when Roger Waters let out his evocative scream during "Careful with That Axe, Eugene." The sound quality was awful, and the show began hours after it was scheduled, but all that frustration only adds to my recollections. 

University days also provided a string of memorable experiences thanks to the lunchtime concerts staged by the student's union. Lodged in my memory is Australia's answer to progressive rock, MacKenzie Theory, with Cleis Pearce whipping up a storm on her electric viola. Scabrous outfit the 69ers also left an indelible impression, especially their tune, "Bum Sweat, Crusty Bits and Stangers."

Music has a remarkable capacity to lodge in our brains, firmly attaching itself to specific times and places. As neuroscientists like Daniel J. Levitin have shown, our physiological response to music is highly complex, engaging many different parts of the brain simultaneously. Multiple-trace memory modeling suggests that specific memories are cross-coded with the context in which they were formed, and there's nothing quite like music to release those unique memory cues with their time-specific settings. While repeated listening to old favourites diminishes their capacity to invoke memories, when we hear a song that we haven't listened to for a long time the floodgates are often opened, triggering deep emotions and recollections.

Tony Wellington. Courtesy of the author.

Researchers have also noted that we tend to respond best to music that we denote as "our music," which inevitably means the music of our teens and twenties. That's not only the era during which we were discovering music, but also when we employed music to make sense of the world. So deep are these memories that even brain diseases like Alzheimer’s cannot expunge them. Indeed, people suffering advanced types of dementia may no longer identify family members but play them a song from their youth and they will frequently sing along, word-perfect.

Why do we keep returning to the music of our youth? A good deal of research demonstrates that our musical tastes are largely locked in by the time we hit our twenties. There is also plenty of research to show that the majority of us stop seeking out new music around the age of 30. For the rest of our lives, we tend to reach for the music of our youth. One study found that our favourite songs activate the pleasure areas of our brain, releasing dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. The more we like a song, the more intense those neurotransmitters become. What's more, with familiar songs, our brains anticipate the high points of the tune, triggering even more positive brain chemicals.

The way we respond to music is also culturally ordained: it's not inherent in the music itself. While it's long been assumed that minor chords are more likely to evoke melancholy feelings while major scales are considered to be happy, that simply doesn't hold true for people with only sporadic exposure to Western music. In one study, remote communities in Papua New Guinea were compared with musicians based in Sydney to gauge their separate reactions to specific chord progressions and melodies. The Papua New Guinea folk were just as likely to choose a minor scale as being happier than they were a major scale. Our responses to music are reinforced by the cultural use of specific music, say, to accompany events such as parties, funerals or weddings. Having learned how to respond to types of music, we can thereafter use music to help regulate our moods.

In the Sixties and Seventies, music was stuff to be shared. I loaned my King Crimson and Gentle Giant albums to my high school English teacher, and he responded with his Little Feat and Steely Dan discs. My friends and I would regularly gather in front of a stereo system for the sole purpose of listening to an album together.

Music back then had social consequences. To simply walk down the street with certain LPs under ones' wing (front cover always facing out) was to make a public statement about who we were. When cassette tapes arrived, we created compilation tapes of favourite tracks and handed them to our paramours, thus providing a tangible demonstration of the sort of person they were getting involved with.

But at the end of the ’70s, along came the Sony Walkman. Suddenly music was no longer something to be shared. The very nature of music changed. Music became increasingly personalised, piped through a headset whilst actively excluding other people from the listening experience.

Today, apart from a live setting, music is mostly consumed in private and rarely shared with others. I doubt that many young people gather to simply sit still and listen to an album. Thanks to streaming services, music can be turned on and off like a tap. The listener has far less investment in the music than they did when they had to travel to a store and hand over hard-earned cash.

Some ten million songs are uploaded to streaming services every year. As often as not, our musical choices are being made by algorithms. Even the pleasure in following band members from album to album has vanished. Only the title artist now gets a credit on the streaming service, and supporting musicians remain summarily ignored.

Music today is so accessible and absurdly abundant that I fear it is losing its value. From observing young folk today, music appears to be something that accompanies video games, or is played in the background whilst performing tasks such as studying and homework. Of course, every generation believes the music of their formative years to be the best that was ever created. As noted above, that's because it is embedded alongside emotional memories that are inevitably intense. But I do wonder whether music today will have the sort of resonating impact on today's youth that we boomers enjoyed in our formative years.

Tony Wellington is an Australian writer and the author of Vinyl Dreams – How the 1970s Changed Music, and Freak Out: How a Musical Revolution Rocked the World in the Sixties (both published by Monash University Publishing). For many years Tony worked in the film and television industry as a scriptwriter, director and editor, and he lectured in media studies and film. He has also worked as a professional artist and illustrator.

Tony has run folk clubs, hosted a music radio show, and has written for music magazines. He is a former Mayor of Noosa Shire. For more information, please visit www.tonywellington.com.

Josh Caterer is responsible for some of the most emotive, thought-provoking, and generally catchy pop/punk tunes of the 1990s. And while many old sayings still carry a lot of meaning, this time, the old saying is wrong because this old dog has certainly learned some new tricks.

A lot of you will remember Josh Caterer as the front man of alt-rock outfit Smoking Popes. Caterer and company are also celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Smoking Popes' debut record, Get Fired. The Popes have been busy once again in the studio, cooking up a fresh batch of songs, including a pair of digital singles: one of them being a guitar-driven new version of the Human League classic "Don't You Want Me" featuring Deanna Belos of Sincere Engineer on vocals, recorded at Million Yen Studios in Chicago, engineered by Andy Gerber, mixed by Jamie Woolford, and produced by Smoking Popes.

They also recorded an incendiary new original song, "Madison." In addition, Smoking Popes put together a 12-inch LP vinyl re-issue of their widely revered debut album Get Fired, which is being released August 17^th, with tour dates to follow. During the pandemic, Josh also reworked some of the old Popes tunes and some of his other favorites during a live session, which has been released on vinyl, CD, and digital.

I dug in with Josh Caterer for a chat regarding the Smoking Popes' debut, their new music, and more.

Andrew Daly: How did Smoking Popes form?

Josh Caterer: My brothers Eli and Matt and I grew up playing music together. We had everything set up in the basement – drums, guitar amps, bass rig. We'd just go down there and jam together for hours, and sometimes friends would come over and watch, so there was sort of an audience there. The band is really just an extension of that. It was a natural progression that we'd eventually come up with a band name and start playing out.

AD: Can you recount the band's first gig?

JC: At first, we were calling ourselves Speedstick and played a couple of basement shows. But when we changed our name to Smoking Popes, the first show we played was in a loft in Crystal Lake, Illinois, with a few other local bands. That would have been the summer of 1991. I don't remember much about our set other than that we enjoyed it.

Josh Caterer. Courtesy of Howlin' Wuelf Media.

AD: How did the band end up being signed to Johann's Face Records?

JC: Marc Ruvalo, who ran Johann's Face, came to see us play at a place called Wrigleyside in Chicago. That's where I remember meeting him. He told us he had a label and offered to put out a record for us. It was all very exciting! We were just a bunch of suburban kids playing our first gig in the city, and now a real Chicago punk label wanted to put out our record. 

AD: Going into Sonic Iguana Studios, where you recorded Get Fired, how many songs did the band have?

JC: We only recorded the nine songs that ended up on the album, so there are no leftover tracks from those sessions. There was an acoustic demo of "Megan" that we had sent to [record producer] Mass Giorgini, but once we got into the studio, we decided to save that one for another album, and it ended up on Destination Failure a few years later. I know many bands like to go in and record a ton of songs and then pick the 10 best for the album, but we've never worked that way. We just come up with a batch of songs we feel good about, record them all and put them out. It's a very efficient approach. The only drawback is that you don't have bonus tracks later.  

AD: Which songs stand out most in terms of recording and writing?

JC: From a songwriting perspective, my favorite track is probably "Don't Be Afraid." I like how the melody and the lyrics work together to create a certain emotional atmosphere. It's sort of a glimpse of the direction our songs would take in the coming years.

AD: Did you have to change the songs much once in the studio?

JC: To my memory, we didn't change any of the songs very much. We had worked out the arrangements before we got there, and we played them pretty much live in the studio with minimal overdubs and relatively few takes.  

AD: What were some of the challenges and the most notable moments?

JC: We went and stayed with our producer, Mass Giorgini, over the weekend while we were recording. We had never met him before, but he let us crash at his place for a couple of days, so it could have gone either way. If we didn't get along, we'd be stuck in that situation, and it could have been a nightmare. But Mass is a great guy, and we really connected with him, and it was all very positive and focused. That was all part of the experience for us, being away from home, in sort of a bubble for a few days, just focusing on making a record with no distractions.

AD: What guitars, amps, and pedals played the most significant role?

JC: I was playing a Gibson SG through a Peavey combo amp. I don't recall using any pedals on this album. I've never been much of a pedal guy, although I do have a fuzz pedal I kick on during solos these days. Eli [Caterer] was playing a Gibson Les Paul Studio through a Randall solid-state head, also probably with no pedals. We like to use the natural distortion of the amp whenever possible. 

AD: Do you have any cringe factor when you listen back? Anything you'd change?

JC: When Mass was mixing the album, we insisted that he use a lot of reverb on the drums to make them sound more like Dinosaur Jr. You can hear it, especially on "Off My Mind." That's my only regret. We should have left him alone and let him mix it how he wanted. But I still think it sounds good, even in spite of that. Mass did a great job, especially considering the lack of time and resources involved. We recorded and mixed all of it in just a few days. 

AD: Tell me about the new tracks you’ve put out in celebration of your 30^th anniversary.

JC: We did a version of the Human League song "Don't You Want Me," and Deanna [Belos] of Sincere Engineer sings it with me. She's got such an amazing voice! We even did a video for that song, which was a lot of fun to make. The other single is "Madison," and it’s sort of an up-tempo rocker. It's the first new original song we've recorded in about five years, so we wanted to come out swinging.

AD: How have Smoking Popes evolved most?

JC: We've learned to listen to each other over the years, and it's helped us to become more of a cohesive unit. When we play now, it feels like we're all part of a single organism rather than separate entities, so we're better able to serve the song than we used to be. When we recorded Get Fired, that process was just starting, we were on the cusp of being able to do that, but we were still pretty loose. Over the course of our next few albums, you can hear us getting tighter and tighter.

AD: And what's still the same?

JC: In that sense – us getting tighter and tighter – we've evolved, but the one thing that has stayed the same about our music is that it's all about the melody. The instrumentation and the chord patterns are all built around the vocal melody because that's how I write. Sometimes, you can tell when a band comes up with the music first, where the songs are built around a riff or a groove, and the vocals come afterward. I'm not saying music like that is always bad, but it's not our style, and it never will be. We've always taken more of the Irving Berlin approach. Everything serves the melody.  

AD: Do you still relate to those early songs? How has your own process changed from a songwriting and guitar-playing standpoint?

JC: I do still relate to those songs. Thankfully, I didn't write anything too juvenile back then that I'm embarrassed to sing now. My songwriting has become a bit more existential in recent years, but I feel like I can still connect with the romantic frustration of those early songs, which is fun. 

AD: What does Get Fired truly mean to you?

JC: This album takes me back to a certain point in time before we signed with Capitol Records and before we knew where the road would take us. I hear a kind of innocence in these songs, just a bunch of kids jamming in the basement, having fun, trying to be cool according to their own goofy standards of what "cool" means. I love that. Technically, it's not our best album because we got better as we went along, but this one has a special place in my heart.

Header image courtesy of Howlin' Wuelf Media.

Since its initial release in 2021, Say Somethin’ by jazz trumpeter Gabriel Mervine has been one of Octave Records’ most popular releases. The original limited-edition SACD and vinyl have long been sold out – and now, listeners can enjoy Octave Records’ re-release of Gabriel’s album of jazz standards and originals, which has been remixed and remastered with improved sound quality, and features two bonus tracks.

Gabriel Mervine began his professional career at age 13. He’s a member of the Colorado Jazz Repertory Orchestra and has worked with Natalie Cole, Christian McBride, Terence Blanchard, the Temptations, the Who, Fred Wesley and many others. On Say Somethin’ he’s joined by Tom Amend (piano), Seth Lewis (upright bass) and Alejandro Castaño (drums) The music ranges from the upbeat grooves of the title track, “1964” and “Furor” to more contemplative songs like “Friends” and the quartet’s cover of “A Foggy Day.” The re-release includes two bonus tracks recorded at the original sessions: the standard, “Young at Heart,” and “Lawns,” a flowing, meditative Carla Bley composition.

Say Somethin’ was originally recorded live in DSD 64 with no overdubbing by Mervine and his quartet, to capture the spontaneity and interplay between the musicians with stunning sonic realism. The re-release has been remixed by PS Audio and Octave CEO Paul McGowan on the state-of-the-art Merging Technologies Pyramix system, for an even greater level of fidelity and musical impact.

Paul noted, “The newly mixed and mastered Say Somethin’ offers greater realism to the sound of Gabriel’s trumpet, more clarity in the drums and piano, better presence for the upright bass, and a higher level of transparency overall.” He added, “we usually release our SACDs and LPs as limited editions, but Say Somethin’ has been one of our most popular albums, as well as one of our earliest, and since we’ve upgraded our mixing and mastering facilities since its initial release, we decided to make it available on physical media once again.”

The reissued Say Somethin’ features Octave’s premium gold disc formulation, and the disc is playable on any SACD, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray player. It also has a high-resolution DSD layer that is accessible by using any SACD player or a PS Audio SACD transport. In addition, the master DSD and PCM files are available for purchase and download, including DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64, and DSDDirect Mastered 352.8 kHz/24-bit, 176.2 kHz/24-bit, 88.2 kHz/24-bit, and 44.1 kHz/24-bit PCM. (SRP: $19 – $39, depending on format.)

I spoke with Gabriel to get his thoughts about the re-release of Say Somethin’:

Gabriel Mervine: People have really dug that album and they've been selling out of it [the SACD and two vinyl editions]. And at Octave they [haven’t done] re-pressings. They generally say, this is what we've made, and once it's gone, it's gone.

I guess they had enough people reach out that they finally decided to do a re-release, and they've just kind of honed their mixing and mastering to a point where this new release is on a different level.

We recorded a lot of material in the Say Somethin’ sessions, just because we were having such a great time. I think we released about 50 percent of what we originally recorded. So, the re-release was a great opportunity to add a couple of tracks that we really liked.

Gabriel Mervine.

Frank Doris: Well, the tracks that you didn't use are just as good as the ones that you did use. And as far as the remixing and remastering, things just keep progressing, you know?

GM: The more time you put into something, the more you learn. And sometimes you can go back and rehash things and create something even better.

FD: I like to tell people the more you play the better you get.

GM: Yep.

FD: “Young at Heart” is a standard, but what's the story behind “Lawns?”

GM: Tom Amend, the pianist on this record, introduced me to that song and we started doing it occasionally. Sometimes certain melodies or certain chord changes just hit you a certain way, or maybe it's the vibe of that performance. I think the first time we played it live was when things were just starting to reopen [after the pandemic]. And it just felt good. It got a good audience response and the band felt good playing it. And so, it just made its way into my book.

FD: I guess you've been back to playing regularly.

GM: Oh yeah. The Denver scene is just really alive. There's lots of places to play and lots of different types of music happening, jazz, funk, dance music, all of it. I've been performing quite a bit every Tuesday at the Brown Palace Hotel, every Wednesday at the Appaloosa Grill and playing [elsewhere] as well.

FD: How has your playing or your music developed in the last few years? Because the world we now live in has deeply affected everybody.

GM: I still work on my craft almost every day. You know, trying to get better at composing and playing my instrument and improvisation and harmony. I really still love just studying music and studying the instrument. And I love playing music of all different types. Something I've been focusing on lately is Brazilian choro music. It’s kind of like classical jazz in a way. (Octave Records artist) Alicia Jo Straka and I are working on getting back in the studio and recording these tunes, with some special guests. After that, I'd like to do another quartet album [with] original compositions.

FD: I find it interesting that with a lot of musicians I've been interviewing lately, they keep saying the same thing, which is that they're getting into playing all different kinds of music.

GM: Mm-hmm.

FD: I wonder if that's become a more universal thing because now you have exposure to every kind of music. With some of Octave Records’ albums, they're jazz-influenced, but you can't really say, “this is jazz,” because the music has so many different elements.

GM: I think it's all of that; technology, and the world has gotten smaller. We can all communicate. Also, a lot of our favorite genres and our favorite musicians that we've been listening to have been incorporating different sounds [from all over the world], and then that will inspire us to want to create that as well. You listen to Herbie Hancock, he's got all these different influences. Roy Hargrove, all these people I grew up listening to, you know? And it's fun to be challenged. Not that playing the same genre isn't challenging, but I find I get really inspired by hearing something new.

FD: What inspired you to do the particular songs on Say Somethin’?

GM: The quote, “jazz standards” that we recorded are just favorite tunes of mine, favorite melodies, [and songs] that I perform. [if] the melody feels good, it's fun to improvise over.

We didn't get to rehearse or really play together prior to this recording, because of the state of the world [at the time during the pandemic]. So I was trying to toe the line as a composer, and write something that's interesting enough for the listener and interesting enough for the performer to have fun and to want to play it, but not so complex that we were gonna need rehearsal time, 'cause we didn't have any! (laughs)

Also, sometimes when you write a little bit of a simpler melody or simple harmonic progression, it allows more space for the performer to express their ideas, you know?

FD: Right. You’re not struggling and trying to play through the changes of something complicated like “Giant Steps” or “’Round Midnight.” I read an article that quoted Frank Zappa, who is such a fantastic guitar player, saying something to the effect that he can’t do that stuff, so he plays through these one or two-chord vamps where he can just fly. Then there’s the story of how Tommy Flanagan, the pianist on Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” could hardly navigate the changes to the song when he did his solo.

GM: Well, the goal is to feel that free and expressive over the chord changes over those more complex harmonic structures, but it takes time. Hopefully you've had the time to work out those kinks. Writing something with a little bit of a simpler harmonic progression can allow more expressive moments, because you're not having to think so much about the harmony. And the Tommy Flanagan thing is a good example. Trane had been practicing those chord changes for a while, because he wrote them. And he probably had just showed them to Tommy, who had to read them right there at the session (laughs). Musicians of today have spent a lot of time learning that progression, 'cause it's so well known. But when we listen to those iconic records, [we need to realize] they were seeing that music for the first time.

FD: Anything else you want to add?

GM: We [still have] quite a bit [of unreleased music] sitting in the locker right now, and we'll keep making new music as well.

Steve Hoffman is one of the most highly-regarded  mastering engineers in the recording industry, and his discography is a microcosm of 20th and 21st Century music history. The thousands of records to his credit span from the Great Depression era with Bing Crosby through World War II and the Eisenhower era of jazz, country and folk, Frank Sinatra, Buddy Holly, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, The Doors, John Coltrane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jethro Tull, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, all the way through to present-day Metallica.

Steve Hoffman has achieved such a rarefied status that he has garnered thousands of audiophile fan followers in a profession that few people outside of the recording industry's technical side are even aware of. Steve spoke with John Seetoo for Copper, and shared some opinions and anecdotes from his home in Los Angeles.

John Seetoo: You aspired to be a musician, and recorded one semi-classic surf rock song, “Cecilia Ann,” with your band, The Surftones. Where did you go from there? Did you always intend to be involved in music?

Steve Hoffman: No, that Surftones thing – that was just a lark. We didn’t expect anything. It was something that happened only because of that Pixies’ thing; they heard it and wanted to record it for themselves. So when that happened, it was a happy accident. But basically, my career has always been behind the scenes. That’s where I’ve always wanted to be. I know I’m not a fantastic musician; I mean, I’m adequate, but nothing to make a career on.

So, I worked in radio broadcasting, and then I moved over to a record company, where I compiled albums on paper, you know, old stuff like Bing Crosby…and then I moved over to mastering of old recordings to make sure that they sounded nice.

JS: You also worked for poet and songwriter Rod McKuen back in the day. What was that like, and did that have any bearing on your future career? Was he a mentor, or are there any others in your career development that helped you to reach your current preeminence?

SH: Interesting question. I don’t consider Rod McKuen a mentor; he was basically just an assignment I had. The record company found him very hard to handle, so they sent me over there, because I’m amiable…and we just clicked right away; absolutely.

JS: Was this during your MCA days?

SH: No, no…after that.  DCC Compact Classics. He wouldn’t answer the door for anybody because he was going through one of those periods where he didn’t feel like answering the door. So they sent me over there, ‘cause I was someone to whom he could relate since he was creative and moody and blah, blah…So, I got to know him and…we became real close. We spent a lot of hours together working on his back catalog, and…he was a really great guy, but as for mentoring me, no. I was already in it up to my neck at that point.

What we were trying to do was get his back catalog out on CD, and he didn’t quite understand what that entailed. We rebuilt this little in-house recording studio, and we remixed some of his old things and re-released them, and kind of brought him back out again into the spotlight.

JS: Were there any people that you would consider mentors; people whose revelations helped you to build on to get to your current level of status…?

SH: Yes, actually. You know, no one has ever asked me that, in all these years. That’s an interesting thing. There was a guy who not many people know now, but at one time he was pretty much a heavyweight in the industry, named Milt Gabler, and he was the guy who, in 1939, founded Commodore Records. When Billie Holliday wanted to record “Strange Fruit,” no record label would touch it, so his Commodore label put it out, and it went on to become famous.

Later, he worked as an A&R guy for Decca Records and MCA. He did “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets, and many, many other great songs from that era. In his old age, I had him flown out to Los Angeles, and apparently no one at the record company had really talked to him for many years. I spent many days with him. And he got me all the contacts that made it possible for us to re-release Buddy Holly, Bill Haley…and everybody like that. So, he helped me out; he helped my credibility out. And I helped him to become remembered. You know, not only in the company, but outside the company as well, so he died a happy man.

JS: Wow, that’s great. It’s nice to be able to have a sense of giving back to the industry; to the people who made a difference in the history of recorded music.  That’s wonderful.  Did you intend to become a mastering engineer when you realized you weren’t destined to become a full time musician?

SH: No…I never wanted…I never even knew what a mastering engineer was. I wanted a job that actually paid money because I was still living at home with my parents. And up to a certain point, that’s OK, but after you get into your 20s, it’s like, OK, you know, it’s time to get a real job now. So I worked in radio broadcasting. And when I moved over to the record industry, I was simply hired to do historical A&R, A&R, of course, meaning artist and repertoire. In other words, to utilize the back catalog of the record company (labels): ABC,  Paramount, Dot, Decca, and Brunswick…all those songs that were lying dormant.

So I was working on a Bing Crosby record and writing down the songs that I wanted on it, and when I heard the test pressing that came back, one song from 1936 sounded wonderful, and then another song recorded at that same time had this echo on it, and it sounded horrible. I then made the decision, that constantly made me a lot of enemies, to find out what they used as their source material – why one song sounded great and a song recorded an hour later sounded horrible.

It turns out they were pulling the wrong versions of the songs, and the mastering engineers out there didn’t care. They would master whatever they were given. I put my nose in where it wasn’t wanted and started to learn what mastering was and how important it was. I kept hanging around, and finally, I was a part of it.

JS: Did you have any training as a cutting engineer or a recording engineer, or did you just hit the ground running as a mastering engineer?

SH: No. I knew how to engineer. I knew what compression was; I knew what dynamic range was from my several years in radio broadcasting. I did radio engineering in high school and in college at the big radio station here in town.  They hired scab labor in those days because they were trying to break the engineering union, and I was about the most willing scab they could possibly find (laughs).

So, you, know, I got to learn how it was done. And I noticed, for example, if we had three versions of Paul McCartney’s Ram [album] and one sounded really good and another sounded really horrible, I would have to finally look at the lead-out groove, and if the writing was not the same, I realized that whichever engineer worked on the bad-sounding one didn’t do it right!  So it whetted my curiosity.

Basically, I always worked in record cutting with another guy, Kevin Gray. He did the actual cutting part; I did the sound part. In other words, I made sure that it sounded the way I wanted it to sound, and he made sure he captured that sound on the actual record.

JS: You refer to yourself as a “music restoration specialist.” Is there any misunderstanding about mastering you’d like to clear up, and how you view your work as different from standard mastering? Do you have a particular philosophy as a mastering engineer?

SH: Oh yeah. OK…you know, I’ve had the same philosophy, throughout my career and even before. If someone works very hard on a song, it’s the mastering engineer’s responsibility to do no damage. Unless it sounds really, really bad – then it’s the mastering engineer’s responsibility to make it sound as good as possible.

I always refer to mastering as “hanging the Mona Lisa.” If the Louvre museum loaned you the Mona Lisa so you could display it at a party, and you hung it in the living room and shined bright lights on it, you’re going to see all the cracks; you’re not going to be really thrilled with it. It’s how you light it, it’s how it’s hung, and how it looks – that’s what’s going to make the difference, and that’s what mastering is.

In my style of mastering, I want everyone to sound like they’re human beings, and I want to keep the dynamic range that’s on the master tape. Other than that –  [with] the mastering engineers, especially right now, the trend is to squash everything so that everything is loud, (even the quiet parts). And that is the absolute antithesis of my mastering philosophy.

JS: Were there any particular projects where you feel you “saw the light” and began to achieve and consistently deliver that higher standard of music restoration above that of the industry norm, since you say you didn’t work at all as an engineer in other recording capacities?

SH: Well, I hung around with those guys. I realized that end of the industry was not for me. I mean, working all day on a tambourine overdub on a song…I mean…OK, but I want to do something else. With mastering, half of the battle is finding the right source material. If you don’t have the right source material, you’re just wasting your time. Once you’ve spent hours hunting for the correct version of each song…but every single album I’ve done has been in the same way. There are projects where I’ve uncovered the actual master tapes that were never used, and I’d go, “Wow! That sounds really fantastic! Let’s make sure I don’t screw it up!,” but I never went, “oh!  This is the way to do it! Let me just ignore everything I’ve done previously, and concentrate on this style.” No, I’ve always had the same style. I’ve worked on thousands of albums: Buddy Holly, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, The Doors, The Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra…and the list goes on and on. And you know, I’ve had that same sound in my head, ever since I was young, so that really hasn’t changed. It’s always been…almost the opposite of every other mastering engineer out there. (laughs)

JS: So you have an innate quality standard that you’ve always strived to achieve, and once you were in a position to do it, you just kept repeating that process and hitting that mark for yourself.

SH: That’s exactly right, John. That is perfect. I’ve got to copy that down, to use that the next time someone asks me. That is absolutely it. You know, I’ve always heard it the same, and that’s never going to change.

JS: You’re associated with audiophile labels and re-releases. Is that by choice? Or would you like to work on new releases as well?

SH: No. I’m old and crotchety now, and I don’t like the engineering style of most of the new recordings out there; they’re absolute ear bleeders. You know, if you hear some of these bands live, they’re fantastic. But when you hear their final recordings, they just sound like – one note. And I try to explain to some of these guys, “look, back off on all this signal processing and let the natural band sound shine through.” And they always say, “yeah, but we don’t want to be quieter than anybody else on a CD or download. We have to be loud.” Well, if you’re all loud all the time, you sound quiet. You know, unless you have something quieter to compare it to, it’s all annoying, and after a while, you lose interest, because your ears are just shutting off the sound. No, I like  working with the old stuff. I’m happy with that.

JS: Do you associate the heavy compression with the lower-resolution quality of mp3 and streaming, or is it a style thing more than a tech thing?

SH: No. What happened is Sony, in their infinite wisdom, invented the CD changer. So now you had a tray with six CDs in there. One is really loud; one is naturally dynamic. So when you’re at a party, the naturally dynamic one comes on and nobody can hear it. So when the executives started realizing that, they told their mastering engineers to make everything sound loud, so you could hear it. And I can understand that philosophy, and that’s OK for something that was recorded in 1998, but you don’t – you don’t screw around with Bing Crosby! You make that loud all the time, you just make it sound – obnoxious.

JS: You’re primarily associated with projects released on CDs and SACDs. How does your job differ for vinyl or download releases? 

SH: That’s another very good question. It doesn’t. It’s the same, every single time. When I am working on an LP, all we have to worry about is that the record doesn’t get too loud so that it’ll break the groove or that it gets too quiet and goes under the noise floor of the actual surface of the record. Other than that, I do not change my style for CDs or for SACDs or any other platform. It always sounds like me. You know, a lot of people love that and a lot of people don’t like it. So, I don’t change my style.

JS: Do you still see strong demand for physical media like CDs?

SH: I do. But I’m in a world of audiophiles, and they want to hold it in their hand. You know, they want numbered editions, they want something tangible; they want something saying that there’s artwork. They’re not really into downloads, although that may change when the next generation comes in. That wouldn’t surprise me. For now, no, it’s always an SACD, vinyl or a CD.

JS: Are they any particular types of projects you prefer to work on, or particular types that you refuse to accept?

SH: I like Asian rap – that’s a joke. (laughs) No, I don’t care what it is. You know what? I fall in love with all my projects. And even if it’s something that I don’t like, I find something about it to love. That’s the only way I can actually operate.

JS: There’s actually some Asian rap you’d probably have fun with, because there are some that use gamelan and traditional Asian and Southeast Asian instruments, which can have some very interesting dynamics.

SH: I know. And a lot of it is actually extremely well-recorded. I mean, unbelievably well-recorded. Yeah, I like pretty much everything. I was brought up in that old school: you listened to some classical, you listened to some jazz, you listened to pop, you listened to world music, you listened to everything – it’s all good. You listen to Buddy Holly and to Miles Davis, and you find something to love about both.

So that’s me. And fortunately, it turned out really good for me and my career that I am like that, because I’ve worked on the most eclectic amount of crazy albums from all eras, and I love it all, so I’m happy.

This article originally appeared in Issue 36.

Header image courtesy of Steve Hoffman.

I have been asked on several occasions to write about the guitar players who have had the greatest influences on me.

While I have talked about this short list in interviews, I have never gone into any specifics as to the what, when and why of my choices.

Here then, for my loyal readers of Copper, is a more detailed description of the guitar players who have had the greatest impact on my life.

Mike Bloomfield

Everyone who creates finds a portal. That is the entry point by which a world of wonder and learning descends upon one’s imagination and pushes out everything else that could get in the way of learning about and a deep desire to figure out why one feels so enveloped by what one has just experienced.

Yes, at the age of 10 I learned my first guitar chords from my brother and my summer camp counselor, Mike Meeropol. Weavers records were always being played in my house.

Through both my brother and Mike, I learned at the age of 10 how to “Travis pick” because in 1962, folk music was all the rage.

I know how to play this pretty complex style of playing but have never needed to use it and it remains just an interesting sidebar to my blues/metal style.

For the next five years, especially through the love of the Beatles, my love of guitar playing was relegated to bass playing because there were never enough bass players for the local bands and I was studying upright bass in junior high school.

As much as I loved the Beatles, I strangely never liked their guitar sound particularly and, though both John and George were great players in their respective positions, never looked up to them as guitar heroes.

It wasn’t until I joined a blues band at the age of 15 and watched a local guitar hero, Nick Katzman, copy the guitar style of Mike Bloomfield, that the fire of inspiration began to burn through me.

I was given a copy of the first album by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band because we were playing many songs from that album. Although the opening song, “I Was Born in Chicago” is one of my all time favorites, it wasn’t until the opening guitar riff from the song “Blues With a Feeling” that nailed it for me. The sound of Bloomfield's guitar and the fluidity of the opening guitar riff followed by the guitar solo became the gate with which I entered the world of lead guitar fascination.

I had to know how it was played.

I had to know how that sound was created.

I played the album, and that song especially, over and over.

Shortly after I got the album I bought my first electric guitar. It was a Fender Telecaster because that is what Bloomfield was holding in the photo on the back of the cover. This was very early 1968, and I went down to 48th street in New York City to a store called Jimmy’s, because the famous Manny’s Music wanted $147.50. I only had $135.00 and Jimmy’s took it!

In the spring of 1968 I got a very bad case of mononucleosis and was ordered by my doctor to stay home from school for three weeks. It was during that time that I played eight hours a day. I slept with my guitar in my bed.

All day I practiced the guitar riffs of Mike Bloomfield.

As the days rolled on, I began to understand the placement of the notes and the timing of the lead parts.

When I finally recovered from mono and arose from my sickbed that spring, I was a lead guitar player!

This desire was so overwhelming and the passion so deep that even today, when I wonder if I can play well enough, I can always go back to that time where anything and everything was possible.

Thank you Mike Bloomfield for being that guiding light and hand.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Mike Bloomfield/Elliot Landy.

This article originally appeared in Issue 57.

Meet George Vardis, a retired biologist with a master's degree in food technology, residing in Athens, Greece. George is a sophisticated man with many interests, including sailing, photography, motorbikes, and music. He plays the piano and the guitar, but his career always steered well clear of the music industry. He was never a recording artist, nor was he a recording engineer. In fact, he has probably never seen a recording studio in real life.

Yet, when he listens to music at home, which he regularly does for pleasure, he expects a seriously realistic experience. George values good recordings, and expects to be able to reproduce them accurately at home. Through the years, he has owned or auditioned a wide selection of the world's finest audio equipment, not least due to his membership of various audio clubs, where it is customary that members invite each other for listening sessions. Some of his audio equipment was originally intended for professional facilities, offering exceptional detail and accuracy.

Exquisite Audio Equipment

His present setup offers a very high level of performance, much higher actually than many professional recording and mastering facilities.

George is listening through a custom horn loudspeaker system, with the low frequencies pumped out of Altec 416 drivers mounted on open baffles. The mid-bass, coming out of the red horns (see the header image), uses RCA MI-9584A compression drivers. The mid-high drivers are Altec 288s, and a pair of Coral H-104s take care of the high frequencies.

The passive crossover was designed by Manolis Proestakis of Tune Audio (an internationally renowned high-end loudspeaker manufacturer from Greece) and the entire system is driven by custom single-ended vacuum tube power amplifiers, using original Western Electric 300B directly heated triodes.

He has a variety of sources, including a Sony SCD1 SACD player, a McIntosh MR75 tuner along with an Audio Research SP11 MKII preamp, but his real passion is for vinyl records and magnetic tape.

His setup for vinyl record reproduction is quite impressive. He runs an EMT 927 turntable, fitted with an Ortofon RMG 309 tonearm and an EMT TSD15 cartridge, along with the vacuum tube EMT 139st b phono stage. Exactly, a pure vacuum-tube signal path!

As this was not enough, he also has an EMT 930 turntable, fitted with an EMT tonearm, with another EMT TSD15 moving coil cartridge and an EMT 155st solid-state phono stage.

There's also an EMT 950 turntable somewhere there, along with a Linn Sondek LP12, and I was told he used to also own a Thorens TD 160 turntable.

While some smaller tape machines (Nagra, Revox, and others) had previously paraded through his system, he eventually decided to take the plunge and go for a full-size master tape reproduction system. For the task, he got not one, but two Studer A80 1/4-inch tape machines. One came from the BBC in the UK and the other one most likely from a Dutch broadcasting facility. The latter is the VU version, fitted with VU meters.

The Necessity of Maintenance: Measuring and Calibrating

Most importantly, George fully understands that in order to achieve truly accurate sound reproduction, it is not enough to simply purchase good audio equipment. The important part is to be able and willing to regularly check and ensure that it is perfectly calibrated. Properly calibrated, cheaper equipment will easily outperform poorly-maintained professional equipment. This takes some skill and some dedicated measurement instruments.

Some of the measuring equipment in George's lab.

So, through some consulting sessions with Agnew Analog, George has become proficient at using the modest collection of measurement instruments he has acquired. In the picture you can see a Tektronix CRT oscilloscope and a Rigol digital oscilloscope, a QuantAsylum 401 analyzer, and an Audio Precision Portable One dual domain audio analyzer. What you do not see in the picture are a couple of measurement microphones and matching preamplifiers, plus a noise generator, distortion analyzer, multiple test records (including the FloKaSon Testtone Record we talked about in Absolute Polarity for Disk Records), test tapes (including some custom Agnew Analog Reference Instruments calibration tapes), and other useful items to have around in any critical listening environment, whether domestic or professional.

High Expectations: Audio Engineers and Music Sales

Having introduced George and his passion for good sound, it is worth pointing out that he is not alone. All around the world, others like him with a similar passion for audio have put together similarly impressive sound reproduction systems, and have learned how to properly calibrate them to ensure accurate reproduction

These people represent a sector of the potential audience for new recordings, released into the market. They evidently take the whole notion of listening to music very seriously.

However, do the professionals working on recordings nowadays take it just as seriously? Is their equipment able to produce recordings that would satisfy a serious critical listener? Is the equipment used in the studios nowadays of the same caliber? Is it being actively maintained and calibrated to ensure accurate performance? Is George going to hear something horrible in your recording that you never know was there, because your monitoring system is not as revealing? Will our recordings, nowadays, meet the expectations of the serious listener, who has regularly experienced truly good recordings?

Frankly, many will fail to meet such expectations. More and more professional audio facilities nowadays consider it "uneconomical" to invest in serious equipment, to pay the wages of seriously skilled engineers, and to maintain all the appropriate operating and calibration procedures, not to mention the required measurement instruments. What they fail to understand, though, is that the relatively minor additional effort and expense required to do things properly greatly expands the commercial potential of their product. In simple words, good recordings sell more, because they are up to the standards of individuals who simply will not buy a mediocre (or worse) recording. Such individuals actually make up a considerable percentage of the music-buying public, especially in these times of free online streaming: those who do not care about sound quality anyway no longer need to buy music.

If a recording can be made to sound good on an accurate, high-end sound system, it will also sound good on any lesser system. Remember, the less-accurate systems actually hide a lot of the detail, which can often hide the faults of a mediocre recording, for an unsuspecting audience. But you cannot hide these faults from an accurate system. On such systems, when a recording is good, it will sound amazing. But they tend to be merciless with bad recordings.

Another view of George's system (also pictured in the header image).

Keeping Up the Century-Old Tradition of Excellence

As a professional audio engineer, whenever I am working on a recording, or designing/developing/restoring professional audio equipment, I always aim to keep George (and others like him) happy. This is the minimum standard for a professional audio facility, in my view. We need to ensure that our equipment, methods and quality control are adequate to satisfy the critical listener.

Apart from the philosophical aspect of my position (always trying to better myself, always working to the very best of my abilities, and trying to reduce useless waste in the form of substandard products, that will either never sell or end up in a landfill way too soon), it is also a very necessary survival tactic in a crowded and competitive market. If you want to last long, you simply have to be that good!

To put it bluntly, everyone and their dog can record an album nowadays. How is yours going to stand out? Listeners like George are the benchmark. They have the ears, the years and the gear to tell apart a good recording from a mediocre one.

As professionals in audio or music, it is our duty to work to the highest-possible standards and not settle for anything less. We must produce recordings and equipment worthy of being reproduced and used by the critical listener if we expect our industry to survive in the long run.

We are now fortunate to be able to enjoy, as professionals or simply as listeners, the results of the immense body of experience, knowledge and research, which has been generously handed down generation after generation throughout centuries of music and audio: This includes the music itself, musical instrument development, musicianship, performance skills, composition, the phonograph cylinder, the gramophone record, electronic amplification, the vinyl record, optical recording, magnetic wire recording, magnetic tape recording, constant improvements to transducer technology, all the way to the modern high-definition digital audio formats.

It is now our turn to significantly contribute to this glorious history in a meaningful manner. We must preserve this history, actively participate in its evolution, and hand it down to the next generation to do likewise with.

This article was originally published on the Agnew Analog Reference Instruments blog and is used by permission.

When I was a teenager, I told my girlfriend that I loved her so much that I would die for her. She replied that if I died, her life would no longer be worth living. So if I lost my life pushing her out of the way of a moving trolley, my sacrifice would be meaningless!

What would she have me do, jump out of the way and let her take the hit? That would kill my sense of integrity and then I’d find life meaningless. What a Catch-22!

My uncle warned me that women would complicate my life.

I’m often asked to make audio assessments for members of The San Diego Music and Audio Guild. Maybe it’s because some big players in the industry have lauded my homemade speakers. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been president of the club for over 20 years and have experienced most every member’s system – and many at CES and other shows over the years. 

Making audio assessments is another Catch-22 situation. If I’m honest and say that I don’t like the sound, the audiophile may feel that my life is no longer worth living. If on the other hand, I tell them it’s great when it’s not, I’d be compromising my sense of integrity!

So, I compliment only their system’s positive characteristics. Once done, it’s best to shut up, politely ask for a beer, and steer the discussion towards hops and barley. Invariably however, after a few glasses, the audiophile will ask what I really think. This is tricky because he may have an emotional fortune invested in his equipment. But beer breaks down my defenses. In the end, I always end up revealing my true impressions. Maybe I should quit beer.

What eventually saved me from this dilemma was a frequency-spectrum analyzer. Now, rather than offer a poor appraisal, I’ll say, “Well, let’s take a look at the in-room frequency response.” Then I’ll take a reading on a pink noise source and share my results. Sometimes it reveals peak to null variations of over 18 dB.

"See Larry, that’s why your system sounds the way it does.”

By using this method, the device takes the rap and I’m off the hook (well worth the $1,500). That’s sometimes followed by a discussion of how measurements are meaningless (don’t try that with a cop who busted you for speeding).

For some members, accuracy is not an issue. On a first-time visit to one member’s home, I was impressed with the $250,000 floorstanding speakers in his large acoustic space. My heart sank, however, when I saw that he was feeding them with a pair of tube monoblocks. I knew the speakers were power hogs needing at least 500 watts per side, but the tube amps produced only 10 percent of that. They were connected via fat speaker cables each housing a big lump – like a python swallowing a sea turtle. That lump most likely held an inductor to roll off the high frequencies, which would tax the amps even more.

Predictably, the amps just couldn’t control the speakers properly, so the system sounded as though we were listening to the symphony in the foyer. Paco proudly told me he bought his system based entirely on one magazine’s “Recommended Components” list.

But he’s not detail-oriented. Paco's the type to measure once, cut twice, then buy more material. If he’d read the full equipment reviews, he’d have learned that audio writers are pretty good about addressing compatibility issues.

I didn’t engage my spectrum analyzer. Didn’t need to. The system had no deep bass, the mid-bass was as flabby as Paco’s waist, and the highs were as compromised as his hearing. But he loved the sound, and in the final analysis, that’s all that matters.

But some of the guys who call me don’t love their sound. Most of the time, it’s not due to the equipment. With the exception of some exotic designs which seem to focus on maximizing one characteristic at the cost of all the others, most equipment these days is quite accurate.

If the system doesn’t sound good, it’s more often due to poor room acoustics than equipment. Many listening rooms are as reflective as the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. "A canary can’t fly in a hall of mirrors, and your system can’t sing there," I tell them, "The reflections will totally confuse your cerebral processing center and cause it to crash."

The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles near Paris, France. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Myrabella.

There are exceptions. One member’s listening room had plaster walls, floor-to-ceiling windows, oak doors, a tile floor, and a large marble coffee table right in front of the listening position. He claimed he loved the sound, so I deduced that this guy couldn’t hear either. I was wrong.

When it was time to audition, he moved his listening chair in front of the coffee table and close to the speakers. When I sat down, he played a few small jazz groups and female vocals at low volumes. The soundtracks I enjoy at concert-hall volumes would have sounded terrible in that space, but his material sounded wonderful. The hard surfaces barely came into play. Note to self: check context before making judgements.

My house has a small living room quite unsuitable for audio. It’s actually more of a hallway to the bedrooms. My wife fell in love with the kitchen and the bathrooms, so she decided this was the house where my system should go. My uncle warned me that women would complicate my life.

I love my wife, so I made what I considered to be a huge compromise. She got control of the kitchen and bathrooms, and I got control of the garage and the living room. So the garage was converted to a motorcycle shop and the living room to an audio salon.

The next problem was, how to get big sound from my small listening room? That’s like trying to get expensive speakers for cheap. It can be done with resourcefulness, but it’s not easy.

My solution was to build the speakers myself (that story will follow this one in the next issue).

Once built, it was necessary for me to understand acoustics. I read everything I could find, and attended as many lectures as possible – both in person and online. I discovered that bass problems below 250 Hz can be solved electronically. Just find the peaks and reduce their amplitude by means of an equalizer. That usually reduces the nulls which typically appear on either side of the peaks as well. I do it in the digital domain as that offers much more control than passive EQ. It’s not a perfect solution, but it certainly beats 18 dB frequency response variations.

Some folks prefer passive bass EQ by means of using bass traps, or relocating the position of the speakers. But bass traps would need to be about eight feet thick to trap the lowest frequencies – which would extend halfway into my listening room. Furthermore, the best location for woofers is usually the worst location for mids and tweets, a Catch-22 for owners of tower speakers.

The solution is a system featuring separate subs and stand-mount monitors. That allows the owner to place the subs at the ideal location for bass, and the monitors at the best location for mids and highs. When implemented properly, this application is very effective.

As for those who insist that all drivers must be aligned, since when are the tympani aligned with the violins?

Analog audiophiles have balked at introducing electronic EQ into their systems believing it will somehow mess up the purity of their sound. What they don’t realize is that RIAA equalization is often far more radical than that required for room correction. Some of the best phono preamps actually use digital EQ, just like my equalizer.

Equalizers correct bass frequencies very effectively, but in my experience, in-room frequency anomalies above 250 Hz cannot be successfully equalized by electronic means. The phasing problems which result are too disturbing. They must be handled by means of acoustic room treatment. But how?

In June of 2013, The Home Entertainment Show in Irvine featured a lecture by acoustician Anthony Grimani from MSR Acoustics. I will forever be grateful to Mr. Grimani and T.H.E. Show for this opportunity. It opened my eyes. I was so impressed, I asked him to address our local audio club. He has a great curriculum vitae and travels around the world constantly, so it took several months before he could find some time to address the San Diego Music and Audio Guild (see header image).  

His academic-quality lecture lasted for almost three hours with lots of graphs, equations, and photos of concert halls, studios, and home theaters. He explained how all his measurements were made, how the solutions were computed and implemented, and how they were tweaked to taste afterwards.

Anthony Grimani gives a presentation at The Home Entertainment Show 2013.

My head was spinning. I’m no rocket surgeon and have neither the equipment, inclination, nor patience to engage in such a time-consuming and painful process. When I looked around, it appeared that the rest of the audience weren’t rocket surgeons either.

Anthony must have sensed our qualms. Just before he closed his presentation, he added that after analyzing and treating many acoustic spaces for several decades, his company had discovered five consistencies in their results:

1.  About 20 percent of typical clients’ walls need absorptive panels.
2.  About 25 percent should be covered with diffractive panels.
3.  The front wall between the stereo speakers responds best to diffraction.
4.  Reflection points between the ears and the speakers must always be treated.
5.  The closer the back wall is to the listener, the more it needs absorption.

Anthony works mostly with large spaces. In my experience with smaller ones, I would add these three rules:

6. Nearby corners (at the floor or ceiling) reflect sound like megaphones and should always be treated.
7. Flat surfaces like coffee tables add glare to the mid/high frequencies due to reflection and those surfaces should be damped or eliminated. 
8. If the front wall is less than four feet behind the speakers, the soundstage can be made to sound deeper by damping the area behind (not between) the speakers.

As for damping materials, that’s a whole other subject which, in my opinion, even some acoustic product manufacturers don’t properly understand. It takes different materials to best absorb different frequencies. 

Once the audiophile understands and acts on all this information, the only question remaining will be: how much will the spouse in your life require you to compromise your acoustics for the sake of aesthetics?

My uncle warned me that women would complicate my life.



This article was first published in Copper Issue 31, and is revised here.

Our story begins with Beethoven. (What else is new?) His Violin Concerto (1806) especially, because it’s the poster child for Modern Concertos in so many ways. First, he wrote it for a singular virtuoso, Franz Clement, whose playing, according to a contemporary, was “not the marked, bold, strong playing [of] the Rode–Viotti School” but rather something “indescribably delicate, neat and elegant.” Clement’s fastidious technical style did not preclude circus tricks: on the same program as the Beethoven concerto, he played variations of his own on a violin turned upside down. Nevertheless when you hear the concerto, you’ll get that Beethoven drew upon Clement’s personal style. It’s mostly sweet and elegant, even though Mozart it isn’t.

Second, Beethoven’s concerto enacts the same experiments in form he was making with other music then, e.g., Symphonies No. 3, 4, and 5; Piano Concerto No. 4; and the Op. 59 “Razumovsky” Quartets. Like his fourth symphony and piano concerto, the Violin Concerto was one of the quietly radical works he turned out in those years. Listen to the opening:

The rhythmic call initiated by the timpani at the outset becomes the most important structural motto in the entire work, permeating it nearly as much as the notorious three-shorts-and-a-long motif does in Symphony No. 5. Beethoven borrowed the trick of turning a simple accompanimental device into a significant formal element from his old teacher Haydn. But the power with which he invests it here is very much his own.

At the 1’00” mark you hear the motto in its noisy four-beat version, quickly followed by a rhythmically reshaped variant, four-shorts-and-a-long. The mottto’s increasingly emphatic presentation suggests that performers should prioritize rhythm—especially an unflagging, energetic primary pulse—in their interpretations. It’s one of the ways in which Isabelle Faust’s recording with the late Claudio Abbado (Harmonia Mundi HMC 902105) stands out. Another is her use of an authentic Beethoven cadenza with timpani, albeit one he wrote years later for a piano transcription of this concerto:

So, to recap: (1) violin concertos are often built around the skills of particular performers; (2) a modern concerto can also draw upon structural innovations that go well beyond the standard dialogue format of soloist vs. orchestra.

To these two points we should add a third: beginning with Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, a concerto may also reference Romantic narrative inclinations, e.g., personal histories and/or feelings and experiences nicked from literary sources; also geography, meaning landscape and/or cultural tourism.

A few years after the premiere of the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz was approached by Niccolò Paganini, the most famous violin virtuoso of his or any other time, with the request for a concerto. Paganini had acquired a Stradivarius viola, a marvelous instrument for which he felt no suitable music existed, so he turned to a celebrated newcomer for something to set the world aflame. According to the composer,

I tried therefore to [write] a solo for viola, but one which involved the orchestra. . . I was sure that Paganini . . . would know how to keep the viola in the forefront. . . . But when he saw all the rests in the viola part . . . he exclaimed: “This will not do; I am silent for too much of the time; I need to be playing continuously.”

So Berlioz and Paganini parted ways, with Berlioz determined to write a sort of symphony with viola obbligato,

a series of orchestral scenes, in which the solo viola would be involved as a more or less active participant . . . . By placing it among the poetic memories formed from my wanderings in the Abruzzi, I wanted to make the viola a kind of melancholy dreamer in the manner of Byron’s Childe-Harold.

(Colin Davis’s slower-paced but more voluptuous reading with violist Nobuko Imai is also available on YouTube.)

In spite of Paganini’s rejection, a significant number of 20th- and 21st-century concertos have seized upon Berlioz’s more flexible view of the genre. They rely heavily on landscape and memoir, a choice that often leaves purely musical, abstract structural concerns à la Beethoven behind. As a result, the soloist’s role can be irretrievably altered.

My own touchstone in this regard is Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto “To the Memory of an Angel” (1935). You could hardly ask for a more personal work, even though Berg masked the autobiographical content in various dense structural techniques. (You could say he was Beethovenesque in his constructivism, except that Beethoven wanted you to hear the structures. Berg? Not so much.) The music utilizes serial technique—a tone row built from ascending thirds, of which four of the first seven pitches, G, D, A, and E, correspond to the open strings of the violin, and the last four comprise motto notes of the old German hymn “Es ist genug!” (“It is enough!”) Berg begins the concerto with those open-string pitches; after that, faint patterns are heard suggesting (at least to me) fragments of a Requiem, and those lead into an Allegretto that surreptitiously introduces a Carinthian folk song alluding to Berg’s own first love, a kitchen maid in his parents’ household whom he impregnated when he was a teenager. (They named the child Albine.)

There’s more. The work took shape as a memorial to Manon Gropius, 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler Gropius and her second husband, architect Walter Gropius. Berg had been quite close to Manon, a polio victim, and as he worked feverishly on the concerto, he fell ill and increasingly believed it would serve as a requiem for his own life. Moreover, he had been involved for years in a passionate love affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, wife of a Prague paper manufacturer and sister to novelist Franz Werfel, Alma’s lover and next husband. Woven throughout the concerto are secret references, numerological and otherwise, to Berg and Hanna. The concerto ends by quoting Bach’s very chromatic setting of “Es ist genug!”:

I know much of this because of Michael Steinberg, whose notes condense and clarify not only the basic music-theory data but also recent scholarship pointing us back toward Hanna, Mitzi the kitchen maid, Berg’s number-mania, and his other tics and obsessions. Above, we’re hearing Faust and Abbado again; he had urged her to pair Beethoven and Berg in their 2010 performances and recording, an unusual but rewarding choice. It’s a live recording with one or two fluff-ups but remarkable energy.

Several 20th-century violin concertos show clear debts either to Beethoven the structuralist or Berlioz and Berg the storytellers. A good place to start is with Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto Op. 15, written in North America between 1938 and ’39. Its genesis actually dates from 1936, when he attended the International Society for Contemporary Music’s festival in Barcelona. That ISCM event saw the world premiere of Berg’s concerto, conducted by Hermann Scherchen because the scheduled conductor, Anton von Webern, was overcome by grief at his friend Berg’s recent death and unable to carry on. Britten himself had harbored a fierce desire a few years earlier to study with Berg, but had been thwarted by a conservative faculty member at the Royal College who advised his parents against it.

In any case Britten performed his Suite for Violin and Piano Op. 6 at ISCM with Spanish violin virtuoso Antonio Brosa, and their friendship led him to promise Brosa “a major concerto.” The resulting work begins with a percussion motto that subsequently underpins much of the first movement’s music:

So, Beethoven! But Britten’s experience in Barcelona, then seething with the partisan unrest that led to the Spanish Civil War, provided a more complex emotional impetus for the music. Consider, for example, the strings’ initial response—vague, apprehensive—to that percussion motto. Later the violinist returns to claim the motto herself, as the orchestra transforms the lyrical first theme into a dance of death, tinged with menace and melancholy.

A hyperactive scherzo follows, although nothing in it equals the first movement’s blend of fear and longing: not yet thirty, Britten was not ready to attempt Mahlerian irony. The composer did, however, reverse the standard fast-slow-fast disposition of the concerto’s three movements; this allowed him to imbue its outer portions with more gravity, yet deprive the middle movement of its moderating role. The finale takes the ambitious form of a passacaglia with nine variations. “A major concerto” indeed.

We have been listening to Arabella Steinbacher’s new recording of the Britten and Hindemith violin concertos (Pentatone PTC 5186 625). Both the hi-res recording and the performances, with Vladimir Jurowski leading the Berlin Radio Symphony, are excellent. And the Hindemith concerto (1939) echoes Beethoven in its percussive opening:

Hindemith doesn’t follow through structurally, though. He had other models in mind—above all, the concerti grossi of Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, with their polyphonic excursions and rich thematic diversity. Like Britten, Hindemith wrote his concerto in exile. You’d never guess that from the music, which is hearty, vivacious, and “learned.” No trace of Berliozian memoir here, no hint the composer had been hounded out of Nazi Germany as a “cultural Bolshevik.”

We’ll give the modern influence of Berlioz and Berg more attention soon. Next: more Daughters, more Violins.

Portrait of Copper's photographer extraordinaire James Schrimpf, made by Alex Lim, Architectural Conservator at Tumacacori National Historic Park. Alex did a series of portraits of Southern Arizona artists for a show at the Hilltop Gallery in Nogales, Arizona and James was one of his subjects. Taken in downtown Nogales, very near the birthplace of Charles Mingus.

James Schrimpf is a Nogales, Arizona photographer. He has been published in Arizona Highways on multiple occasions and was the cover photographer for Mirage Literary & Arts Magazine and Discover Southern Arizona Magazine. His Icons and Totems series was a one-person show in Patagonia, Arizona.

James has worked professionally for over 30 years as an artist, photojournalist, commercial photographer and aerial photographer. He taught high school photography for 20 years and was named Arizona’s Small and Rural Schools Teacher of the Year. His students were consistently honored in juried exhibitions.

At the ripe old age of 17, Alice Phoebe Lou decided she’d had enough of life in her native South Africa. She slung her guitar across her back and headed for Europe. Everywhere she went, she sang on the street, mainly doing covers of other people’s songs. But then she discovered Berlin and its cutting-edge arts scene. She’d found her home and her creative self.

Lou settled in Berlin and started honing her own songwriting skills. Like many indie musicians, her career is growing fast thanks to word of mouth. Visitors to Berlin come to one of her shows, are bowled over, and take their experience home to share with others. Now Lou can fill venues with over 500 seats when she tours.

She started making home-made CDs as a busker, even designing and printing home-made covers. Now she makes recordings in a studio, emphasizing in interviews how important it is to maintain control over every aspect of her product. “I can’t handle having to answer to anyone,” she claims.

Now 23, Lou has a philosophical depth that belies her age. She has described her songs as having three levels of meaning: a personal meaning for her, a “storytelling aspect,” and a universal human truth. Keep an ear out for exhortations to fight against normalizing hate, one of her most central themes. Individuality is the paramount human right in her view, and anything that threatens the flowering of the individual is an enemy to well-being.

In 2014 she made Momentum, which she calls an EP although it includes eight tracks. The opening song, “Berlin Blues,” is a worthy introduction to her intensely focused voice, tight vibrato, and exact intonation. At first the guitar is the barest framework holding up the tapestry of her singing. Despite the name, “Berlin Blues” is a love song to that city and its attitudes. When the drums come in after the somber intro, Lou sings about freedom – of ideas and intellect, mostly. (You know, typical pop stuff. Ha!) “There is a place…where ideas are for free…and your great mind is no longer the minority.”

In “Grey,” Lou shows off some serious R&B- and jazz-singing chops, spinning out long, melismatic lines that end with a little flourish of vibrato like you might expect from Dianne Reeves. Unlike most of the best-selling artists nowadays, Lou understands that ornaments are just that: decorative elements to hang on the main notes, not a substitute for strong melodic singing. The arrangement is mesmerizing, a combination of percussive synth and electric guitar, provided by Matteo Pavesi:

Pavesi (known simply as Matteo) is the co-star on Lou’s album Live at Grüner Salon. Lou carefully chooses the musicians she works with for their individuality and musical instincts. Besides Pavesi, she also works a lot with producer Jian Kellett Liew (A.K.A. Kyson).

Most of the songs on that live collection have also been released as studio tracks. A stunning exception is “She.” Again, individual freedom is the theme, specifically that of a strong, curious, sexually energetic woman. “She caught a hole in the fence and she ran…she didn’t want to lose her desire.” Lou flips the pitch up to headvoice at the end of each line, giving the song a decidedly African sound, a sensation increased by the repetitive, chant-like simplicity of the melody. Listen to that crowd react with cheers all the way through – these people appreciate what she has to say:

Lou’s debut full-lenghth studio album, Orbit, came out in 2016 on Lou’s own label, Rtbe F-L Groove Attack. Orbit continues to focus on personal freedom, and characters longing for communities without too many rules. “Girl on an Island” has a folkish sound, with parts of the melody reminiscent of Verdi. The lyrics start out telling a story, but end up as more of a lesson: freedom is a state of mind. (The live video offers a great view of the creation of the lilting waltz accompaniment.)

There’s a return to an amorphous jazz style in “Haruki” – I can imagine Billie Holiday just slaying this one. While the text, urging someone to wake up after a long sleep, might be directed at one of Lou’s personal acquaintances, it’s also a warning to all of us that we’ve “forgotten how to live for the now.” This is a good example of Lou’s own theory that her songs can be understood on multiple levels.

Some of Lou’s most intriguing poetic imagery shows up in “Orbit,” the album’s title song, which lilts in a slightly creepy triple time accented with the natural creak of a guitar’s fingerboard. It’s hard to tell whether the opening lines are purely metaphorical or some kind of science-fictional vision. “One foot on the pavement,” she sings, “and one foot in the Milky Way.”

As usual, Lou challenges the listener to pursue a full and meaningful existence: “Do you want to be just a machine in this crazy society?” It’s safe to say that, for her fans, the answer is a jubilant “No!"

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Schorle.

This article was first published in Issue 42.