Of interest?
Steven C. Barr
----- Original Message -----
From: "Cary Ginell" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
>
> October 1, 2009
> ROOMS
>
> At One Manhattan Corner, Music Never Dies
>
>
> By ALAN FEUER
> God’s work — at least as it appeared two weeks ago inside an oak-paneled
> studio on West 44th Street in Manhattan — consisted of the following acts:
>
> A musical archivist removed from its case the sole extant copy of some
> 1941 session takes of Billie Holiday crooning “All of Me.” A recording
> engineer received this disc and placed it very gently on a turntable. The
> studio itself then did the rest: Its speakers cracked with static, a quick
> piano vamp followed, the horns came in on cue and then there was that
> voice — you were instantly transported to the eve of World War II.
>
> Five days a week, musical journeys much like that one occur inside this
> studio, where a small team from Sony Music Entertainment performs the
> divine digital act of preserving the company’s archives. While the rest of
> the business spews out the latest candy pop song for consumption on the
> market, the team from the Sony archives digs into a storehouse of
> recordings, from Sousa and Caruso to Dylan and Miles Davis, protecting the
> unique and the endangered from the erosions of the past.
>
> “Everything falls apart,” said Marc C. Kirkeby, an archivist and
> self-described “professional ear.” Records warp; metal plates rust. “We
> want to be the last best place in the world where all this stuff can be
> preserved.”
>
> “All this stuff” is a staggering cache of 1.5 million items — perhaps the
> world’s best playlist — that Sony has accrued over the years by acquiring
> such legendary labels as Columbia Records and RCA Victor. Mr. Kirkeby
> refers to his job as “preserving the life expectancy of the source
> material,” and the material that he and his partners work with might
> include a one-of-kind recording of the heavyweight Jack Johnson narrating
> his 1910 title fight against James J. Jeffries, or the last known copy of
> Simon and Garfunkel’s final concert tour.
>
> Historic work demands historic quarters, and the studio itself — digital
> sound board, leather chill couch, a garbage can that overflows with empty
> coffee cups — was custom built in the 1970s as the Record Plant Studio for
> a man named Roy Cicala, a celebrated recording engineer. Springsteen
> worked here, as did Aerosmith, Kiss and Billy Joel. John Lennon used to
> catch naps in the session booth. In fact, Mr. Kirkeby said, he left the
> studio one night in 1980, headed home to the Dakota and was killed.
>
> The toolbox is extensive: a tackle box of needles, numerous Studer tape
> decks, a huge device that plays old steel recordings and goes by the name
> “the Tank.” There is also what is universally known as “the World’s Most
> Expensive Turntable” — an 800-pound, $65,000, granite-based, pneumatic
> Rockport Technologies special. Mr. Kirkeby said that only four like this
> were ever made.
>
> With overhead so high, it makes a certain sense that the studio — while
> mainly dedicated to the archivist’s art — must also respond to the
> pressures of the market. “We try to be responsible to what’s going on in
> the culture, but also to the needs of the company,” Mr. Kirkeby said. So,
> for instance, if Ken Burns does a PBS documentary on jazz, the team is
> there to dig up old Fats Waller numbers; if a Toscanini bio-pic is in the
> works, it will find his music, too.
>
> But mostly the studio is where the past lives on through its music — where
> Billie Holiday still breathes. Still, as Mr. Kirkeby put it, “Every
> recording is an illusion.”
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