Hi Mike:
The Lomax and Asch comparison is very interesting. I always had the impression that Lomax was
collecting sound first and music second, whereas Asch was running a commercial music label. If that
assumption is true, then Asch would want a result that sounds like a professional music recording,
with a sonic reference buyers would be accustomed to, even if the music itself or the artist was new
to their ears. Lomax, on the other hand, started out working for the government (with no need to be
concerned with a commerical product aesthetics) and his recordings indicate a really interesting
fascination with the background sounds as well as the primary performances. Take the Son House
recording in Klack's Store. A train runs right through town, loudly passing the store even rattling
the recorder. Does Lomax stop and try a re-take? No. In fact he didn't even ask for a second
performance of that song. I have to assume he thought the train passing was a part of what he was
capturing, not just Son House but also Klack's store and the rural Mississippi of that time. The
same is true of his recordings of the fife and drum band and also the prisoner singing. He made
recordings where we hear not just the musical performances but also the environmental audio around
the performers. In those cases, it's fascinating.
Emory Cook's approach seemed more Lomax than Asch. In fact, plenty of his commercially-released
products were ONLY environmental audio (trains, weather, a strip club, etc).
Regarding your comments in another posting about early stereo, I have plenty of demo tapes and
records from the early and mid 50s. Every which way of stereophony was recorded and commercially
released. I don't think the industry settled into anything approaching accepted norms until the 70s.
Then, the accepted norms for rock and pop and even a lot of jazz was near-mono (most information
placed loudly in the center with some stuff mixed to the sides mainly so FM radio didn't sound just
like AM radio). I've always thought it ironic that recording techniques moved to where a "mix" of
tracks not recorded at the same time or even in the same place was then built into an artificial
(illusionary) sound-field, yet many producers and engineers chose to just build a bigger and muddier
mono mix.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Biel" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, September 05, 2014 9:01 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Duke Ellington accidental stereo comparison
> From: Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, September 05, 2014 8:05 pm
>
>> [to George B-N] I disagree somewhat with your statement that
>> accidental stereo "has no relevance. . . .
>> On the Duke Ellington recordings, I hear more clearly how dry
>> the studio was (heavily draped, almost claustrophobic), but
>> also I hear more clearly individual brass and woodwind parts.
>> In mono, Duke's arrangements are somewhat dense and his guys
>> played in almost perfect lock-step, so it's harder to pick out
>> individual parts. For instance, in the second medley, the snippet
>> from "Black and Tan Fantasy" appears to have two muted trumpets,
>> playing exactly the same thing, sitting on each end of the section,
>> with the players in the middle playing different parts. I can't hear
>> that, or the separation of the saxes, in mono. -- Tom Fine
>
> I was just going over our video of Vince Giordano's ARSC NYC talk where
> he discusses the problems of trying to recreate an arrangement from
> recordings. I know he would welcome this type of perspective in the
> recordings he has to use. The only analogous aid are films of the band
> performing where you can see who plays what. I was literally
> front-row-center for Vince's Town Hall Whiteman concert on Feb 12, and
> there was one piece where four reeds sitting side by side were trading
> off measure-by-measure. It was amazing -- in mono it would have sounded
> like one player. (I had my Zoom recorder in my tote bag -- I wish I
> would have had the guts -- and permission -- to have recorded that in
> stereo.)
>
> This use of multi-channel recording -- stereo or not -- was something
> that Alan Lomax embraced in his field recording when portable stereo
> tape recorders became available. On the other hand, Moe Asch HATED
> stereo, and preferred his folk recordings to be a dense mono mix of
> instruments and voices all coming from one point. I don't think Lomax
> minded if the soundstage was a beautiful curtain of sound -- he was
> pinpointing individual instruments or voices for transcription and
> analysis.
>
> Mike Biel [log in to unmask]
>
> Section omitted from George's above quote:
>>> By relevance I mean something that will teach us something
>>> about the soundscape at the time, or recording practices
>>> or -- by giving greater transparency -- a deeper insight
>>> into the performance that was manifestly going on while
>>> recordings took place.
>
>
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