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      Al Schmitt, Maestro of Recorded Sound, Is Dead at 91

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      The winner of multiple Grammys, he engineered or produced records by Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane and many others.Al Schmitt, who as a boy watched Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters record music in his uncle’s studio, and who went on to become a Grammy Award-winning engineer for a long roster of artists including Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Diana Krall, died on Monday at his home in Bell Canyon, Calif. He was 91.His death was confirmed by his wife, Lisa Schmitt.For more than 60 years, Mr. Schmitt brought deft engineering skills and a sixth sense about what made a song great to his collaborations with dozens of musicians and singers. He was renowned for his ability to make subtle but critical changes during a recording session.His gentle, informed guidance from behind the recording console was an essential, if unseen, element in 15 of Ms. Krall’s studio albums.“It’s how he heard things,” she said by phone. “Sometimes he’d adjust the mic a bit or put his hand on my shoulder and say, ‘It’s OK.’ I don’t know if he was adjusting the mic or me.”While recording at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, she added, “Al would say, ‘Why don’t we bring out the Frank Sinatra stool?’ And you’d do the best take in your life.”Mr. Schmitt, whose engineering credits also included Sinatra’s popular “Duets” albums in the 1990s, won 20 Grammys, the most ever for an engineer, and two Latin Grammys. He also won a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement from the Recording Academy in 2006.In 2005, Mr. Schmitt’s contributions to Ray Charles’s own duets album, “Genius Loves Company,” brought him five Grammys. (He shared four with others, for album of the year, record of the year, best pop vocal album and best engineered album. One of the five, for best surround-sound album, he won on his own.)As an occasional producer, his credits include albums by Sam Cooke, Eddie Fisher, Al Jarreau, Jackson Browne and, most notably, Jefferson Airplane. In his autobiography, “Al Schmitt on the Record: The Magic Behind the Music” (2018), he described the zoolike atmosphere during the recording of the Airplane’s album “After Bathing at Baxter’s” in 1967.“They would come riding into the studio on motorcycles,” he wrote, “and they were getting high all the time. They had a nitrous oxide tank set up in the studio, they’d be rolling joints all night, and there was a lot of cocaine.” In spite of those obstacles, “After Bathing at Baxter’s” was well received, and Mr. Schmitt went on to produce the group’s next three albums.A tamer atmosphere existed in 2015, when Mr. Schmitt engineered “Shadows in the Night,” Mr. Dylan’s album of songs associated with Frank Sinatra. (Mr. Dylan produced the album under the name Jack Frost.) Between sessions over three weeks, they listened on Mr. Dylan’s small player to Sinatra’s renditions of the songs that they were about to record.Mr. Schmitt recalled that they were trying not to approach each song “in the same way” that Sinatra had, “but to get an idea of the interpretation,” he told Sound on Sound magazine in 2015.“We then would talk for maybe a couple of hours about how we were going to do the song,” he said.He was initially uncertain about whether Mr. Dylan could sing the Sinatra standards, he said, but he was thrilled by what emerged from the speakers from the start.“If there was something slightly off-pitch, it didn’t matter because his soul was there, and he laid the songs open and bare the way they are,” he told Sound on Sound. “He also wanted people to experience exactly what was recorded, hence no studio magic or fixing or turning things or moving things around and so on.”Mr. Schmitt at the 2014 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles with the 20th and final Grammy of his career, which he won for the Paul McCartney DVD “Live Kisses.” He also won two Latin Grammys and a lifetime achievement award.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesAlbert Harry Schmitt was born in Brooklyn on April 17, 1930. His father, also named Albert, made PT boats at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and later worked for a printing company and for a record processing plant. His mother, Abigail (Clark) Schmitt, was a homemaker.In his Uncle Harry Smith’s recording studio in Manhattan, Al discovered his future.“I loved my mother and father, but life with Uncle Harry was glamorous,” Mr. Schmitt wrote in his autobiography. (His uncle had changed his surname from Schmitt.)At first his father escorted him to the studio on weekends. But by age 8 Al was taking the subway on his own. He reveled in listening to Crosby, being asked by Orson Welles if he believed in Martians (soon after Welles’s nation-rattling radio broadcast of a Martian invasion in “The War of the Worlds”) and being taken to bars by his uncle and his close friend Les Paul.His uncle put Al to work — setting up chairs for a big band, cleaning cables. And Al learned about the proper placement of musicians in a one-microphone studio.After Mr. Schmitt was discharged from the Navy in 1950, his uncle helped him get a job as an apprentice engineer at Apex Studios in Manhattan. He had been working there for three months, still not certain of his capabilities, when he was left alone in the studio on a Saturday. He was taken aback when the members of Mercer Ellington’s big band arrived, along with Mr. Ellington’s father, Duke.Fearful of fouling up the session, he fetched a notebook with diagrams about how to set up the seating and place the microphones. He apologized to Duke Ellington.“I’m sorry, this is a big mistake,” he recalled telling him. “I’m not qualified to do this.”“Well,” Ellington said, “don’t worry, son. The setup looks fine, and the musicians are out there.”Over three hours, Mr. Schmitt said, he successfully recorded four songs.He worked at other studios in Manhattan before moving west in 1958 to join Radio Recorders in Los Angeles, where Elvis Presley had recorded “Jailhouse Rock” and where Mr. Schmitt in 1961 was the engineer for both the celebrated album “Ray Charles and Betty Carter” and Henry Mancini’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” soundtrack, indelibly featuring the Mancini-Johnny Mercer song “Moon River.”Mr. Schmitt was nominated for a Grammy for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” but he did not win. His first Grammy came the next year, for his work on Mancini’s score for the film “Hatari.” (He was also nominated that year for “The Chipmunk Songbook,” by Alvin and the Chipmunks.)After five years at Radio Recorders, Mr. Schmitt was hired by RCA Studios, where he moved into production. He left RCA after three years to become an independent engineer and producer.Those years were among his busiest as an engineer. In 2018, during an interview on “Pensado’s Place,” an online series about audio engineering, he remembered one two-day period.“From 9 to 12 I did Ike and Tina and the Ikettes; we’d take a break, and from 2 to 5 I’d be doing Gogi Grant, a singer with a big band, and that night I’d be doing Henry Mancini with a big orchestra. The next day, Bobby Bare, a country record, and then a polka record.“I hated polka music,” he added, “but what I’d concentrate on was getting the best accordion sound anybody ever heard.”Mr. Schmitt began his career after leaving the Navy and continued working well into the digital age.Chris SchmittMr. Schmitt kept working until recently, helping to shape artists’ sound well into the digital era. His most recent Grammy, in 2014, was for Mr. McCartney’s DVD “Live Kisses.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Schmitt is survived by his daughter, Karen Schmitt; his sons, Al Jr., Christopher, Stephen and Nick; eight grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; his sister, Doris Metz; and his brothers, Russell and Richy. His previous three marriages ended in divorce.In 2015, Mr. Schmitt received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Speaking at the unveiling of that star, the record producer Don Was said that Steve Miller had recently played him several new songs.“I listened for a minute and I said, ‘Did Al Schmitt record this?’” Mr. Was said. “He was taken aback and said, ‘Yes, how did you know?’ I said, ‘Because your vocals sound better than I ever heard them before.’” More

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      Bob Porter, Jazz Producer and Broadcaster, Dies at 80

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      Hundreds of albums bore his name, notably reissues of classic material. And he helped make WBGO the biggest jazz radio station in the New York area.Bob Porter, who as a record producer guided the reissue of vast swaths of the classic jazz canon, and who as a broadcaster helped build WBGO into the largest jazz radio station in the New York City area, died on April 10 at his home in Northvale, N.J. He was 80.The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, his wife, Linda Calandra Porter, said.Rock ’n’ roll had mostly eclipsed jazz in the public ear by the time Mr. Porter produced his first album for Prestige Records, the organist Charles Kynard’s “Professor Soul” (1968), for which he also wrote the liner notes. Mr. Porter began regularly producing sessions for the label, mostly in the soul-jazz style of the day, including outings by the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, the organists Jimmy McGriff and Charles Earland and the guitarist Pat Martino, among many others.He went on to take part in the creation of hundreds of albums as a producer and author of liner notes for a variety of labels. Much of that work was on boxed sets and reissues of archival material.He won a Grammy in 1978 for his liner notes to the five-disc “Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy Studio Sessions,” which he also produced. He later won the best historical album Grammy in 1986, for producing the compilation “Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 1947-1974, Vols. 1-7.”Interviewed that year by Rolling Stone, Mr. Porter recalled putting together the Atlantic box alongside Ahmet Ertegun, the label’s famed co-founder. Some of Atlantic’s original master tapes had burned in a fire, so Mr. Porter drew upon his network of fellow vinyl collectors to track down original pressings. His main goal, he said, was accuracy and completeness.“We tried to list in copious detail everything we could about the original recording date — the singers, the bands, every piece of information we could unravel,” he said. “The most important thing in doing any work of this nature is that you get it right.”But he also wanted to make a historical point about how social history shapes genre. “We decided to stop in 1974 because that, in a sense, marked the end of an era,” he said. “When you get into disco and rap music, you’re really talking about something that’s very different. The conditions in the country were a lot different when this music was being made. I think that the demise of soul and R&B may ultimately be viewed as a casualty of integration.”In the 1980s, jazz’s commercial fortunes perked up, in thanks partly to the advent of compact discs, which led listeners to buy reissues of old albums. Working most often with Atlantic, Mr. Porter led the remastering process for CD reissues by the likes of Duke Ellington, Ray Charles and Lester Young.As soon as WBGO hit the airwaves at 88.3 FM in 1979, broadcasting out of Newark but reaching across New York City, Mr. Porter started volunteering as a host. Two years later he began a daily show, “Portraits in Blue,” which went on to be syndicated by NPR stations around the country and would continue for the next 40 years. He later hosted two additional shows: “Saturday Morning Function,” which focused on R&B and jump blues, and “Swing Party,” heard on Sunday mornings.On his own podcast earlier this month, Nate Chinen, the director of editorial content at WBGO, called Mr. Porter “a Mount Rushmore figure when it comes to Newark public radio — someone who was on the air, really, from Day 1.”Robert Sherwin Porter was born in Wellesley, Mass., on June 20, 1940, to David Porter, who ran the financial advisory firm David L. Babson & Company, and Constance (Kavanaugh) Porter, a homemaker. The eldest of four siblings, Bob attended Whittier College in California, where he studied English before serving in the Army, stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his brothers, John and William Porter; a sister, Linda (Porter) Owens; a son from a previous marriage, David Porter; two stepsons, Michael and Rick Tombari; and a granddaughter.After his military service, he returned to Whittier to complete his degree. While still in school he began contributing to DownBeat magazine. His articles caught the attention of Bob Weinstock, the head of Prestige, who was impressed by Mr. Porter’s erudition and offered him a job with the label.Mr. Porter’s passion for the artistic and cultural history of African-American music stretched back to its earliest known recordings, and he was deeply knowledgeable about blues as well as jazz.He received awards from various music societies and foundations. In addition to his two Grammys, those included a 1986 W.C. Handy Award (now known as the Blues Music Award) from the Blues Foundation and a 2003 Community Service Award from the Bergen County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. In 2009, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.Mr. Porter became a published author late in life, self-releasing “Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975” in 2016. That book gave a detailed history of the jazz musicians who were especially popular in Black communities just after World War II, but who at the time had rarely come under the gaze of white critics.A white writer himself, Mr. Porter felt compelled to redress the omission. “Black communities had their own heroes, and Black fans of jazz had their own way of responding to the music,” he wrote in the book’s preface. “I have helped dozens of researchers and writers through the years, and I always hoped that one of them would tackle this untold story. Nobody did, and now most of the greatest players are gone. Thus, I decided to do this myself.” More

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      Ethel Gabriel, a Rare Woman in the Record World, Dies at 99

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      For much of her more than 40 years at RCA, Ms. Gabriel was a producer, overseeing “Living Strings” and other profitable lines.Ethel Gabriel, who in more than 40 years at RCA Victor is thought to have produced thousands of records, many at a time when almost no women were doing that work at major labels, died on March 23 in Rochester, N.Y. She was 99.Her nephew, Ed Mauro, her closest living relative, confirmed her death.Ms. Gabriel began working at RCA’s plant in Camden, N.J., in 1940 while a student at Temple University in Philadelphia. One of her early jobs was as a record tester — she would pull one in every 500 records and listen to it for manufacturing imperfections.“If it was a hit,” she told The Pocono Record of Pennsylvania in 2007, “I got to know every note because I had to play it over and over and over.”She also had a music background — she played trombone and had her own dance band in the 1930s and early ’40s — and her skill set earned her more and more responsibility, as well as the occasional role in shaping music history. She said she was on hand at the 1955 meeting in which the RCA executive Stephen Sholes signed Elvis Presley, who had been with Sun Records. She had a hand in “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” the 1955 instrumental hit by Pérez Prado that helped ignite a mambo craze in the United States.She may have produced or co-produced the album that contained that tune, but April Tucker, lead researcher on a documentary being made about Ms. Gabriel, said details on the early part of her career were hazy. Ms. Gabriel often said that she had produced some 2,500 records. Ms. Tucker said officials at Sony, which now holds RCA’s archives, had told her that the number may actually be higher, since contributions were not always credited.In any case, by the late 1950s Ms. Gabriel was in charge of RCA Camden Records, the company’s budget line, and was earning producer credits, something she continued to do into the 1980s.In 1959 she began the “Living Strings” series of easy-listening albums, consisting of orchestral renditions of popular and classical tunes (“Living Strings Play Music of the Sea,” “Living Strings Play Music for Romance” and many more), most of which were released on Camden. The line soon branched out into “Living Voices,” “Living Guitars” and other subsets and became a big profit-generator for RCA — which was not, Ms. Gabriel said, what the boss expected when he put her in charge of Camden, a struggling label at the time.“I’m sure he thought it was a way to get rid of me,” she told The Express-Times of Easton, Pa., in 1992 (too diplomatic to name the boss). “Well, I made a multimillion-dollar line out of it, conceived, programmed and produced the entire thing.”Ms. Gabriel with her fellow producers Don Wardell, left, and Alan Dell at the 1983 Grammy Awards. They shared the award for best historical album for “The Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra Sessions.” Ed and Nancy MauroThere were other profitable series as well. Ms. Gabriel was particularly good at repackaging material from the RCA archives into albums that sold anew, as she did in the “Pure Gold” series. In 1983 she shared a Grammy Award for best historical album for “The Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra Sessions” By the time she left RCA in 1984, she was a vice president.Yet, unlike the top male record executives of the era, she rarely made headlines. Ms. Tucker, an audio engineer, said she had never heard of Ms. Gabriel until one day she went searching to see if she could find out who the first female audio engineer was. She brought Ms. Gabriel to the attention of Sound Girls, an organization that promotes women in the audio field, and soon Caroline Losneck and Christoph Gelfand, documentary filmmakers, were at work on “Living Sound,” a film about her.Ms. Losneck, in a phone interview, said they had been hoping to complete the documentary by Ms. Gabriel’s 100th birthday this November.Ms. Losneck said Ms. Gabriel had survived in a tough business through productivity and competence.“She knew who to call when she needed an organist,” she said. “She knew how to manage the budget. All that gave her a measure of control.”Many of the records Ms. Gabriel made fit into a category often marginalized as elevator music.“It’s easy to look back on that music now and say it was kind of cheesy,” Ms. Losneck said, “but back then it was part of the cultural landscape.”Toward the end of her career, as more women began entering the field, Ms. Gabriel was both an example and a mentor. Nancy Jeffries, who went to work in RCA’s artists-and-repertoire department in 1974 and had earlier sung with the band the Insect Trust, was one of those who learned from her.“Being a woman and having ambition at a record company in those days was something that just didn’t compute with most of the male executive staff, but I was fortunate enough to land in the A&R department at RCA Records, where Ethel was established as a force to be reckoned with,” Ms. Jeffries, who went on to executive positions at RCA, Elektra and other record companies, said by email. “She had developed a couple of deals that, while they weren’t particularly ‘hip,’ generated a lot of income and financed some of the more speculative workings of the department. Lesson one: Make money for the company and they will leave you be.”Mr. Mauro summarized his aunt’s career simply:“She was successful early on when the playing field wasn’t level.”Ms. Gabriel, interviewed by The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1983, had a succinct explanation of her ability to thrive in a man’s world.“I didn’t know I was somewhere I shouldn’t be,” she said.Ethel Nagy was born on Nov. 16, 1921, in Milmont Park, Pa., near Philadelphia. Her father, Charles, who died when she was a teenager, was a machinist, and her mother, Margaret (Horvath) Nagy, took up ceramic sculpture later in life.Ms. Gabriel studied trombone in her youth and formed a band, En (her initials) and Her Royal Men, that played in the Philadelphia area. While at Temple she began working at RCA in nearby Camden putting labels on records and packed them before advancing to record tester.Ms. Gabriel at her home in Rochester, N.Y., in 2019. She had a succinct explanation of her ability to thrive in a man’s world: “I didn’t know I was somewhere I shouldn’t be.”Living Sound FilmAfter graduating in 1943, Ms. Gabriel continued her studies at Columbia University and worked at RCA’s offices in New York, including as secretary to Herman Diaz Jr., who led RCA’s Latin division. She spent a lot of time listening in on studio sessions, and by the mid-1950s trade publications were referring to her as an “RCA Victor executive.”In 1958 she married Gus Gabriel, who was in music publishing. The couple counted Frank Sinatra as a friend. In a 2011 interview with The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, she said that in 1973, when her husband was dying in a hospital, she walked into his room one day and found his nurses in a tizzy.“I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’” she recalled. “They said, ‘Oh, everybody got autographed pictures from Sinatra!’”Ms. Jeffries said that Ms. Gabriel had always mentored the women at the company no matter where they were on the corporate ladder. But her helping hand was extended to men, too, as the producer Warren Schatz found out when he joined RCA in the mid-1970s, as the disco wave was building.He had an idea for an album that might catch that wave, he said, and she came up with $6,000 to get it made. It was by the Brothers and included a song, “Are You Ready for This,” that became a dance-floor staple.“So Ethel basically started my life off at RCA,” Mr. Schatz said in a phone interview. Soon he was vice president of A&R, and she was reporting to him.“Whatever she wanted to do, I would just say yes to,” he said. “She was so calm, and so knowledgeable, and so self-sufficient.”Ms. Gabriel left RCA in 1984, in part, she said, at the urging of Robert B. Anderson, a former U.S. treasury secretary, who persuaded her to turn over to him her retirement package — more than $250,000 — so that he could invest it in the hope that the proceeds would finance future music ventures. The money disappeared, and Mr. Anderson, who died in 1989, was later convicted of tax evasion.Ms. Gabriel lived in the Poconos for a number of years before moving to a care center in Rochester to be near Mr. Mauro and his family. As she died at a hospital there, Mr. Mauro said, the staff had Sinatra songs playing in her room. More

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      Virtual Concerts to Watch

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      Looking for signs of a return to normal? Sitting back to enjoy a live-music performance might be a good place to start.The performing arts have endured a year like no other, but the decimation of touring and in-person shows has in no way squelched music fans’ love of a live performance. And in many ways, the pandemic has yielded creative new ways for artists to engage with their listeners.Since March 2020, for example, the wildly popular Instagram Live series Verzuz, created by Timbaland and Swizz Beatz, has recruited some of the biggest names in rap, hip-hop and R&B for nostalgia-driven battles. Highlighting their musical oeuvres and mimicking D.J. battles, each artist plays a song, then their opponent follows with one of their own works, chosen with the intention of one-upping. Engaged audiences argue passionately about the victor. (In a testament to their popularity and relevance, the voting rights activist Stacey Abrams appeared on a November show featuring the Atlanta artists Gucci Mane and Jeezy to promote voting in the Georgia Senate runoffs.)At the same time that small concerts with socially distanced audiences are gradually beginning to return, livestream musical events allow the unvaccinated and those across the country to take part in intimate shows from some great artists. Here is a selection of performances in the coming week that are worthy of a festival lineup, but with a comfortable front-row seat guaranteed.March 30Pandora LIVE Powered by WomenPandora is honoring Women’s History Month with a streamed all-female event, hosted by Hoda Kotb, which will include performances by Jazmine Sullivan and Gwen Stefani. They will also sit down with the fellow artists Becky G and Lauren Alaina for a round-table discussion on issues facing women in music. 9 p.m. Eastern, free for Pandora members; pandoralivepoweredbywomen.splashthat.com/PRApril 2Blind Boys of Alabama Easter Weekend SpecialThe Grammy-winning gospel group will perform a Good Friday show to celebrate the Easter holiday with a slate of new and old hits. The ensemble began performing in the late ’30s — its first members were children attending the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind — and since then there has been a rotating roster of band members, many of whom are visually impaired. The socially distanced, in-person show, held at Nashville’s City Winery, will be livestreamed. 9 p.m. Eastern, tickets start at $18; boxoffice.mandolin.comApril 3Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle, “Woofstock at the Winery”Steve Earle, who was recently featured on a cover of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to benefit Feeding America, will perform live with the country-music icon and avid dog-rescuer Emmylou Harris. Filmed at City Winery Nashville, the performance will benefit the animal charities Crossroads Campus and Bonaparte’s Retreat a canine-rescue initiative founded by Ms. Harris and located on her property. 9 p.m. EST, tickets $15; form.jotform.com/210543759066156April 4Dionne Warwick At Home With YouThe legendary songstress has had a very busy past year, increasing her fan base by becoming a must-read on Twitter, appearing on the third season of “The Masked Singer” (she was disguised as a mouse) and popping up for a guest appearance on the Gladys Knight vs. Patti LaBelle Verzuz battle. Ms. Warwick, who was nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in February, will be performing two virtual shows on Easter Sunday, plus another two on Mother’s Day. She is also expected to resume touring in October. 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. EST, tickets $20, boxoffice.mandolin.com/pages/dionnewarwickApril 4Verzuz: Isley Brothers vs. Earth, Wind & FireThe Verzuz battles have become one of the singular joys of quarantine Following the esteemed pairings of Snoop Dogg and DMX, and Alicia Keys and John Legend, the Isley Brothers and Earth, Wind & Fire will appear in the next round of the beloved series, the first time that two bands have duked it out on the series. 8 p.m. EST, free to view on Instagram Live @verzuztv or on Triller. More

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      Lou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94He led the team at Philips that changed the audio world in 1963 by introducing a small, portable way to play and record: the cassette.Lou Ottens in 1988, 25 years after he led the team that introduced the cassette tape to the world.Credit…Philips Company ArchivesMarch 11, 2021, 6:58 p.m. ETIn these digital days, it may be hard to appreciate how radically Lou Ottens changed the audio world when, in 1963, he and his team at Philips, the Dutch electronics company, introduced the cassette tape.“As the story goes, Lou was home one night trying to listen to a reel-to-reel recording when the loose tape began to unravel from its reel,” Zack Taylor, who directed the 2017 film “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” said by email.Mr. Ottens was in charge of product development at the Philips plant in Hasselt, Belgium, at the time.“The next morning,” Mr. Taylor continued, “a frustrated Lou Ottens gathered the engineers and designers from the Philips audio division and insisted that they create something foolproof: The tape had to be enclosed, and the player had to fit in his jacket pocket.”The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, something not easily done with vinyl, and to record it conveniently as well. Artists started using cassettes to record passing ideas. Bootleggers used them to record live concerts for the underground market. Young lovers used them to swap mixtapes of songs that expressed their feelings.Soon record labels began releasing entire albums on cassettes and automakers were installing cassette players on dashboards.Another portable technology, the bulkier 8-track cartridge, was introduced in the same period, but cassettes, smaller and recordable, quickly doomed those devices, and also cut into the vinyl market.The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, and to record it conveniently as well. “It was a big surprise for the market,” Mr. Ottens said in 2013.Credit…Philips Company Archives“It was a big surprise for the market,” Mr. Ottens told Time magazine in 2013, the 50th anniversary of that wallet-size breakthrough. “It was so small in comparison with reel-to-reel recorders that it was at that moment a sensation.”Mr. Ottens died on Saturday in Duizel, in the Netherlands, Tommie Dijstelbloem, a spokesman for Philips, said. He was 94.In the 1970s, after spearheading the development of the cassette, he contributed to the development of the compact disc, a product Philips and Sony jointly unveiled in 1982. The new format soon pushed the cassette aside.“The best thing about the compact cassette story,” the newspaper Nederlands Dagblad wrote in 2011, “is that its inventor also caused its downfall.”Not quite. Cassettes remain popular with some aficionados, in a retro sort of way. Mr. Ottens, though, was not one of them.“Now it’s nostalgia, more or less,” he said in the documentary. “People prefer a worse quality of sound out of nostalgia.”Lodewijk Frederik Ottens was born in Bellingwolde, the Netherlands, on June 21, 1926. He graduated from what is now Delft University of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering and began working at Philips in 1952.He became head of product development in Hasselt in 1957 and began overseeing the development of a portable reel-to-reel machine in 1960. Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, said that when he conceived the idea of a cassette tape, he carried a wooden block in his coat pocket that was the size and shape of what he envisioned.“His wooden block prototype was lost when Lou used it to prop up his jack while changing a flat tire,” she said by email. “However, we still have the very first cassette recorder he developed on display, a testimony to his foresight and innovation.”The company unveiled the cassette in 1963 at a product exhibition in Berlin. The old saying about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery was quickly proved.“Our cassette was extensively viewed and photographed by the Japanese,” Mr. Ottens told an interviewer in 2013. “A few years later, the first Japanese imitations came, with a different tape format, different dimensions, different playing time. Not shocking, but too many hit the market. Then it becomes a big mess.”Mr. Ottens in 2013. When he conceived of the idea of a cassette tape half a century earlier, he carried a wooden block in his coat pocket that was the size and shape of what he envisioned.Credit…Jerry Lampen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPhilips made its licensing available free, largely at Mr. Ottens’s urging, and its version of the cassette soon became the standard.“That’s the reason that it didn’t become obsolete too early,” Mr. Ottens said in the film, “and it’s taken 50 years to die.”Philips says 100 billion cassettes have been sold worldwide.After the cassette, Mr. Ottens worked on an unsuccessful videodisc project before shifting to the CD. And before that innovation was released, he had shifted his focus to Video 2000, a system intended to compete with VHS; it, too, did not catch on.He retired from Philips in 1986. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.The makers of “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape” took a romanticized view of the cassette and its importance to the countless people who made use of it in myriad ways, but Mr. Taylor said Mr. Ottens had a much more utilitarian view.“Lou was never comfortable taking credit for the cassette, or for the incalculable impact it had on the history of music,” Mr. Taylor said. “What I saw as a deeply personal medium, Lou saw as a pragmatic answer to the cumbersome nature of the reel-to-reel.”In the film, Mr. Ottens and three of the men who worked under him on the cassette project reminisce. Mr. Ottens still seems surprised by the impact of the little gizmo.“We expected it would be a success,” he says, “but not a revolution.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Attend the Tale of ‘Anyone Can Whistle,’ Then and Now

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookAttend the Tale of ‘Anyone Can Whistle,’ Then and NowA sparkling new recording of the 1964 musical makes half the case for Stephen Sondheim’s endlessly inventive score.From left, Maria Friedman, John Owen Edwards, John Yap and Stephen Sondheim working on the recording of “Anyone Can Whistle” at Abbey Road Studios in 2013.Credit…Doug Craib, via JAY RecordsPublished More

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      Rupert Neve, the Father of Modern Studio Recording, Dies at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRupert Neve, the Father of Modern Studio Recording, Dies at 94His equipment became the industry standard and influenced the sound of groups like Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Chicago and the Who.Rupert Neve in 2009 at a mixing console at the Magic Shop recording studio in New York City. His revolutionary Neve 8028 console (not shown here) had a huge impact on the music industry.Credit…Joshua ThomasFeb. 19, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETWhen the Seattle grunge band Nirvana recorded their breakthrough album, “Nevermind,” at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Calif., in 1991, they used a massive mixing console created by a British engineer named Rupert Neve.The Neve 8028 console had by then become a studio staple, hailed by many as the most superior console of its kind in its manipulating and combining instrumental and vocal signals and as responsible in great part for the audio quality of albums by groups like Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd.For Dave Grohl, Nirvana’s drummer and later the leader of Foo Fighters, the console “was like the coolest toy in the world,” he told NPR in 2013 when his documentary film about the California studio, “Sound City,” was released. “And what you get when you record on a Neve desk is this really big, warm representation of whatever comes into it.”He added, “What’s going to come out the other end is this bigger, better version of you.”In 2011, long after forming Foo Fighters, Mr. Grohl purchased the console as Sound City was closing, took it to his garage and used it to record the band’s album “Wasting Light.”Mr. Neve’s innovative, largely analog equipment has been used to record pop, rock, jazz and rap — genres distinct from his preferred one: English cathedral music, with its organs and choirs.After his death last Friday, the influential hip-hop engineer Gimel Keaton, known as Young Guru, tweeted: “Please understand that this man was one of a kind. There is nothing close to him in the engineering world. RIP to the KING!!!”Mr. Neve (pronounced Neeve) died in a hospice facility in San Marcos, Tex., near his home in Wimberley, a Hill Country town that he and his wife, Evelyn, moved to in 1994. He was 94. The causes were pneumonia and heart failure, according to his company, Rupert Neve Designs.Arthur Rupert Neve was born on July 31, 1926, in Newton Abbott, in southwestern England. He spent most of his childhood near Buenos Aires, where his parents, Arthur Osmond and Doris (Dence) Neve, were missionaries with the British and Foreign Bible Society.Rupert developed a facility with technology as a boy taking apart and repairing shortwave radios. It accelerated during World War II, when he served in the Royal Corps of Signals, which gave communications support to the British Army.After the war, working out of an old U.S. Army ambulance, he started a business recording, on 78 r.p.m. acetate discs, brass bands and choirs as well as public addresses, like those by Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth II when she was a princess.His future father-in-law was unimpressed. When Mr. Neve spoke to him about marrying his daughter, Evelyn Collier, the older man couldn’t imagine recording as a way of making a living.“He’d never heard of it,” Mr. Neve told Tape Op, a recording magazine, in 2001. “To him a recorder was a gentleman who sat in a courtroom and wrote down the proceedings.”During the 1950s, Mr. Neve found work at a company that designed and manufactured transformers. He also started his own business making hi-fi equipment.With his expanding knowledge of electronics, he recognized that mixing consoles performed better with transistors than with vacuum tubes, which were cumbersome and required very high voltage.He delivered his first custom-made transistor console to Phillips Studios in London in 1964, and its success led to thousands more orders over the years — bought by, among others, Abbey Road Studios in London (in the post-Beatles years), the Power Station in Manhattan and the AIR Studios, both in London and on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, founded by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer.The singer-songwriter Billy Crockett bought a Neve console about eight years ago for his Blue Rock Artist Ranch & Studio, which is also in Wimberley. He is quick to extol its “warm, open, transparent” sound.“It’s all about his transformers,” he said in a phone interview, referring to the components that Mr. Neve designed that connect microphone signals to the console and the console to a recording medium like vinyl or a CD. “They provide something intangible that makes the mix fit together. So when people get poetic about analog, it’s how the sound comes through the transformers.”Mr. Neve received a Technical Grammy Award in 1997. In a 2014 interview with the Recording Academy, which sponsors the Grammys, he said he was pleased with the loyalty that his consoles had fostered.Mr. Neve in 2013 with the musician Dave Grohl at a screening of “Sound City,” Mr. Grohl’s documentary film about the famed recording studio in Los Angeles. The film was being shown at the SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Mr. Neve’s pioneering mixing console was at the heart of Sound City.Credit…Michael Buckner/Getty Images for SXSW“I’m proudest of the fact that people are still using designs of mine which started many years ago and which, in many ways, have not been superseded since,” he said. “Some of those old consoles are really hard to beat in terms of both recording quality and the effects that people will get when they make recordings.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Neve is survived by his daughters, Evelyn Neve, who is known as Mary, and Ann Yates; his sons, David, John and Stephen; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.Mr. Neve was more aware of the engineers who handled his consoles than of the singers and bands whose albums benefited from his audio wizardry.That preference was borne out when rock stars approached him after the screening of Mr. Grohl’s “Sound City” documentary at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin in 2013.“They all wanted to take pictures with him,” Josh Thomas, the general manager of Rupert Neve Designs, said in a phone interview. “And after each picture, he asked me, ‘Why is he important?’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      One Album Released by 44 Labels. Is This the New Global Jukebox?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOne Album Released by 44 Labels. Is This the New Global Jukebox?For a decade, Senyawa has helped redefine how Indonesian music sounded. Now, the duo wants to revolutionize how it gets heard.Wukir Suryadi and Rully Shabara at their studio in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Their group, Senyawa, is an international emissary of Indonesia’s experimental music scene.Credit…Ulet Ifansasti for The New York TimesFeb. 18, 2021Updated 2:02 p.m. ETWhen coronavirus lockdowns began to grow among Indonesia’s 900 inhabited islands late last March, Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi, like many artists worldwide, began to fret over their musical future.During the last decade, their duo, Senyawa, has emerged as one of the lone international emissaries of Indonesia’s rich experimental scene. They have hopscotched among the islands of Southeast Asia and flown abroad for prestigious festivals, earning 90 percent of their income on tour. Their tumultuous mix of heavy-metal aggression and free-jazz bedlam — bellowed in Shabara’s athletic baritone, backed with Suryadi’s elaborate homemade instruments — has dispelled notions that all Indonesian music chimes like gamelan or hypnotizes like one of its folk forms.“When Senyawa started, if someone knew about Indonesia, they knew gamelan, Bali; they think everybody is playing traditional music,” Shabara said, laughing during a recent video call from Yogyakarta. “If you wanted to go to the United States and scream, people expected you to play the flute. But people know Indonesian music now. That door was opened.”The pandemic threatened to slam it shut again, so Senyawa came up with an unconventional plan. Last September, while making its new album, “Alkisah,” the duo decided its music would no longer be issued through a single label. Instead, the group would make an open online call for any imprint willing to enlist in a global confederation, with each member selling small localized editions of the same record. This week, at least 44 labels scattered across four continents will offer unique versions of “Alkisah,” each with distinct artwork and, in many cases, bonus tracks. It is the most daring iteration yet of Senyawa’s new credo: “Decentralization should be the future.”“It’s not about Senyawa anymore. It’s not about our album,” Shabara said, jabbing his finger toward the screen as a cross-legged Suryadi perched behind him like a mantis, taking long drags from a cigarette. “We don’t want to dominate anybody. This can be anyone’s music.”Unless they’re self-released, most albums fall under the purview of a single label. Or perhaps one imprint handles a record in the Americas, while another takes the reins in Europe or Asia. At best, the stakeholders coordinate release dates or promotional strategies, with priority often given to the label with the biggest potential market share. They are unequal members on one loose team.Senyawa wondered what would happen if it not only grew the team to an unusually large size but also gave the players relative autonomy. After all, “Alkisah” is a dizzying eight-song suite about the revolution that’s possible when world powers collapse, built into a fun house of prog-rock, noise, metal and a little traditional chanting. Why not rethink, from every angle, the very system that delivers music to listeners?The duo doled out graphics and audio files, encouraging labels to make covers that might appeal to their audiences and to commission remixes that might warrant local excitement.“We want the labels to have ownership. Somebody in Beirut may have the Senyawa album, but it should feel like an album from Beirut, not Indonesia,” Shabara said. The Beirut cover glows in iridescent orange and pink, the band’s name scrawled across it in Arabic. One of four German editions is stark and striking, suggesting cool minimal electronics. Together, the assorted editions of “Alkisah” sport nearly 200 remixes.“We want the labels to have ownership,” Shabara said. “Somebody in Beirut may have the Senyawa album, but it should feel like an album from Beirut, not Indonesia.”Credit…Ulet Ifansasti for The New York TimesWhen James Vella first heard Senyawa’s plan last October, he was conceptually intrigued, if pragmatically uncertain. His boundless British label, Phantom Limb, had previously issued Shabara’s solo work, and he loved the pair’s adventurous ardor. But could his fringe upstart afford to divvy the audience for experimental Indonesian rock with more than 40 other imprints?“As fans, we wanted to say yes,” Vella said by phone from London. “But any tiny label is forever one release away from failure. If you invest time and resources in a record that doesn’t sell, it could be the death knell. That is slightly more complicated here.”Vella began to understand, though, that this plan would enhance the sort of resource sharing some labels already use. Phantom Limb, for instance, partnered with a Belgian imprint to market “Alkisah.” The 44 labels now commingle on the chat application Discord, swapping ideas and information.These private international companies have digitally merged into a de facto mutual-aid network, mirroring Senyawa’s ethos back home. With an instrument-building shop, studio, kitchen, sleeping quarters and even indoors beehives, their Yogyakarta compound recalls an artist loft from a bygone New York. The group licenses Senyawa-brand hot sauce, cigarettes and incense for community relief. During the pandemic, Shabara has drawn 200 portraits of strangers, each of whom agreed to feed one neighbor in exchange.For the labels, it’s not just altruism. Senyawa contracted Morphine Records in Berlin to oversee the production and distribution of 2,300 copies for a dozen imprints, driving costs far lower than if those businesses placed separate orders. One in Bali will get 50, another in Spain 200. The savings mean each transaction might net $10, giving these boutique brands a rare shot at a modest profit. Phantom Limb sold what Vella called a “healthy” chunk of its 300 copies before “Alkisah” was actually released.“There may only be 500 people who are interested in the record I am putting out, but I am trying to find all 500,” said Phil Freeman, whose Burning Ambulance is one of two tiny American imprints working with Senyawa. “Wherever they are in the world, great.”Shabara gushed when he discussed this scheme’s future feasibility, detailing organizational refinements he imagines. And Rabih Beaini, the owner of the German label handling manufacturing, suggested that bands big and small could increase their audience by recruiting a plethora of cooperative partners. “You could have 100 labels that reach obscure markets in countries where you might not normally sell your music,” Beaini said from Berlin. “It’s quite utopian.”But Stephen O’Malley — the co-founder of metal duo Sunn O))) and a label owner — warned against reducing Senyawa’s idea into a novel strategy for sales. Several years ago, O’Malley invited Senyawa to perform with him at Europalia, a biennial arts festival, each event devoted to a different country’s culture. He reveled in their openness and enthusiasm.“Senyawa are approaching this record as a way to connect with a lot of people, a way to collaborate,” O’Malley said from his home in Paris. “So why does it have to be sustainable as a business? Of course music is sustainable. It’s been around since the beginning of the species and transmitted the whole time.”But the added connectivity is already changing the way Senyawa functions. This weekend, the group is presenting Pasar Alkisah, a two-day virtual festival of performances, D.J. sets, cooking classes and interviews, a massive act of coordination between the band and their dozens of partners.In September, when Senyawa recorded “Alkisah,” it reconvened near Borobudur, the iconic Buddhist temple built on Java a millennium ago. Shabara and Suryadi isolated themselves in a friend’s sprawling home there, surrounded by a patch of jungle and a panorama of converging rivers and twin volcanoes. It was a postcard version of Indonesia — and a perfectly ironic place to capture a less stereotypical perspective on the world’s fourth most populous country.“We are normal musicians like anyone else in the world who experiments. We just happen to be Indonesian,” Shabara said, his words arriving in a torrent. “If we want Indonesian musicians to flourish and be as highly respected as musicians from the West, we have to think we’re part of the world, not the ‘Third World.’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More