Acoustic Recording - 2006
Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2006 7:29 pm
Edison, Unplugged
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: June 11, 2006
In a basement recording studio in the Bronx the other day, unencumbered by wires, cables, amplifiers or headsets, a huddle of musicians took their cue and eased into a song. It was a four-man band — trumpet, clarinet, banjo and battered tuba — and a singer, a young woman with saucer eyes, a blond bob and excellent diction.
They played and she sang into the fat ends of two long metal horns, like backward megaphones, that funneled the sound to a wooden box, a wind-up lathe on which spun a shiny cylinder coated in brittle black wax. As a needle etched a groove in the cylinder, a surgically attentive man dusted away the shavings with a paintbrush and little puffs of breath.
When the music stopped, he put the cylinder on another machine for playback. He turned the crank, placed the needle and a sweet, melancholy song flooded the room. It sounded like an unearthed relic of the Roaring Twenties, though the recording was barely a minute old.
Down in the poolroom
Some of the gang
were talking of gals they knew
Women are all the same, said Joe
Then one dizzy bird said, Pal, ain't you heard
the story of True Blue Lou.
It was an electric moment, though electricity had nothing to do with it. The recording was the product of the collaboration of a radio host, Rich Conaty, who plays 20's and 30's jazz and pop on Sundays on WFUV; Peter Dilg, an acoustic engineer; and the pickup musicians who leapt at the invitation to make a brand-new, old-time Edison cylinder.
Mr. Conaty, Mr. Dilg and the band are first-rank, certifiable enthusiasts. At lunch after the session, they plunged obsessively into Thomas Edison lore and Tin Pan Alley trivia. They lamented the supremacy of inferior recording technologies. They pined for Betamax and cassettes, for Bix Beiderbecke and Cab Calloway.
Mr. Conaty, who plans to play the cylinder on his show tonight, has an audience that, practically by definition, is too young to remember Sophie Tucker, Ukulele Ike or the young and jazzy Bing Crosby. But the people who, like me, plan their Sunday nights around the show have discovered pleasures in the music totally unrelated to nostalgia. It's a revelation to hear music so fresh and strange, so witty and soulful, from people who are dead and gone.
And there is another pleasure, too. It's the warmth of the technology. There are surely downloadable versions of "True Blue Lou." But unlike the MP3, whose magic is incomprehensible and thus boring, the wax cylinder is viscerally miraculous. It's staggering to think that lungs and plucked strings could vibrate the air, wiggle a stylus and capture a song for 100 years on a fragile thing that looks like a toilet paper roll. Compared with the iPod, it's a lot more human, a lot more accessible, a lot easier to love.
Once you've seen and heard it done, there's no going back.
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: June 11, 2006
In a basement recording studio in the Bronx the other day, unencumbered by wires, cables, amplifiers or headsets, a huddle of musicians took their cue and eased into a song. It was a four-man band — trumpet, clarinet, banjo and battered tuba — and a singer, a young woman with saucer eyes, a blond bob and excellent diction.
They played and she sang into the fat ends of two long metal horns, like backward megaphones, that funneled the sound to a wooden box, a wind-up lathe on which spun a shiny cylinder coated in brittle black wax. As a needle etched a groove in the cylinder, a surgically attentive man dusted away the shavings with a paintbrush and little puffs of breath.
When the music stopped, he put the cylinder on another machine for playback. He turned the crank, placed the needle and a sweet, melancholy song flooded the room. It sounded like an unearthed relic of the Roaring Twenties, though the recording was barely a minute old.
Down in the poolroom
Some of the gang
were talking of gals they knew
Women are all the same, said Joe
Then one dizzy bird said, Pal, ain't you heard
the story of True Blue Lou.
It was an electric moment, though electricity had nothing to do with it. The recording was the product of the collaboration of a radio host, Rich Conaty, who plays 20's and 30's jazz and pop on Sundays on WFUV; Peter Dilg, an acoustic engineer; and the pickup musicians who leapt at the invitation to make a brand-new, old-time Edison cylinder.
Mr. Conaty, Mr. Dilg and the band are first-rank, certifiable enthusiasts. At lunch after the session, they plunged obsessively into Thomas Edison lore and Tin Pan Alley trivia. They lamented the supremacy of inferior recording technologies. They pined for Betamax and cassettes, for Bix Beiderbecke and Cab Calloway.
Mr. Conaty, who plans to play the cylinder on his show tonight, has an audience that, practically by definition, is too young to remember Sophie Tucker, Ukulele Ike or the young and jazzy Bing Crosby. But the people who, like me, plan their Sunday nights around the show have discovered pleasures in the music totally unrelated to nostalgia. It's a revelation to hear music so fresh and strange, so witty and soulful, from people who are dead and gone.
And there is another pleasure, too. It's the warmth of the technology. There are surely downloadable versions of "True Blue Lou." But unlike the MP3, whose magic is incomprehensible and thus boring, the wax cylinder is viscerally miraculous. It's staggering to think that lungs and plucked strings could vibrate the air, wiggle a stylus and capture a song for 100 years on a fragile thing that looks like a toilet paper roll. Compared with the iPod, it's a lot more human, a lot more accessible, a lot easier to love.
Once you've seen and heard it done, there's no going back.