Also: The other console, is it in a control room? That would offer clues. I'm not certain if we ever definitively answered where the console on Jim Reeves' site was located (I think probably Studio E, but I'm not sure), but it certainly wasn't 30th Street.
It is a control room rather than a mastering room. The studio as seen through the window is much too small to be 30th St, and there is a drum iso booth visible with cedar shake siding and a drum kit visible through a window. The tape machines are to the left of the console rather than in their own room on the right like 30th St had. They also gave me a picture of the CBS designed console with faders in the 30th St control room with a tape room visible where the old tape room was, to the right of the console. The ceiling and back wall of the control room are unrecognizable, though, as there is a dropped angled ceiling like "modern" control rooms had in the 70's. I'm going to see the guys at Battery Studios tomorrow and hope they can ID that interloper. Today was my last day in the archives, and I finished 1958 but didn't make it to 1959. During 1957-59, my subjective feeling was that for every session at 799 there were 20 to 30 or maybe even 40 sessions at 30th St, which can't have been right. I also believe there were sessions missing from the 30th St AFM reports that were there, although it is much too early to correlate my multiple piles of info. I'm kind of still recovering from a fairly intense few days. I'm coincidentally staying about a block and a half from Battery Studios, so that will be pretty straightforward, and since they are part of the CBS/Sony family we should be able to talk freely while looking at stuff, unlike here unfortunately (since I can't post what I got per the agreement for getting it). Here's some random things I learned: Captain Kangaroo recorded at 30th St. Screamin Jay Hawkins recorded "I Put A Spell On You" at a CBS studio in NYC, although I have no idea if it was a remake. Bo Diddley was a Columbia artist (probably Epic), and recorded in NYC at least once. Anthony (Tony) Mottola the guitarist who was a top session player also had a very active career as a bandleader playing children's music (as in "Songs For Two Year Olds 1" and "Songs for Two Year Olds 2", and "Train to the Zoo 1" and "Train to the Beach" etc.). He and his groups did a TON of sessions like that. Big Maybelle recorded at 30th St. Arnold Stang recorded at 30th St. Art Carney did multiple sessions at 30th St. over the years. One tune that he did at an early session was something like "Serenade of the Sewer". (He played the sewer worker Ed Norton on "The Honeymooners" with Jackie Gleason as the bus driver Ralph Kramden.) There were for sure more interesting tidbits, but that's what I can think of right now. Apropos of almost nothing, when walking to Sony this morning I saw this church on a side street on the West Side that is very similar to the side street that is 30th St. on the East Side, and figured the studio building must have had a similar impact on the street scape: This picture is taken from a lower angle than those we've seen of 30th St from a similar angle, so it seems more imposing, maybe. Still, its mass seems very similar, fwiw. OH! Do you remember this series of pictures I posted a year ago to try to ID these people? Since then I've shown those pictures to a LOT of people and come up blank every time. A month and a half ago Art Kendy came up with the name "Gold and Fizdale" without even seeing the picture, just hearing that it was two pianos with percussion on the session. Sure enough, looking up Gold and Fizdale proved that two of the people were indeed Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale. My wife guessed maybe they were playing some kind of modern Poulenc piece. But no amount of searching came up with a piece that was such odd instrumentation with chorus. Until today. I found a Gold and Fizdale session from 1954 in the AFM sheets that had a third player listed under the "Musicians" section, Al Howard. All the other G&F sessions only list two players, this one had three. Googling "Al Howard percussionist" almost immediately resulted in finding which not only cleverly (?) uses one of the pictures but also has ID's for everyone! And the piece with the chorus is not Poulenc but there is a Poulenc piece on the album!!!! What a cool day! And with that, I'll stop for now but again thank Tom Tierney and Sony for such an awesome experience that promises to be the gift that keeps on giving.
Very cool about the cover photo. Although I see that the exact shot used for the cover isn't among the photos you posted, Dan. Did you just miss that one? Or did Columbia perhaps retain the negative? It appears the album is actually on iTunes, albeit with different artwork: https://itunes.apple.com/ie/album/bowles-picnic-cantata-poulenc/id442558173 And Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0054PFKKG?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0 It would appear that the current release is a "grey market" one due to the copyright having expired in Europe.
They must have retained it, because I got the whole series this last time (those and all those I showed before a couple months ago are from the Sept. 2014 trip) and that exact shot isn't in it. Maybe they had a pro photographer there at the same time on the same day? But there is no picture of a photog in the series, so I don't know what exactly happened. Interesting that the iTunes store only has additional works by Gloria Davy. What I found was that there is an additional album by Martha Flowers (singing for the Don Shirley trio), http://www.ebay.com/itm/Don-Shirley...504a48800f289cc3bbe495&pid=100391&rk=5&rkt=6& That one has the best picture of the cover, but someone else has it for a couple of bucks. with a couple of songs listenable on Youtube. Here's one: The album was recorded in NYC at Fine Recording. That kind of operatic voice has never appealed to me, but YMMV. I spent part of the morning reading about Paul Bowles and his wife Jane, who were both very creative people. There are a couple pictures from that session that I think are of Jane, but I'm not sure and I have to run out now. Glad you guys like this. I was blown away when I found that album with ID's, after trying for over a year to figure out who all those people were and why they merited so many photos. Learning about Gold and Fizdale and the Bowles makes me realize why. (Paul was an inspirational figure to the Beats in a similar way to William Borroughs, although different, and Jane was a noted playwright and author as well.) You don't have to Google very far to find out a lot about them, if you are interested.
The Battery Street guys were positive that it was a Neve 8108 and in Studio B at 49 E. 52nd St. That is the picture I saw yesterday but didn't post. I just looked into my files, and this picture of Frank Laico, Ted Brosnan, and Billy Messina from Frank's personal collection is the same one in the same place but a different angle than the picture you haven't seen, unless CBS had more than one Neve 8108. Don't have a date for the pic, but from the look of Frank it would be near the end of his career at CBS, which was 1983 I think, same as when 30th St was torn down. The picture on the Reeves site that was allegedly in 30th St. is actually also at 49 E. 52nd but in Room 415 and is an MCI 536. They talk about these rooms as though they each were one guy's room, like "Oh, that's XXXX XXXXX's room", which is interesting to me. They also have their own rooms at Battery.
Hi Everyone, Sorry for the infrequent posts; just in the final few hours in Manhattan and I've been packing a lot into not much time. Saturday I spent several hours with Steve Epstein and Art Kendy, both 30th St alums to differing extents and readers of this thread. We had a really great time looking over the picture collection with them reminiscing about people and situations; Art described the day as "momentous", and that about sums it up for me. Art has been feeling funky lately and I was really honored that he made what must have been a tremendous effort to spend some time together. I was truly honored that day. This is Steve producing a Tokyo String Quartet session in August of 1977. He was astonished to see this series of pictures, first because he had zero recollection of a photographer (let alone Fred) being in the studio that day, and second because he totally didn't dress like that. There are some other pictures showing the fourth member of the quartet wearing the exact same shirt at the same time as Steve, so he figured the musician must h MSS 52, The Frederick and Rose Plaut Papers in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University ave given it to him. This is Art at a console in 52nd St. I think He told me more detail about this picture and the other fellow in it, but I'm way behind in labeling pictures and so you'll have to wait for that info. Which brings me to the last bit of today's post (and probably this week, since I'm swamped as soon as I get home): these last couple of months have been momentous indeed. I've gathered so much information and talked to so many people that it's been a swirl in large part, and I have months if not years of work to organize all this data and get it into a presentable form. We can talk more about this later if anyone is so inclined, but really, I'm going to talk about it whether you are so inclined or not. But later. Now it's time to run, and hope you will and have enjoyed our journey, which in some respects is really just beginning. As always, those pictures are from MSS 52, The Frederick and Rose Plaut Papers in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University, acquired with the invaluable assistance of librarians Richard Boursy and Emily Ferrigno.
Hi Everyone, Back home and preparing for the holidays, but wanted to touch base and tell you what's going on. The spinning of my head has slowed down somewhat and I am not making plans to return to New York in the immediate future, for a change, so I'm starting to focus on what has been gathered in the last month and a half and how to process it into a useful form. INVENTORY: -Five or six videos each lasting a minimum of an hour and more like two hours; -8000 Plaut pictures; -somewhere around 3000 Sony Archive recording session documents including dates, times, some locations, players on each (numbering from one to over a hundred), music recorded at each session and release numbers, covering the years 1946-1958 inclusive; -a hundred or so pictures from the Sony photo archives that show other facets of the studio and building, although nowhere near as much as I'd hoped for, although I spent only about 2.5 hours there out of the 20 in the archives; -several audio recordings of relevant people lasting a couple hours each; -75 Building Dept. documents showing actual construction details as well as unbuilt plans and links to further exploration; -and maybe more, including the pictures that we already have (some of which you've seen here) but didn't know where or when they were taken, which will need to be correlated with the session document information. I think that could be years of fairly diligent work. After dealing with the holidays and beginning the annual bookkeeping in preparation for income tax season, as well as things I've not done while traveling, I'll start on this phase of the project and look forward to sharing info with you. FYI there are several issues to be dealt with, and here are some of them: 1) Having the recording session documents summarized in a database/spreadsheet will make ID'ing photos much easier, I think. Issues: a) The data entry for that will be formidable, since there are something like 20-30 fields on the session documents (the AFM Recording Summary sheets), and each field has between 1 and 100 items: b) Fields are: Date, client, artist/group, leader, contractor, call time, end time, overtime hours, songs recorded, record release numbers [maybe those numbers are internal numbers so they can keep track of unreleased material, too?], musicians, studio location information [or not], who filled the form out, and maybe a couple others.) c) I have 390 dates in my spreadsheet now, but that format is inadequate to deal with a hundred musicians. I think being able to ID which musicians are New York players vs. who are Hollywood players will be invaluable as we try to determine where recordings were made on the hundreds of sessions where location was not noted. d) My thoughts now are to keep working in the spreadsheet format so as to get through this quicker and wait until we're faced with doing the nuanced work of studio location before revisiting how we keep track of the musicians. e) Here is page 1 of that spreadsheet as it currently is. If there is anyone reading this who is adept at spreadsheets and/or data bases and would like to help me figure out a direction to go in this, please PM me and we can discuss it, preferably on the phone rather than typing. I'm using the OpenOffice spreadsheet which I largely don't understand, and have been looking at databases like Filemaker, Panorama, and Panorama Sheets and understand them less. I'm currently using iPhoto for the photo organization and it is largely fine EXCEPT that although titles can be very, very long and are adequate for the amount of information I want to put in them, there seems to be a constant 20 character limit for actually viewing the titles which makes it very difficult to use. A database seems like it could be useful in photo viewing if only for that reason. f) My son and I were talking about OCR software last night, and although that might ultimately work better in the very long run it would also take almost as much work to get it running as it would take to do the simple data entry (leaving out the musicians, for example). g) It might make sense to hire a data entry person to work a few weeks or whatever to get that done, but where does that money come from? I'm already pretty far extended on this project and have no revenues coming in from it. I'm very aware of this and am thinking about it. 2) Although the Plaut photos have very little ID information in the index from Yale, it will still be useful to first correlate the people in the pic who are ID'd already in the index with the pictures so we can then know who is unknown to both them and us. That will be a formidable project as well. (I attach the ID's to the photos in the title.) a) Note that the Yale indexer knew almost no one from our technical world, so we've already ID'd a bunch of people here and in my meetings with those who were there. But there's lots more people in the photos who are still unknown, both technical people and musical people as well as others who the Plauts came in contact with. b) There is almost no chronological information in the Plaut photo library, and I am adding that to the pictures as well. The AFM sheets are going to make that process awesome, as you saw above. This is why I'm thinking the AFM sheets --> spreadsheet process should be done first. c) I'm realizing there should be a spreadsheet item correlating to the Plaut collection pictures. That's enough reading for you for now, thanks for slogging through it and getting an idea of what's going on now with this project, which I think is entering a phase of conclusive information rather than so much speculation. Happy Holidays to all!! Dan
Well thank you! I'm glad for that. I'll take this opportunity to say again that I've been reading Gary Marmorstein's book "The Label", about the history of CBS Records. I started before I went back East but couldn't take it with because it is gigantic. Been reading it before sleep since I got home the other night and it is really fascinating to see of the scope of the company and some of the intrigues. The author barely mentions 30th St., which I guess shows how peripheral it was to the company activities. It seems to be treated like a tool by the civilians (non-geeks, unlike us) rather than as a center and a breathtaking and even hallowed location. He does a really good job of naming names and jobs (there were a TON of people in the record division over the years), although the chronology is fluid and a little hard to follow sometimes. He concentrates much more on Goddard than on Mitch, which seems reasonable, and gives a decent amount of description of the many people and their activities and interactions. There is a definite sense that the history is written by the survivors/victors, although the losers' viewpoints seem to be sensitively presented. There have been a number of explanations of how things fit together or came about, and I've gone "WOW, that's how that happened!" or something similar. He did a very thorough job of looking at lots of the parts, although I would have preferred a more technically-centered approach in some areas. My wife is in a book club and they enjoy talking about a book a month; it would be fun to be in a book club associated with this group and discuss this book. Given our various locations, that's probably not in the cards... Thanks again for your nice comment.
The AFM reports are kind of burning at me, so I decided to see what the data entry is like. I started with the first report that specifically named 30th St as the location, which was a Les Elgart session on 10-28-54, and went from there. In a couple of hours I got a little farther than this, but this is what will fit in one screen shot on this laptop. The vertical columns are: (A)Date: (B)Time Called: (C)Time Dismissed: (D)Add'l hours of overtime or my time comments: (E)Studio: (F)Artist: (G)Song/Album/Description/misc.: (H)Engineer (none of these had that): (I)Song/Album/whatever ID number: (J)Info Source: They were sometimes casual about noting if "10:00" and "1:00" start and end times were AM or PM, and I tried to note that confusion. This is why I used a 24 hour time, too, so as to make that more distinct. Not sure if that was a mistake on my part yet or not. Also note that there are several sessions without a location listed. My guess is that many of them are at 30th St but I don't know that yet. I got all the NYC sessions whether they were specifically at 30th St or not so that we could see the breadth of the recording activity and also maybe more accurately guess where a session took place. The latter is where I think it would be useful to have the musician info, too. I noticed a "The Tattle Tales with orchestra" session on Dec. 10 (just off this page that I'm showing you) in 30th St where Milt Hinton was on bass, then another one for "The Sandmen" in an unknown location on Dec. 14 with Quincy Jones where Milt also played bass. That indicates to me that the second one was also in NYC at least, and thus either at 799 "A" or 30th St. Those CO numbers in column "I" seem to be locators for each song and since they are usually sequential seem to have been assigned at the session. Here's the rest of what I did yesterday: You can begin to see on December 10 how busy the studio could be, and it's worth noting how much overtime the Mahalia Jackson sessions had on November 22 and 23. Those overtime hours are in addition to the call hours (those between call time and time dismissed). Seeing that kind of stuff is what makes this interesting and worthwhile to me. Correction: That end time on the Sammy Kaye December 10 session should be 17:00, not 15:00. Sheesh.
What is the designation for sessions at 799 Seventh Ave? My understanding is at the time there were at least 2 studios, A and B, and *possibly* 4, A-D. If the notes specifically mention A, that's good, but if not, I don't think it's safe to assume that was the studio used, at least at that time.
The notes on the 11-15 sessions specifically say "799 7th Ave Studio A". I'm guessing at location for the 12-09 session. AFAIR there are no notes saying anything other than studio A for 799 for the years I looked at. There are MANY sessions that just say "Recorded in NYC" or don't say anything at all. That is the frustrating part, or one of them. The appointment books that I didn't get to look at and which I was not going to be allowed to photograph must be more specific as to which studio would be in use, but it also sounded like they were also less specific about who was in it than these AFM sheets which is why I stuck with them. That 12-09 Tony Mottola session was an interesting one for me, in that it is the first in this sequence (there were more before this and many more after) for him and his band, and they were all kids music. He had a thriving career as a session player, too, so his name is all over the session logs as a guitarist, but all these other ones he is the leader and obviously had a pretty decent career from kids music. I met my wife when she became the piano player for a kids music band that I did PA for. That is actually about the extent of my interest in kids music, btw. I just thought it was cool that this preeminent session guy was doing "Music for Three Year Olds" and stuff like that. Anybody heard it? Was it swingin'? My Google-Fu is not strong enough to summon any songs. I get a Billboard from 1956 that has an album listed with songs similar to what's on that 12-09 session.
Another interesting thing that I think I mentioned earlier is that the sessions ID'd as 3oth St outnumber those for 799 by 10 or 20 or sometimes more to 1, at least during the years I looked at. I don't get that at all.
I'm not sure if we knew this already or not: From the book The Label: the 30th St. control room underwent a two month renovation in late 1970 or early 1971 to install 16 track recorders. Like I mentioned, the author's chronology is a little hard to follow and that dating is the best I can figure of when he means. It seems about right, as in the Masterworks pic collection there is a sliver of the rotary console visible in a pic from the November 15, 1970 session of Two by Two with Danny Kaye. Here are the curtains on the wall at that same session: To my eye they look more similar to the random color and arrangement pattern than they did in later years, which if memory serves from the final Glenn Gould video was a regularly alternating series of brown and tan curtains. Here's a shot from No No Nanette, recorded on January 24, 1971: That looks more regular to me than in the earlier pic, but it could be ambiguous since we don't know the exact location of the pics. So the timing of that renovation in the book seems plausible, and even seems like it can be narrowed down to late November 1970 to late January 1971, assuming the curtain remodel is relevant. The pics that I've seen in that Masterworks collection (which is the most precise dating tool we have so far, I think) don't show something that looks like the CBS linear fader console until March 18, 1973, when there's this shot of A Little Night Music: L-R that's Glynis Johns, Judy Kahan, Hermione Gingold, Stephen Sondheim, Goddard Lieberson. There are no Dept. of Building documents supporting or contradicting this timing of the installation of the recorders. The last relevant document in the collection is in 1962, alas. Do we know if the rotary fader console could work with 16 track recorders, or if the linear fader one was necessary? And now it will be time for me and I hope you to enjoy the holidays. Best wishes, everyone! EDIT: Seeing the curtains side by side large like this: I dunno. It looks like there are some brown ones in the mix already in that Danny Kaye picture, although they do look less even and cared for.....
I probably wouldn't use the curtains as the basis for anything, both because it's hard to tell much from the black and white photos, and because changes in the studio itself don't necessarily correlate to changes in the control room. The rotary fader console appears to be an 8 buss console to me. Could it work with 16-track recorders? Yes, but with limitations: you could *probably* only record 8 tracks at a time, at least by design (not sure if it was possible to patch individual mic channels directly to the tape machine). Not an issue for pop overdubbing, but definitely an issue for the work that was happening at 30th Street, where most or all tracks would be recorded live. My money would be on the new console being installed in the timeframe mentioned. Simply installing new tape machines would probably only take a few hours, if that. The time for the renovation was almost certainly to install the new console, as well as make any other related changes. Unfortunately, I believe I previously noted that control room photos were somewhat scarce from that era, at least on the Masterworks site, which made it hard to pin down exactly when the new console was installed.
This thread continues to be awesome! Just for the record, that's Richard Rodgers in the first pic with Danny Kaye.
Hello especially to Dan, Luke, and Matt. I find the photo of the (stereo) Ampexes off to the side interesting. Is that supposed to be the 'old' 30th St. control room? In the 1959 Gould video, I noticed that they do playback on a full-track machine despite having a three-track set up and running. My best guess is this was done to preserve the three-track tape as much as possible without wear, and thus I'm also led to believe that the full-track setup at that time was strictly used for reference, not for a mono master tape. The reason I believe this is because the speed issues with Kind of Blue point to both the original mono and stereo pressings having the same speed issues, which would mean that mono master was derived from the three-track tape (see http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threa...-mono-speed-issues.232772/page-5#post-8029880). Anyway, it would make sense that the stereo setup in that old control room would have only been for rare instances where they wanted to hear the three-track tape on a stereo rig...??? Or maybe it was just for playing stereo LPs?? Was there ever a photo of a turntable in there? I would say they may have played stereo masters tapes that came back from the edit room but I don't recall ever seeing a two-track in the room, or was there? Regarding the three speakers in the 'new' 30th St. control room, has it been established if the middle one was for mono playback and the two on the sides for stereo, or that maybe it was a hybrid where the middle speaker was for mono and then it could be switched over so each speaker was for a single channel of the three-track machine?? Also, the Bill Putnam blurb is fascinating! This pic is so priceless! The mysterious man in the middle is concert pianist Phillipe Entremont: (So glad to have been able to offer something to this killer research project!) Are there any photos of a two-track being in the old control room? I feel like there may have been one, I'm having a hard time keeping track of which CR is which...I also think I'm overlooking the 'tape room' I saw in the floor plan. Was that for storing tapes or were they running a feed to that room where other machines were recording? Is that where that photo was taken with the clerkly women sitting in front of several Ampexes? This is simply fascinating to me...the way Les Paul is involved, the nitty gritty of figuring out the technology...this is a terrific anecdote! I (unfortunately) agree that it would be difficult to try to pinpoint when the echo chamber began being used and when the delay would have been implemented (I will say however that I have managed to pinpoint when Rudy Van Gelder's EMT plate was implemented at his Hackensack studio, which perhaps was easier because the artificial reverb unit he had before sounded incredibly 'springy' and quite distinct from the smooth sound of the EMT). Also, I think @crispi had mentioned some time ago that Columbia had an EMT plate...is this correct, crispi? Surprising to me that in 1959 they would have added verb in the editing room during the 'mixdown' of the Mingus album. Any other evidence of this ever happening? Regarding the mono master tape, see my comments above.
Yes, that's the original control room on the west end of the studio. My *understanding* is the mono master was usually derived from the mono machines running at the session. FYI, Kind of Blue was recorded in March and April and released in August; the Gould sessions were in June. It's possible that this practice was ending around this time. Perhaps the live mono tapes were still being made as "insurance", while the 3-tracks were starting to be used to create mono mixes from. I can't imagine wear was a significant concern, especially when there were 2 3-track machines in use, and it's not as if the tapes would be played more than a few times. It's also possible the mono tapes were used for studio playback because 1) that's what everyone was used to, 2) stereo wasn't a concern for those involved, or 3) the speakers out in the studio were mono, so there was no need for the 3-track. The only 2-track machines I've seen are from the time prior to the introduction of the 3-track machines. That is, they were there for recording sessions, not recording or playing back stereo masters. As above regarding 2-track. When the original control room was in use, the tape machines were right in the room. With the introduction of the new control room, I believe the tape machines were in a room immediately to the east. This is in the original control room:
Thanks for your reply, Luke. The two photos you just posted were precisely the ones I was recalling from earlier in the thread, thank you! The Gould video is more telling now that I've read this trove of information. Let's take a look: At the 3:55 mark, Bob Waller readies two three-tracks and one full-track for recording (a second full-track remains idle to the left): At the 6:55 mark we get confirmation that the multitrack machines (cropped out of the shot at 3:55) are in fact three-track, which is consistent with what you said about all the tape machines remaining in the CR until they moved to the new one: I understand that the second three-track machine is a 'safety' machine, but I find it interesting that they're running only one full-track along side two three-tracks. If the mono master tape was made during the session, why would it somehow be less 'important' than the three-track, as I feel is being implied here by the fact that there is only one full-track deck running...? In other words, if the mono master tape was made during the session, wouldn't they want a safety reel of that too? This seems to me to point to the fact that the editing room was where the mono master tape was made. The KOB speed issues seem to provide additional evidence that the mono master tape would have been derived from (one of the) three-track tapes during this time period. FWIW, KOB remastering engineer Mark Wilder also apparently jumped into the KOB speed issue thread at one point (quite surprising, actually) expressing the belief that the best explanation for the speeds of the original stereo and mono LPs being the same is that the mono master was made from the three-track...? (http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threa...-mono-speed-issues.232772/page-5#post-8029880) I'm not out to prove you wrong or anything, I'm just providing all my evidence for believing the contrary so you all (we) have the best chance of getting to the truth.
It definitely seems like they were in a state of transition at the time regarding how to capture the performances. They *did* previously run 2 mono machines, but it's possible they were phasing out recording directly to mono, and they went to 1 machine before stopping the practice entirely. Unfortunately I've never seen or heard anything specific in terms of timeline or why the change was made, so it's all speculation to some extent.
