On the Edge with Eddie Jobson: "Globe Music" and Beyond
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The second challenge involved translating his musical ideas into their own musical dialect. “Every little yelp and whoop and yodel was very precisely written using fairly archaic notation devices. There were inverted mordents, turns and other devices that I hadn’t worked with or seen since studying music theory when I was 14 years old. But there it all was in the score. They’re a highly disciplined choir. Even though they are traditional folk singers, they have a very strict regimen of classical study. They all read music extremely well.”

It was a trial-and-error process of trying to make Voices of Life sound pleasant enough to Western ears and to people used to somewhat more high-fidelity recordings, without
removing the real
character of the choir.

The third challenge was translating Jobson’s poetry into Bulgarian words. He sought the talents of a Balkan poetry professor from Boston University, and together they worked out the poems into Bulgarian. “It’s a very percussive language,” explains Jobson. “A lot of the words just don’t seem to have any vowels in them, so I would ask him what a certain English phrase was, and he would come back with this machine gun staccato that was completely unsingable. Further, he said that some of the lyrics that they used were not only in Bulgarian, but they were from archaic Bulgarian folk poetry. So to really do it in the authentic style, we had to use phrases that would be typical of ancient poetry. I would come up with these phrases, and he would find interesting metaphors that they would have used a couple of centuries ago.”

The last step in scoring the music was writing the words in the proper alphabet. The choir reads in the cyrillic alphabet, so Jobson found a transcriber in New York to rewrite the score “because in vocal scoring, every syllable has to have a note assigned to it. Where you may have one note with a three-syllable word, that one note had to be turned into three notes with the right rhythm. So we had to rewrite the entire score [and integrate the] cyrillic words by hand, which was remarkable to watch.”

The musical and lyrical theme for Legacy was inspired by his trips to Bulgaria to begin recording the choir, to the Czech Republic to record the City of Prague Philharmonic, and by his observations about what had transpired there over the last 50 years and the aftermath of Eastern Europe’s despotic regimes. “That’s what the title refers to,” he says, “the legacy that’s been left not only by the oppressors, but this spiritual legacy that has been retained by the people, despite so many years of hardship.”

The first recording sessions for Legacy took place in 1995. Jobson recorded the group in the Russian Cultural Center in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, bringing in 14 cases of digital recording equipment from Floating Earth, a company that specializes in on-location classical recording. For the 1999 sessions, he rented a cathedral and brought equipment and recording engineer Mike Cox from Abbey Road Studios. Jobson miked the choir with four pairs of Schoeps microphones run into a Genex 20-bit hard disk system. He utilized a Tascam DA-88 for playback. Because the two Legacy vocal numbers were to be later integrated into rock songs, the conductor required the use of a click track.

The recordings were contained to just eight tracks. “I didn’t want to get into too many microphones,” Jobson remarks. “We wanted to keep it fairly pure, so we just had a couple of solo mics down in front of the choir, and then the main two fairly widely spread close mics. Then a couple of higher overheads, and then a couple of ambient mics.” Mixing the tracks was relatively easy: “I usually found that just two of the pairs were enough, usually the close mics and one of the ambients mixed in was enough, if you had the right placement.”

After beginning work on Legacy, Jobson became sidetracked with scoring Nash. Then the Bulgarian Women’s Choir record label in Germany approached him about releasing future albums by the group, especially as Jobson had founded a label for the difficult-to-market Legacy project called Globe Music Media Arts. He suggested assembling a compilation of their best live and studio performances, basically a mixture of released and unreleased material. He would later add three tracks from the Legacy project—“Zavesata Pada (The Curtain Falls),” “Utopia” and the instrumental album intro “Nov Den (A New Day)”—but in a form more befitting their style.

For the Voices of Life album, Jobson spent two months in his L.A. studio remixing the older recordings to clean out noise—“air conditioning buzzes, lighting hums and even a lot of coughing from the audience, which was very difficult to remove,” he explains. “A lot of it came down to clever manual editing on Pro Tools to remove sounds and then trying to extend sounds from other places or even time-expand sounds in order to fill gaps that we’d taken out; sometimes editing in-between phrases and filling the phrases with high-quality digital cathedral reverb. A lot of the work on my part was in trying to make the recordings sound like high-fidelity, full-sonic recordings, whereas many of the original recordings didn’t. I did that just by extensive EQ’ing.

“The choir’s tonality is very difficult to record, especially when it’s not miked terribly well,” he continues. “You end up with a lot of shrieking formants in the sound, and these can really combine to create this dense, high-pitched whistling in the sound that on speakers can be pretty unpleasant. It was a very difficult job, because I had to take very narrow Q’s on those harmonics and isolate them and notch them out. But there were so many of them within the one sound that by the time I got through it all and notched them all out, a lot of the presence of the track would disappear. So then I’d have to rebuild it back up again with a more pleasant top end, bring the presence back in without that obnoxious sibilance. It was a trial-and-error process of trying to make it sound pleasant enough to Western ears and to people used to somewhat more high-fidelity recordings, without removing the real character of the choir.”

Voices of Life, the dynamic Bulgarian Women’s Choir compilation that also includes guest spots from King Crimson’s Tony Levin (on Chapman stick), Bill Bruford (drums), Jobson (electric violin and surreptitious synths) and the string section of the Prague Philharmonic, has found a receptive audience in the States; the Bulgarian Women’s Choir successfully toured the U.S. last fall. Jobson and the choir made numerous NPR appearances, and CNN taped one of their performances. In addition, they were selected International Artist of the Year on Amazon.com, and they have received critical acclaim from prominent newspapers, including The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

One hopes that the critical acclaim that the Voices album has garnered will also find its way to Legacy once it is finally released. But Jobson is concerned with staying true to himself, no matter where his muse takes him. “I suppose, when I look back, it does seem like I’ve gone in a lot of different directions,” he observes. “But for me, it’s always been the same direction, it’s just been in pursuit of new, interesting things. I try to stay on the cutting edge as best I can, both with technology and with whatever’s going on musically, because that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning: not getting too stuck on the same thing and going into a repeat formula mode.”
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