“Technology has allowed us to put this stuff in a form where people can still look and listen. It’s almost a teaching tool to young students,” says Dorn’s engineer of some 30 years, Gene Paul. “You listen and realize that people don’t play that way now. So you are privy to being as close to that club, as close to that performance, as close to that spirit that was happening at the time, and technology is allowing us to snoop back into that zone.”
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“At Label M, we don’t have an existing label as our wellspring,” he adds. “What we have are collections of live music that I’ve been stashing for the last 15 or 20 years. The hope has been to someday have a label built around live unreleased music in a variety of genres by major artists at the peak of their powers.” Much of the first live product on Label M is from a large collection of reel-to-reel tapes originally recorded by Vernon Welsh at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, chronicling Left Bank Jazz Society events in the 1960s and ’70s. First releases included Stan Getz’ My Foolish Heart, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims Live at the Left Bank, Cedar Walton Live at the Left Bank and Sonny Stitt’s Just the Way It Was.
There is also a subterranean world of people outside the music business who have tapes that were recorded on an amateur basis. “Someone else might say ‘illegally,’” Dorn quips. “What we do is get clearances on them, get the rights, pay the artists and make them legal and legitimate and put them out. Once the word gets out that you’re looking, lots of musicians have tapes of their own. A soundman will say, ‘Here—here’s your performance tonight.’ Now we get tapes every day from people.” Dorn’s son, Adam, helps to gather and listen to material, along with others at the label. “The jungle drums are out there on us in the tape collecting world,” Joel says. “Lots of people are contacting us. So you put it on—you either like it or you don’t like it. I don’t want to make this sound like there’s any great mystery to it.”
“Most of this old stuff was recorded almost by mistake,” says Gene Paul. “The Left Bank collection was recorded reel-to-reel, 3 3/4, half-mil, Mylar tape, quarter-track. I don’t think you could do any worse. They put the piano in mono on one side, with the drums and the bass. The other side would be two horns or a horn and a vibe or something. And we would make a DAT of these tapes right away, because with the mylar tape, being half-mil, you run into certain problems. When it stops quickly, it stretches the tape, and the tape literally turns into a thread, so that portion of tape you cut off and throw away. Once the mylar stretches, it’s over. Once you put it on and start playing it, you must continue through the whole side. It’s so thin that you can barely thread it without it bending and fraying and falling apart. And it’s quarter-track, which means you have two channels going one way, and then you turn the tape over and there’s two more. But when all is said and done, the music really lifts it to a point where you say, ‘Listen to what he’s playing.’
“It’s brilliant Stan [Getz],” Paul continues. “Sonny Stitt’s the same. We had to have gone through eight or 10 hours of music. Joel and I just sit there, and when it hits, it hits. Joel says, ‘Do you think you can dig the sound out?’ If it survives getting through it and everybody says, ‘Did you hear Getz?,’ that’s the key. Getz was on a good night. There are moments that you hear the honesty. You hear something go down that had nothing to do with the red light. That privilege of searching in the treasure chest is just overwhelming, because many times you see a side that never existed on record. When this one came by, everybody in the room sat up. And if you can polish it a little bit and not lose that...
Reprinted with permission from
Magazine, April, 2001© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
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