Label M: The Art of the Jazz Archive
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“We do a little No Noise, we do a few things of the technical world; we’re not the Flintstones,” the engineer continues. “But when No Noise starts to become music, I stop. I’d rather hear noise than hear the band scalped. So I’ll stop there, and noise is my friend. The music has to be so focused and so spectacular that it truly extends all of the flaws. You just don’t see them anymore. If you’re into Getz, there’s no way you’re going to stop listening to Getz to listen to some flaw.

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“We’re using Sonic Solutions,” Paul says. “In this case, we’re coming off an Otari 50/50 quarter-track reel-to-reel. We’re going through some real fine Apogees, and we’re going into a Yamaha digital mixer in order to try and spread this a little bit. And then the mix is mostly passive. It’s just a tool to add maybe a little room sound, a little echo and spread it out very gently. Most of this stuff is just feathers—the more you touch it and make it right, the wronger it becomes. As stupid as it may sound, it’s what you don’t do to it that makes it great. Leave it as honest as you can, and then through that process we go into Sonics, and if we have to brush it, we’ll brush it, and if we have to do some little level increments inside, we’ll do that. A little bit of No Noise, something minor that doesn’t take the room out.”

Dorn and Paul were behind the board during pop’s “Golden era,” as staffers for Atlantic Records in the ’60s and ’70s. Dorn won Grammys with Roberta Flack (“First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly With His Song”) and produced the likes of Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Leon Redbone, Bette Midler, the Neville Brothers and Lou Rawls, after an apprenticeship under Neshui Ertegun. They were magic times at Atlantic. “It screwed me up for the rest of my life, because I thought that’s the way it was,” he says. “I figured I’d still be making records at Atlantic with Fathead [Newman]. A little naive on my part.”

One of the hardest parts of Dorn’s current job is hearing a great live performance on tape and realizing there’s no way to make the audio presentable. “There’s a delicate balance there,” Dorn says. “There’s a point at which I don’t care how great the performance is; sonically it has to at least be sound. What we obviously listen for is ‘A’ performance and ‘A’ sound. But if you have ‘A+’ performance and ‘B’ sound, after a moment or so the performance transcends the sound. But we won’t go too far. For an absolutely brilliant performance we’ll bend a little bit for sound, but not much. And, conversely, brilliant sound in and of itself means nothing if the performance is dull. So our batting average is very low. We’ll listen to 100 tapes and we’ll get two-and-a-half or three albums out of it. But those albums meet the requirements.”

Editing is just a part of the process, according to Dorn. “You don’t over-edit, like you don’t over-equalize or over-Sonic Solution. But after you’ve been doing this for a while, you get a sense of how to reduce a performance without changing its basic character. Maybe focus a little better. It still has to be natural, it has to have its feel. If someone says that was a great live performance and doesn’t know we took four minutes out of a 12 minute piece, we did okay.”

“Some of these choruses are way over-extended,” adds Paul, “and everybody but the bartender takes a chorus. The good part is that they play enough that within that passage you’ve got a moment there that’s brilliant. Then you’ve got an option to tighten it up a little bit.”

Label M is also in the business of re-releasing out-of-print records, such as Joe Williams’ classic vocal album A Man Ain’t Supposed To Cry (Roulette), as well as Atlantic classics (produced by Dorn, Arif Mardin and Neshui Ertegun) by David Newman, Les McCann and Eddie Harris, and Rufus Harley. But Dorn and Paul are focusing the label more toward live performances. They received a four-star review in the February 2001 Downbeat for Ray Bryant’s Somewhere in France. Gene Paul recalls the discovery of that concert tape: “Joel kept prodding Ray to see if he had any tapes, and Ray finally called Joel up and said, ‘You have no idea what I’ve found. I’ve got a performance from Europe—I don’t know where it was.’ The quality of the performance and the sound is so good you’d swear it was done with a truck. The crowd sounds like Avery Fisher Hall, the talking is just marvelous and it was all done on an audio cassette.”

“The beauty of what we have with these tapes is that the musicians never knew they were being recorded, so they were just doing their gig,” says Dorn. “The pressure of recording live wasn’t there. In the ’60s and ’70s, I saw Cannonball Adderley and Horace Silver a hundred times. I know what it was like back then, and I’m trying to document that period. With the live records, some of them are stunning, some of them have incredible sound, but all of them have something that’s evocative of that era.”

“We can go in there and divide people, and make it so quiet that you’d swear it was done six years ago,” says Paul. “But when you finish with it, it doesn’t have the magic like when you went to a club and saw a performance that was just incredible, even if the sound was mediocre. It all had to do with the atmosphere, with the air conditioning and the smoke…and they performed to whatever the bad parts of the room were. And when you try to correct that, it alters what they’re doing. It really boils down to, do you have goose bumps going up your arm and how does it feel? We like to get as good a top end and as good a bottom and clarity as we can get, but never giving up that feeling.”

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