Jeff Jones: The Jedi Master

<div class="captxt" style="background-color: #fff !important; color: #000 !important; text-align: center !important;">@ Scovil Productions, Norwalk, CT</div>

Jeff “The Jedi Master” Jones has been an engineer and producer for music and films in New York City for over 40 years. Starting out as a teenager in suburban Connecticut, he eventually worked with seminal New York rap artists like Slick Rick, Roxanne Shanté, Jam Master Jay (Run-DMC), as well as with Public Enemy on their breakthrough album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back . He recorded all of the music for the Academy Award-nominated documentary Against Wind and Tide: A Cuban Odyssey and won a Grammy [for Best Contemporary Blues Album] with Dr. John in 2009 for the album City That Care Forgot . He has worked with the likes of Wynton Marsalis, Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, Village People, Chick Corea, Norah Jones, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Alicia Keys, Talking Heads, Jon Batiste, and filmmakers such as Spike Lee and Ken Burns.

What were your earliest recording experiences?

My mom was an opera singer who performed with the local and metropolitan operas. She had a small reel-to-reel Wollensak, and I used to record myself with that when I was nine years old. I figured out how to go into record and fast-forward at the same time by disconnecting the capstan. I'd make recordings at extremely high speeds and slow them down to listen back to them. I’d talk into the mic and then slow it down so much I could hear the vocal cords going “clack, clack, clack.” I’d stick the mic up to my heart and record it. I would take a cardboard tube, cover one end with paper, and poke a sewing needle through the end and hold it over a record. I remember ruining a bunch of my parent’s vinyl LPs doing that. [ laughter ]

You were experimenting with some form of turntablism before it broke through!

Yeah, this was the late-1960s. I grew up in Connecticut. My dad was a civil engineer. I studied some classical piano, started on trombone, studied some drums, and played the clarinet for a little while. I used to jam. My best friend at one point was Danny [Dan] Brubeck, [jazz pianist] Dave Brubeck's son. When I was in my junior year, the town built a new high school, and the music department procured The Putney synthesizer [EMS VCS 3], the model Todd Rundgren had used. I went into school early in August, and by the end of September teachers were coming by the music room and saying, “Aren’t you supposed to be in my class?” because I had never gone to class. [ laughter ] The school had a ReVox reel-to-reel 1/4-inch, plus the synthesizer and a microphone. I used to bounce back and forth between the tracks and use anything that was available to make songs. My mom came in one time around midnight because I hadn't come home. She was pissed. I said, “Can’t I stay to do one more overdub?” She screamed, “No!” [ laughter ]

You were obsessed already!

I loved being in recording studios, and the only studio around was owned by a jingle guy, Don Elliott, in Weston Connecticut. Some friends of mine recorded there due to a tip from John Hammond, Sr., who had some interest in them. I was fascinated by the entire recording process. I ended up helping build a studio in the area that was on a second floor, above a meat market. It was originally a Baptist church; we had to disassemble a baptismal tank and unwrap a crucifix all wrapped in foil. That's where I cut my teeth. Then I had the opportunity to move into New York City, and when I moved into the city I used to commute back to Connecticut to do sessions. As time passed, I started getting hooked in with people in the city, and one of the places that I got hooked in with was a studio called Intergalactic Music. They had George Martin's old Neve from AIR Studios, and they had the first Fairlight [CMI synth/sampler] in Manhattan. They knew John King, of Chung King Studios fame, where a lot of rap was being done at the time. I ended up getting some work with Jam Master Jay, and I got some sessions with Hank Shocklee [ Tape Op #51 ]. There was Spyder-D [“Rap Is Here to Stay”], Roxanne, Slick Rick, and different rap artists. One of the sessions was with The Bomb Squad [Hank Shocklee and Eric Sadler]. And we tracked “Bring the Noise” based on [Simon Harris'] “Bass (How Low Can You Go).” That was done with an [Ensoniq] Mirage 8-bit sampler – played by hand, no sequencer. It was on John's baby Neve when I was working swing shift with engineer, Steve Ett, who was also part owner in the studio. I tracked the actual music, but I didn't track the vocals on the record.

What was your relationship with Talking Heads?

I had a “band house” out in Connecticut that was essentially an eight-bedroom house that I’d rented. I was managing touring tenants, but the lease was in my name. A family friend came by and said some band needed a roadie, but the roadie had to have their own van. I was like, "Okay. But I don't have a van." They said, "The name of the band is Talking Heads," and that sounded like a totally weird name to me at the time. I offered the gig to my friend Gary, because he had a van. We had set up a small 4-track recording situation in the house, and eventually the band needed another roadie to work with Gary. I came on as a roadie, and then I ended up being a guitar tech. I did some live sound for them, and also some recording engineering in the early days. The band flew everywhere, and me and Gary drove. We're talking from Niagara to Miami to L.A. to Houston; hauls like that. And whenever we came back from being on the road, we would keep building the studio. The gear for the studio initially was actually the live sound gear for Vicki Sue Robinson, who did the hit “Turn the Beat Around,” which Gloria Estefan did a remake of. Whenever Vicki Sue had a gig we couldn't record because they’d take the mixing board. [ laughter ] We had a Scully 16-track, 2-inch machine and we used the TEAC Model 5 audio mixer. We eventually upgraded to a Tangent console. Talking Heads split to go to Europe, and the next thing that they did was go to Compass Point Studios to record Remain in Light . I remember trying to convince my dad to give me the money to go. I was like, "If you could just get me there. They're going to do this record with Brian Eno [ Tape Op #85 ]! It's going to be the shit.” But my dad’s a civil engineer, Republican, corporate guy. He replied, “Why should I give you money to go to the Bahamas?” He wouldn't do it, so I ended up not going. At that point, Gary didn't want to be involved with the Talking Heads any longer. Gary was into working with Weather Report. We’d just done a Larry Coryell record – more what Gary considered to be "upper echelon" music. Gary just said, "Screw that. I'm not going to deal with these new wave guys." It was the disco era, so the studio had carpet on the floor, acoustic tiles on the ceiling, and cloth with fiberglass behind it on the walls. The room was completely dead. It was like walking into a studio and having there be no acoustics. Like singing into a pillow! I tried recording my mom’s operatic singing, and she flipped out because she was used to hearing herself in a large hall with an orchestra. It's a completely different experience from headphones and artificial reverb. She couldn't find her tuning, her center.

<div class="captxt" style="background-color: #fff !important; color: #000 !important; text-align: center !important;">The Talking Heads</div>

How did you get into film?

I had day gigs on film sets and worked my way up. In the case of Ken Burns, I've done a couple of different documentaries with him. He's a unique director in that lots of directors start with visuals, and they'll put a “slug” piece of music in to have something that they can work with. Afterwards, there's nothing you can do to satisfy them musically since they’ve grown accustomed to the music that’s already there. It's a bit like “demo love.” But Ken Burns starts with the music and then edits images to the score. In most cases at those sessions, I had three assistants, and I would give them the engineering credit and take the production credit. I always wanted to get as far away from engineering as possible. If you said, “Jeff is the best engineer in the world,” I'd almost be insulted, because I do stuff that's so much deeper than just engineering. I deal with the music; I deal with performance. The producers that I admire would be ones that recognize talent, like John Hammond Sr. or George Martin. People that are completely fluent in multiple worlds. They can say something like, “Okay, second string, that’s a G-natural, not a G-sharp,” and, “Engineer, can you put the low end rolloff on the [Neumann] KM 84 on the clarinet,” and, “Can you go to 3 minutes and 21 seconds? That'll be the second repeat of the first chorus.” They are dealing with all those different worlds, understanding where we are in terms of time, in terms of key, and in terms of musicality. Wynton Marsalis would call me up and I'd pull over, put the score on the dashboard, and take out a flashlight so that he could give instructions like, “At bar number 178, we need to fix this trumpet.” I studied jazz piano and took some drum lessons.

<div class="captxt" style="background-color: #fff !important; color: #000 !important; text-align: center !important;">w/ Ken Burns &amp; Wynton Marsalis</div>

I’m not a great musician or a sight reader, but I can follow a score. So, I would generally have three people under me. One would be running a second machine, which would be a separate computer that's getting the same feed digitally, so at least there are two copies of everything for redundancy. Then I would have another who would read the score and call off markers like, “Letter B, Bar 168” Another is on a second computer, entering that information. I'm dealing with a piece of music where we might do four different takes with a couple of tag endings and it's an eight-minute song. If the musicians want to come back in and say, “Can I hear letter B from take 2?” I can't be fucking around. The third person would also type in what’s said in the room when listening back, because that's how people process. If the bass player says, “Oh, that bit sounds off," or, “Hey, we got it right that time,” the third assistant would write that down so we could refer back to it with precision. Here's the secret, okay? This is the crux of what I do and is partly the belief and philosophy behind what I do: The recording medium is imperfect. The medium itself and the position to the microphone and such. I look at it as if I'm doing correction for that imperfection.

What were your experiences with Spike Lee like?

In the case of Spike, it's the opposite approach of with Ken Burns, because Spike had picture that was existing, and musicians were playing to those images.

How do you approach mixing?

The day that you do a recording, the mix that you get that day is spiritually in some way more connected than any other mix that you can do. It sounds better. There's a center. There's a bead. Like the musicians get a bead that they're excited about, so does the engineer. So does the mixer. I look at it as we as human beings can create infinitely more colors than any recording medium can truly represent. In MIDI you have 127 steps, and that's it. But a classical pianist can coax so many more subtle things than 127 steps. The way that I approach recording these days, I record one-to-one, a microphone to track for every single element. I also record stereo instrument stems. That would be drums in stereo, with effects, compression, and some EQ. Those stems get summed into a mix. And that mix, I put some mastering processing on. I record multitrack, stereo stems, and also mix and master simultaneously by printing effects on the stereo tracks. What that gives me is a basis or the bead that we were on at the time. I'm constantly reacting to the music. I'm reacting to the musicians. It's an open book; I continue to adjust and I capture the live mix, and it’s always the best mix. I'm talking about having heard the demo, done a whole album, doing all of the overdubs in a big studio, and then going back and doing a mix. Then coming back and doing a recall for the record company. Then, after all of that, you go back and listen to the DAT tape from the original day you did the tracks and go, “That’s better.” The feeling is there, but there's always something completely wrong with it as well which makes it so we can't use it. We can't use the stereo mix because the sax player was playing by accident at some point or there are some leakage issues. But what I try and do is I try and capture that moment, and I use the stereo mixes to do my editing. That is my cookie cutter guide to editing the multitrack, which is inevitably 24 or 64 tracks or whatever. But moving 64 channels around is a pain in the ass. If I match that stereo mix, and I edit the multitracks right on that same place as it was in the stereo mixes, it’s quicker and easier. Where I learned editing was recording to 2-inch tape. We’d go through six reels of 2-inch tape in a session, and then we'd stay up into the evening and edit the 2-inch together to get the rhythm section totally tight. I worked with Eddy Offord one time, and he told me that the original Yes records – where it was like, “Oh, man those guys are so tight. How do they do that?” – that Yes did the songs in loops. They would play each section over and over and over again, and then they’d edit the best bits together. The Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein" song was done the same way, splicing right in the middle of the song itself on 2-inch.

How did you become involved with Wynton Marsalis?

I became a partner at Intergalactic Music. We had four rooms running by the time we were done. I had 15 engineers under me. We produced 40 songs a month for a karaoke company in Japan. So, it's all soundalikes, right? I was a chief engineer and producer, doing 100 hour weeks. I started building my own studio around 1988, which was in my apartment. For a year it was just a controller keyboard with no synthesizer, a DAT machine, and a pair of Yamaha speakers. I asked a guy that was a percussionist friend, who I’d produced a bunch of karaoke music with, to do some carpentry for my home studio. He came to me and said, "Can you enhance the sound from this tape?” It was video from a hand-held, crappy camera, but it was Wynton Marsalis doing a benefit for this Lower East Side nonprofit theater that gave lessons to kids in the area. I did what I could to salvage the video. The next year that Wynton did the benefit, they asked me to come and record it. They had a budget of $400 – this was before Jazz at Lincoln Center. Knowing both his reputation and musical abilities, I got a friend of mine to bring a couple of professional cameras. I took my entire studio apart, rented a snake, and borrowed gear from other people. I recorded the gig, which for me was a day of preproduction and a 15-hour day to record. Then I spent five months – after I got the camera tapes – editing it into what I thought was an hour-long television pilot. That recording was unique – there was no barrier between the audience and the musicians; there weren’t any camera lights, and the mics were all trussed so you couldn't see them. That recording ended up being picked up by Blue Note. I did the whole thing – film editing, color correction, and titling. Wynton's brother, Delfeayo Marsalis – who had produced all of his work up to that point and plays trombone with him – called me up and said, “I’m looking at my brother, Wynton, right now. He's walking around the room and no matter where he stands the sound is perfect. Yet I don't even see one microphone. How did you do that?” I had two overhead mics. I put black curtains on them. I hid my [Neumann U] 47 behind the acoustic piano. I put two PZM flats behind a curtain on one side between two brick walls. Then I spent five months mixing this thing. So, I sent him the masters.

<div class="captxt" style="background-color: #fff !important; color: #000 !important; text-align: center !important;">w/ Wynton Marsalis, Ken Burns, &amp; Jackie Robinson at The Power Station</div>

How many mics were used for that, in total?

It was an 8-channel recording on a Mark of the Unicorn [MOTU 2408]. It had RCA inputs! [ laughter ] After Jazz at Lincoln Center opened, they asked me to work with them there. I did Eric Clapton and Wynton’s Play the Blues: Live from Jazz at Lincoln Center , Willie Nelson, etc. And then they asked, “Can you mix this for 5.1 Blu-ray?” I bluffed and said, “Sure,” and then I rushed out, bought some speakers, and I mixed in my living room.

Tell us about working with Dr. John.

<div class="captxt" style="background-color: #fff !important; color: #000 !important; text-align: center !important;">w/ Dr. John</div>

I was a fan of Dr. John’s since I was a small child, when I was so young that I put up Christmas lights in my room to make it seem more like a New Orleans nightclub! [ laughter ] Working with him kicked me into a high gear, where I was going into Power Station and a bunch of places. When I first showed up in New York, I went to Electric Lady Studios and said I was looking for a job. They tested me on a bunch of stuff, and then they said, “What New York studios have you worked in?” I said, "None," and they wouldn't hire me. I replied, "Yeah, but I've done this and that. I did all of the music for this documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award [ Against Wind and Tide ]." And they said, “Yes, but you have to work in a New York studio to have cred.”

What have been your experiences with discrimination in the music industry?

I mean, I'm a “suburban negro.” When the rap guys in the city would say, “Yo, let’s go to Mickey D’s." I’d say, “What's Mickey D’s?” “It's McDonald’s! What's wrong with you?” There's often friction between different styles of music. People have opinions about the styles of music that they listen to and like or don’t like. But to me, as long as someone can say who it is they don’t like, then that artist is successful. You could say, "I hate Johnny Cash," but you recognize him, and that’s the end of story.

Versus saying, "I hate country music," in a general way.

Yes. Rap was not an acceptable music form in the late-1980s. Engineers were like, “What are you guys doing? What the hell is that ?” But my sister and I were not just the only kids of color in our school. We were the only kids of color in the entire school system – from kindergarten through high school! I grew up in that environment. I was raised to be scared of black people. On the first session I had with Jam Master Jay, a guy came in and was just standing there, glaring. Then he points at me and says to Jam Master Jay, “You owe me 10 grand and you hired this asshole?” Then he and Jam Master Jay went into the recording booth, and it got so heated that they ended up throwing furniture at each other. Then, on the next session, Jam Master Jay couldn't make it, so he sent his cousin, who was a part time security/part time police officer. He had a white shirt, a shoulder holster with a pistol, and he stood behind me while I was mixing. He didn’t know anything about recording.

If you could only have one microphone for a session, what would you use?

I don't know. A vintage Telefunken U 47 with the vintage tube? It has a sweet quality to it. It’s meaty, but silky. Fat, though also transparent.

<div class="captxt" style="background-color: #fff !important; color: #000 !important; text-align: center !important;">@ Intergalactic Music</div>

What are some of your workhorses for gear?

Some people are into expensive gear. I have a Neve, but I also have mic pre pedals made by ART that I would put up against almost anything else. They have a tube in them, and some I bought for $70. I remember being in the studio with John Hammond Sr. I said to him, “It's amazing how much the technology has increased, and all that we can do now.” He looked at me and said, “Jeff, I remember making records before there were electric motors.” I asked, “How did you do that?” He said they’d drop a weight down a shaft, there would be a governor, and then they’d put wax on the thing. The singers were paid by repetition before the labels were able to actually mass reproduce vinyl records. They’d get ten Victrolas lined up and the musicians would play. Then the engineers would reset all of the Victrolas, and the musicians would play the same song again and make ten more copies.

What would be the best piece of advice you'd give to somebody to catch optimal audio?

It’s more of a mindset. It's like what I teach at Berklee; if you go into a rehearsal studio with a cassette Walkman – which is not common these days but used to be – you're still there to make a Grammy-winning recording. That should be the perspective. Whatever you have to do, do it. Treat everything like a masterpiece – no matter what medium, no matter what microphones you have, no matter what anything . Shoot for the highest possible outcome. For monitoring, what I do is I use a Sony plug-in which can give an MP3-type codec in real time. I set it on the worst possible setting, so that even if my session might be running at 192 kHz, 32-bit float, I'm listening to it as 28 kB. It's like taking a mix out to the street and listening to it in your car. I make the sonics as horrible as possible and then work my ass off to make that sound as great as I can. I started recording bands in basements using borrowed equipment from music stores that the bands worked in, and using mattresses for gobos and broomsticks for mic stands. But no matter what you’re using, the recording process, in essence, remains the same.

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