I saw that you're still performing "The Minotaur" (A hit from his first Moog record Moog: The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman).
Well, "The Minotaur" has come back into my life. Some years ago I took it out of hibernation and converted into a violin-piano piece, which I recorded with Yuval Waldman in the '90s for Capitol under the title Jazz Sonatas. Since then I've added a full orchestra to the arrangement. Lindsay Deutsch and I have performed it that way, most recently at the Siletz Bay Music Festival in Oregon. I'm hoping for more performances in the future.
And do you feel that, even though the piece was launched from the synthesizer, it translates well to traditional instruments?
Originally it was just an improvisation done with three overdubs on top of a drum machine track. We added the melody line, the bass, and finally the drone. The drum machine beat was an odd result of combining a waltz with a bossa nova. It was a lucky inspiration, all around.
Was that first Moog record done on a 4- track?
It must have been.
There's a photo in the second Moog record (The Age of Electronicus) of a 2-inch, 8-track deck.
I can't recall. I remember only that we worked in a very small editing studio run by Walter Sear [Tape Op #41] and that the equipment resembled an old-fashioned telephone switchboard with a keyboard and some pedals fastened to it.
That first Moog record was my introduction to your work. It's a very strange record, even today, because it's so experimental. In the liner notes you talk about trying to humanize electronic music, and there are elements of that. But there are other parts of it that are still kind of bizarre.
I suppose so. Incidentally, not many people remember another Moog track I did that wasn't in either of the Command albums. Enoch [Light] had moved onto Project 3 Records by then, so this was not in the Command Records catalogue at all. I guess we had this track left over somehow ["Exploration for Moog"], and Enoch chose to put it on the end of an otherwise big band album called The Brass Menagerie 1973. We had already done two earlier Brass Menagerie [records], which I had arranged.
I was going through my Command collection last night. I've got maybe 70 of them and I'm realizing that I probably don't have even half!
I've been looking through my own collection as we talk. The ones I had something to do with were ones under my own name on piano, organ, harpsichord, or synthesizer. There are others where I played, arranged, or both for Enoch, Doc Severinsen, Tony Mottola, the Ray Charles Singers, The Free Design, Urbie Green and others.
Yeah, I've got some of those by you: Happening, Fabulous, and Electro-dynamics. The titles themselves are just so great.
I think that was Enoch's particular contribution.
Can you tell me a little bit about what the Command sessions were like?
They all took place in the ballroom of a hotel on the corner of 57th Street and 6th Avenue in New York City. The sessions were all recorded by Bob Fine [Tape Op #90], a great engineer; Enoch, of course, was in charge. Bobby Byrne and Loren Becker were his assistants. The ballroom had wooden floors and, as I recall, wooden walls. It was very resonant. The sound on those recordings was quite natural, although there might have been some reverberation added. The personnel almost always included Bobby Rosengarden on drums and Don Lamond, also on drums (if Bobby played bongos, etc.). There was also percussionist Phil Kraus and the other percussionist, Phil Bodner. Stanley Webb was on reeds, Bob Haggart on bass, Mel Davis and Doc Severinsen on trumpets, Urbie Green on trombone, and Arnold Eidus, the violinist who acted as concertmaster. There were other players in addition, of course. I guess I did most of the sessions on one instrument or another, and maybe also as arranger. As I mentioned before, the Moog performances were recorded in Walter Sear's editing room; but those tracks that had some real rhythm instruments (like "Topless Dancers of Corfu") required that we lay down a track first in the ballroom. Then I'd add the Moog upstairs in Walter's place.
So when they were doing the ping-ponging stereo effects, was that all done in post with editing?
That was done in the editing. But I remember Don Lamond and Bobby Rosengarden being instructed to play a drum break and then a bongo rhythm so they could be positioned on opposite sides of the stereo recording.
And that stuff was mostly live to two-track tape, I imagine. At some point the Command records started being recorded on 35mm film?
Well, yes. Enoch did his Dimension 3 process with a big orchestra — was it in a concert hall? I was not a part of that.
So you weren't involved with any of the sessions where the recording took place to film?
Not that I recall.
At some point the record jackets start talking pretty specifically about that 35mm film technique and the clarity of it. Certainly all the Command records really shine when compared to a lot of the other percussion crazy records from the '60s. They're brilliant sounding still!
The sound is wonderful. The separation is exactly what was intended and, to my knowledge, they were the first of that sort of thing. It was a wide-open market. Enoch beat the big companies to that target and, much to his credit, everyone scrambled to keep up with him. And his was only a small company.
And, at some point, the company was purchased by ABC Records.
Enoch's recording history is something like this, as I recollect. I first became involved with him when he was with Waldorf Music Hall Records, if I have it right. They were covering current hits. We made a lot of albums — sound-alikes, really. That's when he first asked me to do a honky-tonk piano as Knuckles O'Toole. Other companies were having success with that style, which featured a jangly pseudo-ragtime manner. He had these performances issued, as well as on other labels he controlled, each with a different pseudonym: Willie "The Rock" Knox, Puddin'Head Smith, etc.; but they were all my identical tracks. He followed Waldorf with Command Records, which he then sold to ABC; he finally established Project 3.
And that's where the band The Free Design comes in.
The Free Design was arranged for, and led by, Chris Dedrick, who was the nephew of my good friend, the trumpeter Lyle "Rusty" Dedrick. I played on those dates, as I did on other Command albums, by Urbie Green, Pearl Bailey, the Ray Charles Singers, Tony Mottola, and Enoch himself. And, as I have said, I was often the arranger. The original arranger for Command was Lew Davies, and he did my earliest albums. Later on Dick Lieb and Jeff Hest arranged various sessions; I played for them too. When Enoch established Project 3, I wrote for the Brass Menagerie. I also continued my own albums, one overdubbed affair called The Sensuous Piano of "D" (after a notorious book of the period), Ragtime Stomps & Stride, a Baldwin organ album, and so on.
Would Enoch say, "I have an idea for a new thing. Come on over for a session"? It seems you guys were doing an astounding amount of recording back then.
Well, you understand, we weren't only working for Enoch. Business was booming and I was very fortunate to be in it for that 25 years. We would play for everybody without any planning or rehearsal. We'd show up at the appointed time, get paid union scale and that was basically it; unless one of us was the arranger. Then, of course, I had to meet with the producer and get the recordings, get the understanding and work out the personnel, the instrumentation and everything; and then produce arrangements. That was quite a bit more complex, but normally a musician would just show up and play whatever was given. Not to say that there wasn't a lot expected contribution-wise that might not be on the paper. People were hired because they had certain musical and improvisational skills. It was assumed they played certain instruments in certain styles, but that was the nature of the recording business. On a good week you might do ten to fifteen such sessions.
Is there much improvisation on those records? It sounds really tight to me.
