Jim Anderson | TapeOp

Jim Anderson has had a multifaceted career in audio, from the beginnings of National Public Radio, to audio for The Muppets, to President of the AES Society, to engineering albums for some of the best jazz and acoustic musicians in the world. Not only is Jim a fine (Grammy winning) engineer and producer, he also helped create the esteemed music- recording program at The Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU, where he is currently a professor. For Jim, it truly is all about audio.

You started working in college radio. Were you doing recordings at the radio station or DJing?

It was actually the beginnings of public radio. The radio station that I started at in Pittsburgh was an interesting station in that it had been on air five days a week, five hours per day, at 5,000 watts, and the antenna was five feet below average terrain. Then along came the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and they started seeding all these public radio stations. By the time I got there it was in its first year as a 25,000-watt stereo station. We covered the tri-state area of West Virginia, a portion of Ohio, and western Pennsylvania. I saw it go from 12 hours a day to 18 hours a day; I left just as it went to 24 hours a day. It was my first job out of college; I spent roughly a year and a half working as an engineer. I had my FCC license and all that. I was also producing the morning public affairs slot from 10 to noon every day, five days a week. Then I oversaw the jazz announcers at night. Occasionally when someone was sick, I'd have to go and do a two-hour shift. It was great training.

I'd imagine. Are you a musician yourself?

My major in college was music education, so my major was French horn. You had to have a minor too, and mine was piano. My parents made me get my education degree, the old 'just in case, you can go teach.' The funny thing is that I'm the last of five of my siblings, and they're all teachers. They're all retired; they laugh at me now because in September I have to go back to teach school.

How long was it into your career when you started teaching?

I was with NPR from '74 to '80. I left there and freelanced from 1980 to 2003. In fall 2003, we started the Clive Davis Institute. It's now been ten years. I still freelance and engineer, but the primary work I do is at the Institute.

How did you get handpicked for the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music?

It was a very funny meeting. I was co-chairing the AES convention with Zoe Thrall back in 2003. I went by her office [at The Hit Factory]. I was being considered for a job at another university. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her I was waiting on this other job. She told me to hold on a second. Troy Germano was there [The Hit Factory's owner], so she said, "Let me get Troy in here." Troy came in, flipped open his phone and said, "No, that's not what you're going to do. This is what we're going to do." He called the Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and said, "I've got the guy you've been looking for." He flipped the phone closed and told me that I was going to get the job. The Dean called the next day. I went down and had an interview that was almost two hours long. I had 10 pages of questions and research that I'd done over the course of the weekend. She looked at it and said, "You've done some research on us, haven't you?" I said, "Of course I have!" So I grilled them as much as they grilled me. The funny thing was that about a week or two later, I was in the studio and I got an email from this other institution that wanted to offer me the job. It turned out that the fellow who was supposed to send out the email to me went on vacation, so it was delivered two weeks late. In that two weeks was when NYU found out about me. That's how things can change so quickly!

Just one phone call.

Yeah. My friend at the other institution said, "You mean if I had sent you that note, you'd be with us?" I said, "Oh yeah, that's exactly what would have happened." I didn't have to sell the house and move and all that. One of the deans once said to me back in the early days, "You don't understand the significance of this. No one ever gets to start a program at a university. You always step into a program that's been running for 50 or 60 years. You're in such a unique position." I was a visiting professor my first year, and then I was the chair for four years. Now I'm a full professor with tenure there, so it's very cool.

Nice. Did you have to build the curriculum concept?

We built it and we've taken it down and changed it. In fact, we had to build all four years of curriculum as we went, and then we'd look at it and see what worked and what needed changing. We've had to mold the curriculum to match the changing times. I think that's one reason why people watched us. I was once told by the head at USC that we were their main competition. I said, "What do you mean? We've only been up for two or three years!" He said, "No, we've been watching you guys." I think we've set the modern mold for what a music program could be, because it's a more holistic program, with music business, production, and criticism all wrapped into one. You don't just come out as a businessperson, or an engineer, or a producer. We're looking for somebody who can stand on their own two feet and figure out what they want to do.

Yeah. I've heard from people that it's a very well-rounded academic path.

I have to say, we've hired an excellent faculty. Everybody has their specialty. We have diverse engineers, excellent businesspeople, excellent history and criticism people. Everybody's been cherry-picked for their abilities.

How many students go through the program and graduate each year?

We started out thinking about roughly 32 per year, and we're now at something like 48 a year. But we read close to 400 applications for those 48 or so slots.

How do students get picked?

Well, we have an interesting application. We ask for a statement of intent, which is essentially for us to see if they know what we're about and how they'd fit into the program. Then we ask for a desert island disc, like, "If you were on a desert island, what ten tunes would you take with you? Write about one of them." From that we get a sense of their tastes, as well as their ability to write and think. We try to get a fairly well- rounded population, in terms of gender, geographic location, and music sensibility. We don't want all 18- year old guitar players. We try to get songwriters, journalists, and vocalists.

How many bands end up starting during the course of a year?

Quite a few. We have a very interesting thing, and I think some other universities are starting to take this up. We have something called a capstone, which is a project that students spend their senior year working on. Our students are not just thinking about what they're going to do when they graduate, or what they can do for a job. They actually have something to do with their hands and minds. They could be recording their album, or a friend's band. Or they could be creating a label, bringing five bands they know onto the label, and cultivating a certain aesthetic. One of my advisees was a student from Hawaii; she wanted to go back and live there, but nobody was really servicing the film industry with all of the music from Hawaii. So I said, "Okay, what if we expand it and think of Pacific Rim and go down to Micronesia?" That became her capstone, and her idea is to license this music for television, radio, and whatnot. She can use all this music that she knows about and try to get people talking about it, because there hasn't been anybody who is doing that. We try to get them to see what unique position they can put themselves in.

It's not about wrapping up school; it's about starting your career and your life. That's a cool thing.

You could treat it as an exercise. Or, if you're smart, you think about what you're going to do beyond that and take it from there. Fortunately most of our students actually take it that way. Another thing they do is present their capstone in front of an industry panel. If our faculty have done their jobs right, there will be people on the panel who are interested in these ideas. We have students who sometimes walk away with a prospect, an investor, or a job.

That's pretty unique. You've recorded a lot of different genres, but you seem to always be working with a lot of live, performance-based music, as well as a lot of acoustic-based instruments, right?

Well, you know, it's funny. I learned a long time ago that if you're not working on music you like, you aren't going to be a very happy camper. You're not even going to like the people you're working with, frankly. In college, I was essentially a jazzer. We had a jazz band, and I played lead French horn at Duquesne University. We had two French horn players, myself and another guy named Steve Irwin. We'd write stuff that had these wonderful French horn lines just sailing over the trombone section and everything. When I had a chance to go to NPR, I was probably the only engineer at the time that actually had a music degree, could read a score, and could play an instrument. So I got a lot of the music projects that were coming up. One of the shows was called Jazz Alive . I recorded the opening show for that series, which was Ella Fitzgerald in New Orleans. There's a track on a record, We All Love Ella: Celebrating the First Lady of Song , and it's the encore of Ella's concert where Stevie Wonder comes up and sings "You Are The Sunshine of My Life" with Ella Fitzgerald. I present it to students to say, "Here, this is my first professional jazz recording." Two tracks, 7.5 ips, no noise reduction, no backup, no nothing. I play it and I say, "Here it is." Now, imagine yourself three or four years from now, and this is your assignment. That was my job. So when you come back to work and have something like that in your hand, you can't do anything wrong. That was a weekly show, and we needed a lot of material. In doing that show, I got to meet people like Phil Woods and his producer Bill Goodwin. I went on to record probably six or seven albums with Phil; maybe even more, now that I think about it. I also met Toshiko Akiyoshi and Lew Tabakin; I still work with them. I met them back in '79, or something like that, at a live show at Carnegie Hall.

Do you think people saw you could handle any kind of pressure?

Well, that's the thing about broadcast. You have to be good, fast, and right on top of things. With this Toshiko concert, I was onstage at Carnegie Hall setting the mics for Jack DeJohnette on drums and George Duvivier on bass. The front line was Lew Tabakin, Curtis Fuller on trombone, and Dizzy Gillespie. I went out there and set the microphone nice and high. I pointed it up where Dizzy's trumpet would be. He looked at me, smiled and nodded like, "You're right. That's where it goes." That was the kind ofworkIwasdoingwhenIwas26or27.I'dgoback and in three or four more hours, it was on the air nationwide. It was essentially working without a net. You're on the air. Also, at the same time, I was doing All Things Considered . I even did Morning Edition when it came on. I did press conferences and long-form sound documentaries, because I was interested in that stuff. Noah Adams and I originally proposed a show on stock car racing. We thought it would be fun to go to Daytona and do a documentary on stock car racing in stereo. Scott Simon ended up doing the show, and it was Scott's first long-term piece. I was co-producing with Deborah Amos, who now is reporting from Syria for NPR. If you can imagine, we were all 23, 24, 25, or 26 years old. Carl Kasell was the "old" guy. We would come up with these crazy ideas of things to do. We didn't have any multitracks in-house, so I had to use separate 2-channel machines. I'd try to make these difficult mixes together. I'd have ten different 2-track machines running, with effects, background, and narration; and I had to roll this all in and mix it live. It was a great experience. Then we went on to do another series that I produced with a few other guys from NPR, called Segovia , where we went to Spain and spent six months with [Andres] Segovia in Madrid and all over Spain. There's actually a pretty picture on my Facebook page of me in 1982 standing at Segovia's desk, and he's signing a picture that's now hanging on my wall in my office at NYU. But again, these were projects that were ideas we came up with and said, "This is something we have to do on the radio."

It seems like budget cuts have killed wonderful creativity like this.

Yeah. In fact I just finished a project with Jane Ira Bloom, her Sixteen Sunsets album. We mixed in surround and did a playback for her yesterday of the final mastering. She said that she loved the pacing of the record. It was funny, because I was listening to it at my desk and I'd have notes for the mastering people saying, "No, half a beat more here. Two more beats here." She told me it was my radio background doing that. It's the kind of pacing that other people don't pay attention to. It all comes together at some point.

Everything we do informs everything else in this career. One artist you've worked with a lot is Patricia Barber. What drew you guys to work together?

It was Brian Bacchus. He was involved in the first Norah Jones album. He was on staff at Antilles back then. He came to me and said, "I've got this singer I think you'd be perfect for." We did an album called A Distortion of Love . It was Patricia's first foray into a major label. We started working together in the studio, and we did a couple of nice tracks. There was one point where we had to change tape. Just was we started doing so, some people in the band started playing "My Girl," and Patty started singing along. I looked at Brian and said, "We should be recording this. The heck with what we were doing." So we sent one of the runners from Power Station up to Colony Records on Broadway to get the sheet music to "My Girl." We had Wolfgang Muthspiel on the guitar. Wolfgang, if you can believe it, had never heard the Motown version of "My Girl." We did this version with Marc Johnson, Patty, and Wolfgang, and Wolfgang didn't put in a single cliché from the Motown original. I think that's when Patty started doing covers, because she does [Tom Jones'] "She's A Lady," and [Bobbie Gentry's] "Ode to Billie Joe," as well as all of these other kinds of songs. But I think it started with that track. The label that we were on got eaten by PolyGram, and they decided to drop Patty. She wasn't very happy about the experience of major labels. She went back to Chicago. Michael Friedman, who was a musician from Chicago, was starting up a little label [Premonition Records] specializing in Chicago musicians. As I understand it (this may, or may not, be true), in Patty's deal it said that I had to come along with it as an engineer. The next thing I know, I was going to Chicago and we record Cafe Blue. We did that album, and again we tried to think of what we could do to make the record sound different. We literally built a live chamber in the stairwell of the Chicago Recording Company with big JBL speakers and a couple of microphones. It became the sonic footprint for the original version of Cafe Blue . I sent out a [Sony DRE-S] 777 [convolution reverb unit] and sampled it. I have that convolution on a memory stick. I was at Avatar Studios, we pulled out a 777, and I had the CRC stairwell reverb to use. Now I've been with Patty for ten albums, and they've been a hit with the audiophiles. We got a Grammy award for the surround version of her Modern Cool album this year.

Amazingly you're getting a surround Grammy for her album as the rest of the world listens to MP3s.

From A Student's POV

Jim Anderson was my recording professor my freshman year at NYU. It was a little daunting to enter this sphere with a multi- Grammy winner, but his easy vibes and constant encouragement gave me an early lesson on how a producer/engineer should conduct oneself. The meticulous hours Jim spent with us on ear training is probably some of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever had. Jim might have a proclivity to use the best gear and studios, but he also doesn’t have a problem using a Shure SM58 on an upright bass. He also knows how to have a good time (he instituted “Bolo Tie Day” at school) and has a nice and dry sense of humor. One year, my cover band, Daniel Day Lewis & The News, honored him by playing a medley of all the NPR theme songs he had recorded, but with a metal tilt and we all repeatedly screamed, “Jimmmmm!” He loved it. I won’t hold it against him that he’s a Yankees fan, but I owe him a lot. He provided me the foundation I needed to act like I knew what I was doing in a studio. Jim is a true mentor and friend.

-Jesse Lauter

Well, it's a catch-22. If there isn't material, there's not going to be a market, and it won't be a Grammy category. Yesterday I did a playback for Jane Ira Bloom. She'd been there when we mixed, but when she sat and listened to her band in surround her jaw dropped and she started crying. It was so overwhelming. She said that this was really what it was like to be in the band. She said she could hear everything that her sax was doing, and that she'd have a hard time going back to stereo. There's so much music in TV and film that is done in surround. I try to get them [my students] to start thinking about music in a much broader way. It's always the music people who aren't working in surround! Everybody else is.

That's fascinating, isn't it?

Yeah. Once you hear it, it's hard to go back. It sounds great, and you can do so much with it even if it's just expanding the environment that the music is sitting in.

Do you have any philosophies about surround, like where you place things, especially in a studio recording like this?

The thing is that the more legitimate the music, for instance if it's straight jazz, it's hard to make it not feel gimmicky. That was the thing about Patty's record. We had a couple of tunes, like the first track, where the opening note is this huge explosion of sound. You can have sounds in the back and other things running around pitter-patter, and do something with it. But then when she goes into the straight head track, how do we make that feel enveloping, but not gimmicky? Now we've got this record with Jane. The idea was to envelop the listener and have then feel like they're sitting in the middle of the drum kit with her up front. One thing I've learned, especially with acoustic bass, is to leave it toward the front. Once you start fooling with that image it gets a little bit funny. I have to say, it's great fun to do. I enjoy mixing like that. We did the movie Chico & Rita, and most of those recordings were things we had done back in 2002, but we re-mixed for the movie in surround. When I did that, the producers came up and said, "Hey, would you like to re-do the whole set in surround?" It was a two-CD set. They gave me two days, so I got to do a remix of a whole big-band album, and small-group album, in two days, in surround! That hasn't come out yet, but I'm waiting for that.

Where have you done most of those mixes?

Well, most of them I've been doing at Avatar and then mixing in Studio B. Jane loves Studio B. That's her room. I used some very serious, tried-and-true surround techniques, like the Hamasaki Square [surround] mic'ing configuration. She would be in the main room, which is fairly small... like an average living room, frankly. I'd put four microphones high up in the air. I'd have two pairs of matched Brauner VM1s and I'd put them up in a square, two meters by two meters. I'd put her in the middle, with the microphones placed very high, about 8 feet, to get the environment. I normally mic her with the [Neumann U]47s. You can nail down the atmosphere in the four corners with those four microphones. When we're doing the mix, I put them back up and pump the sound back in to create a 4-channel live chamber. That's what I also did at Skywalker Sound when we mixed Modern Cool . We were doing it on a small scale. That way I could actually get the instruments to feel like they were all in the same environment. It sounded very natural. Yesterday, Jane was so beside herself. Her initial release will be a Blu-ray on the Pure Audio label.

I'd love to hear that.

It's gorgeous. I'm proud of it. As I said, if we don't do it, then there is no market. You want to push the market and make sure that there's something out there that people will listen to. For this record we didn't do a down-mix. When we finished the surround mix, we turned off all the surround stuff and listened in stereo, and then did a stereo mix. We have a separate stereo mix and a separate surround mix.

They're such different beasts to handle.

I always thought that with satellite TV, how you have all these channels of music. There should be one channel that puts out nothing but 5.1 surround sound music. I think something like that would actually get people thinking.

When I first met you, you were the president of the Audio Engineering Society.

Yeah, and I had been the New York section chair before that. I had been the Eastern vice president for five years, prior to that. And, at the same time, I've been working on AES conventions since 2001.

What is the convention chair job about?

Well, this'll be the fourth one coming up that I've done as convention chair in roughly 13 or 14 years [135th AES Convention, October 2013, in New York]. I started out as facilities chair the first year. Then we brought Zoe Thrall in, and I've worked with her since I was the Eastern VP. Frankly, for this job you're thinking big picture. We've got this excellent committee; it's basically been the same people for almost the entire ten years here doing various tracks. We meet roughly once every two months to sit and look at everyone's progress. We'll ask each other what one another is currently focusing on, like if there's something in live sound. My job is to oversee and give everybody all the room they need to work. Every once in a while I'll throw in something that I've been paying attention to in the press or the trades. That's a coordinating function that the chair does. You're working with HQ. Just about an hour ago we were having a conference call about special events that we're going to do and trying to decide on why we do things a certain way. We've got the unions to worry about, the platinum producers and engineers, mastering, and all that, so we want to make sure that we cover more than the latest and greatest. Last time we had Phil Ramone [ Tape Op #50] talking about the Tony Bennett Duets record. To me, that's as legitimate as the latest Jay-Z track. It all needs to be talked about. Sometimes I think there's a tendency to focus on what's in the news at this moment, but there're a lot of people who I really do want to know about. I'd love to be able to call up Morten Lindberg and have him come talk about the latest 2L album he's done. The one thing that I was able to do with Stefan Bock was Pure Audio. We can't call it a standard, but it's a recommendation of a way to make a disc in high-resolution. My feeling was this: here I am as president; if I don't take the time to think of what issue I could move forward on, I've squandered an opportunity. The Pure Audio format is a Blu-ray audio disc that can be navigated without a screen. I'm all for the highest resolution possible. I want to try and keep that in people's homes. Let's not settle for streaming audio and all that. Sometimes I'll have kids from the university come and listen, and I'll play them a high-resolution track. There's nothing like it. Once you hear that, it's hard to go back. It's a matter of educating people and having them listen.

I think some of our readers might not even know what AES stands for. Or maybe they think it's a gear convention once a year.

Well, the big problem with AES is that anybody who comes there about audio feels that it speaks to them . So if you're a researcher, AES is all about research. If you're a recording engineer, it's all about recording. And if you're into automotive audio... and so on. We cover so much. If it has any flaw, it is its diversity. It's a big issue. I hope that, from the outside, AES stands for quality. I might be wrong, but somebody once said to me that I was the first president of AES who was actually a recording engineer. It might be true. It has mainly been educators and research people, such as Ray Dolby and people like that. When you look at the list of people who were president, it's

pretty cool. Usually the right person comes along, at the right time, that the society needs. For me, it's been a wonderful way to network and stay involved. If I didn't work on the AES convention, I don't know what I'd do if I actually went to the convention. I guess I'd have to stop and listen to a tutorial.

I'm always stuck at the Tape Op booth, so I hardly ever get to go see panels or anything.

I'm always downstairs [at the presentations and panels] and never get to go up on the trade show floor for the first three days. I always think, "Oh, we have another day."

One of the funniest things I found on your resume was The Muppets.

You know, it was funny. I remember when I was at NPR I read an article about Jim Henson. I remember thinking that I'd like to meet that guy. I grew up watching The Muppet Show every Saturday night. In 1985 I got a phone call saying that The Muppets were looking for somebody to do audio. They were looking for a freelancer who they could depend on. They asked me my normal rate; they couldn't quite afford it, so I asked them how much they could pay. And I did it. The thing was, it always seemed to come whenever I didn't have a record project. We'd have two weeks of Muppets. I'd go over to their studio; there was a control room upstairs and a performance space downstairs. The first thing I did was called a "Sing-Along, Dance-Along, Do-Along with Fozzie Bear." Then slowly I did the original sound design for the The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss [TV show], and then I did the pilot for Bear in The Big Blue House . They did a Muppet show for NBC, and I did the internal pilot that went to the NBC execs. That was the first time they were actually in stereo — when they moved across the street I had to match picture and do live pans, which was pretty crazy. There was also a show on NBC called The Jim Henson Hour . They started trusting me more and more with the audio. We started using Sanken COS-11s for the microphones after we'd graduated from the Sony mics, and then we started using John Hardy M-1 mic pres. I started to get nice quality audio for them. Frankly, I think that's why The Muppets always sounded good. We always used good mics and pres. When I was doing this work, my kids were growing up at the same time; sometimes, when they were little, they'd come and meet me for lunch. The Muppets people actually liked having kids on the set. The summer when my son, Stuart, was an early teenager I brought him in for about two weeks to be the kid on set who would run scripts up and down stairs. We were talking about this the other day. As a kid, that was his favorite thing. It was fun. I was there doing stuff for a good ten years.

One of the themes I see running through your life is diversity. You do a variety of different things, but all within the realm of what you enjoy.

Yeah, that's exactly it. To me, audio is audio, and good audio is good audio. You can't say, "I'm a rock engineer" and limit yourself if you want to have a career, a family, put food on the table, and pay the mortgage. I did cassette books for Simon & Schuster! Now everybody's doing podcasts and cassette books, but back then it was looked down upon. I just thought of it like doing radio. I got to work with William F. Buckley doing one of his Blackford Oakes novels. When in the hell else would you ever have a chance to work with him? If it's audio, I'll do it. It's always been that way. [NPR journalist] Susan Stamberg always had a little plaque on her wall that said, "Style is avoiding what you do badly." Try to make sure that when you say you can do it, you can do it. So when they said, "Muppets," I said, "I can do that!"