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Trumpets

Paul's Posts — 28 July 2012

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Trumpets

After writing yesterday’s post about perfection I was looking for an example to share with you and then it hit me: Al Hirt vs. Louis Prima.

When I was growing up my father, Don, and I were both trumpet players.  Well, actually my father was and I sucked – or blew – whatever the case.  As a young and struggling trumpet player I always admired Al Hirt and had many of his albums.  Al was a master technician and could really play the horn unlike anyone I had ever heard.  He was my hero and I aspired to play like Al.  My father hated him.

Instead, he loved Louis Prima and for the life of me I could never figure out why.  Al played faster, hit the notes perfectly and in general made Louis Prima sound like a third string trumpet player (like me).

My father tried to teach me that Louis played with soul and the mistakes he made were part of that soul and Al played perfectly from sheet music.  According to my father Louis was brilliant and Al was boring and it took me years to understand what he meant – especially the part about making mistakes.

At the time my family lived in California and I remember my parents were excited to have the chance to drive all the way to Las Vegas Nevada and watch Louis Prima, Keely Smith with Sam Butera and the Witnesses play at the Sahara hotel – something they just never did.  What really stunned me was that Al Hirt was also playing live in Vegas at the same time.  I felt let down that they could make the trip to watch this third string player rather than watch my A player.

Years later I understand and have always regretted the lost opportunity to watch one of the best trumpet players, singers and bands ever in the history of modern music – fortunately all is not lost for me as my parents happened to have been in the audience when they recorded the event live and it’s available to listen to today.

Al was perfect and boring while Louis played and sang as if his soul was on fire.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(14) Readers Comments

  1. coppy

    July 28, 2012 at 6:43 am

    I get it with Al Hirt… still play my old “Honey in the Horn” LP when I need a trumpet fix. It sounds so good I forget its a mono recording!

  2. Soundminded

    July 28, 2012 at 7:22 am

    What’s a better (more representational) photo, a fuzzy out of focus color photo or a sharp black and white photo (with apologies to Ansel Adams)? Both have major shortcomdings. If you went to see a play, say Hamlet and the actor who played Hamlet came out on stage and said “To see or not to see” would you want your money back? Playing the wrong notes is like an actor saying the wrong words, forgetting his lines. If “the play’s the thing” then saying the wrong words is not the play, not the one the author wrote. To be a world class classical musician, being technically accurate virtually 100% of the time playing with only a very rare minor mistake (clam) even the most difficult pieces is de rigeur, necessary but not sufficient by itself. Some of the most exciting music is exciting in large part because of its technical difficulty, the musician’s fingers and hands move so fast they are a blur. Some people refer to this as “pyrotechnics.”

    Where is this going? Probably to stereo systems that are “technically accurate” but not exciting. So where’s the problem? First if the performance or music is boring, an accurate sound system should make it sound boring. Some music, some players are just boring by nature. What is boring? Boredom is in the ear of the beholder and can change over time. As I told Lawrence Schenbeck, when I was young the third act of La Boheme was boring. As I grew older I realized that was the most beautiful part of the opera. But then there are those sound systems that make all recordings sound boring. Technical accuracy in one dimension does not mean technical accuracy in all dimensions. Victor Campos of KLH once said, what speaker you like depends on what kind of distortion you can put up with. Since I won’t put up with any of it, there aren’t any I like. What’s an interesting discovery to me is that when you can reproduce those other dimensions, the errors in timbre are not minimized but magnified by them. Tonal accuracy becomes more criitical not less. This makes the problem even harder. Anyone not up for a good challenge shouldn’t try it. On the other hand, it’s not nearly as much fun solving an easy problem as one that others have said is impossible. You wouldn’t believe how much time some people spent trying fruitlessly to connect those nine dots, never thinking to look outside the box. But even once you see the answer, the lines must still be drawn straght.

    • acuvox

      July 28, 2012 at 7:47 am

      During the Baroque era (one of the golden Ages of music IMNSHO), strict adherence to the score was a sign of incompetence. In jazz, as the great philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “if you play the right note, it’s wrong”. I doubt that Chopin or Rachmaninoff played their own compositions twice the same way. The conservatory insistence on adherence to inanimate spots of ink that can’t possibly define the richness of a sound carried through oral history has culminated in the Tonmeister treatment of splicing hundreds of bits together to form perfectly ersatz recordings.

      The LSO and SFO formed their own labels so they could record live and escape the practice of “perfectio ad absurdum”. I refuse to buy DGG for the hydra-miked, sausage spliced sound. I commented on this on Anne-Sophie Mutter’s facebook page and she agreed. Of course, she has transcended the system and is free to play what she feels.

      I saw her first Carnegie concert that broke from standard repertoire. She played some Vienna “soul food” music by Kreisler to finish, and half the audience walked out after the unfamiliar piece and before the first encore. The other half stayed for THREE encores, jumping, hooting and hollering in response. This rigidity is killing classical. I am nearly 60 and below average audience age for a lot of symphonic presentations. If the patrons won’t listen to living composers, at least some new notes should be played in the old pieces.

      • Soundminded

        July 28, 2012 at 8:34 am

        If composers or musicians want to recompose music on the fly that’s their business. Maybe the audience will like it and maybe it won’t. Yes I know that great performers of the baroque era were also great improvisors. But when they change the notes they are playing a different piece. That is not the same as an interpretation where there is flexibility of phrasing, dynamics, tonal balance among multiple musicians, etc. These are a matter of how the actor reads his lines, not the words in the lines themselves. We know there are different cadenzas written for the same concertos. Usually the best performers play the most technically challenging ones or they may even write their own. The harder ones are usually the more exciting versions. There are certain liberties that are reasonable, acceptable within the context of a composition and then there are mistakes and liberties that are not. They do not enhance a performance, they detract or even ruin it. What is the criteria? To a proud father, a mediocre performance of a Mozart piano concerto by his eight year old son may be the most beautiful thing he ever heard but to the rest of the audience they’d rather be at home watching a rerun of I Love Lucy. We each have our standards. Mine do not forgive technical mistakes and I will not call them anything but mistakes. Those performers who commit them can practice on their own time, we are not amused. As for others they are free to buy or listen to what they like instead. I like Anna Sophie Muter’s recordings and own several. But she is not major league. She does not exist in the rarified pantheon of the best virtuoso violinists. Who are they? It’s a matter of some dispute in my house but among them are without doubt Heifetz, Rabin, Menuhin, and Nadien. Of the four, only Nadien is still alive.

        “If the patrons won’t listen to living composers”

        They might if these people ever wrote music worth listening to. That hasn’t seemed to happen in a very long time. If it did, they’d rise quickly in stature as word now spreads around the world instantaneously. In a world where it is politically incorrect to be judgmental, there should be no surprise that mediocrity is the best most people ever achieve because it is acceptable. The dumbing down of society isn’t merely a catch phrase, it’s the world we have come to live in. Small wonder artifacts left to us by those not so constrained when standards were much tougher still find favor to those who have learned and remember just how high those standards once were. There are dinosaurs like me who will not compromise, yield, or pretend poor is good to please others or be polite in those things we find important.

    • acuvox

      July 28, 2012 at 9:57 am

      Responding to the second part of your post, with which I agree: yes, all speakers suck. Measuring on-axis frequency response at close range leads to local sub-optimization. Even including power response for two discrete two dimensional measures is folly.

      A few enlightened designers include time response (phase response, group delay, etc.) in their calculations and produce superior results like Dunlavy, Lipinsky and Khenkhin. Some control off-axis response better than others, notably Linkwitz, Putzey and the B&W mini-monitors. Coaxial speakers reduce lobing at the crossover but have other problems. A few models have low spectral contamination from finer division of the frequencies (4-6 way), small midranges and large woofers. Vanishingly few can reproduce the dynamic range of acoustic music (TAD comes to mind); but none do it all.

      Instead we have a huge variety of bad compromises and art projects designed by and for peoples who don’t listen to acoustic music. Ever.

      Which brings me back to the first part of your post. What you describe is to me is like a musical wax museum, trying to re-create the image of music long dead while forgetting the rough edges. I have over 5,000 recordings and have listened to few of them twice. Instead I attend over 60 acoustic concerts a year and am blessed with a lady who practices harpsichord in my residence; and I can assure you I would rather hear an amateur repeating mistakes on an acoustic instrument than the best orchestra in the world over-produced through speakers.

      Your need for perfection makes me suspect that your idea of musical nirvana is the fake perfection of sound spliced to match a score rather than any form of raw human performance, like preferring an airbrushed image in Playboy to a real woman.

      I leave you with a quote from a musician who left a lot of imperfections in his monumental work, Jimi Hendrix:

      “Or is it just the remains of vibrations and echoes from long ago?”

      • Soundminded

        July 28, 2012 at 11:49 am

        I don’t think among those familiar with the sound of live acoustic instrumental music and voices trained in an operatic style there is much disagreement about the sounds produced by sorry state electronics the consumer audio industry offers being substantially different and disappointing by comparison. This, especially in light of the industry’s long ago promises and sometimes stupefying prices. I would rather respond to your comments about music which I find much more interesting and contentious (there wouldn’t be anything to discuss if we didn’t disagree.)

        “What you describe is to me is like a musical wax museum,”

        Hmm, I’ll have to think about that. After how much time does it turn to wax? How long after Bach died did the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor become a relic in a museum? Why do most attempts to “improve” upon something powerful like that almost invariably seem to me like an imbecillic parody instead? If liking the original makes me a Luddite, then so be it. I’m definitely a creature of another era. An anachronism. I’m not satisfied to live in a world where ipods and ear buds are good enough.

        Even as a watered down recording;

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o

        “I have over 5,000 recordings and have listened to few of them twice. Instead I attend over 60 acoustic concerts a year and am blessed with a lady who practices harpsichord in my residence; and I can assure you I would rather hear an amateur repeating mistakes on an acoustic instrument than the best orchestra in the world over-produced through speakers.”

        Of the approximately 6000 I’ve got, I’ve heard some of them many times, and many hundreds of them not at all. I’ve been listening to live and recorded music all of my life. If I take into account the students who get their lessons here, practicing, string quartets who play here usually once a week, and occasional performances I’m dragged to reluctantly (I don’t go to any great ones lately I’m sad to say) I hear a “concert” practically every day of my life. You don’t know what pain is until you’ve heard eight amateur string players sit down for the first time to attempt Mendelssohn’s Octet. It sounds more like bagpipes than string instruments. It’s like having a toothache in every one of your teeth at the same time. It can be enough to make you want to kill yourself if you can’t get away from it.

        “Your need for perfection makes me suspect that your idea of musical nirvana is the fake perfection of sound spliced to match a score rather than any form of raw human performance,”

        Heifetz who is revered as god of the violin in this house I understand never allowed any of his rare mistakes to be edited out. Comparing his powerful and usually technically pefect recorded performances against others never leaves me wondering if it could have been better had there been some wrong notes thrown in. It’s a credit to those sound engineers of yesteryear that they could take inferior performances like those of Isaac Stern and with merely a razor, a splice block, and splicing tape, no digital computer to fix things, assemble what passed for a commercially viable recording.

        ““Or is it just the remains of vibrations and echoes from long ago?””

        I do not find raw overdriven amplifiers with high gain and treble, guitar amplifier feedback, wah-wah pedals used to deliver tonal exaggerations, particularly with high bends to be pleasing sounds. In fact I find them quite irritating. But then I’m a Luddite, remember? I don’t fit into this era. I’ll never be a fan of Taylor Swift.

        The truly great ones always make it look so easy. Like they could do it in their sleep

        • Soundminded

          July 28, 2012 at 12:02 pm

          The Toccata and Fugue I linked to was performed on a “music animation machine” that is a computer assisted performance. Ultimately the sound is under the control of a human who is a keyboard artist so it is not really a genuinely computer generated rendition.

          http://www.musanim.com/index.html

        • hahax

          July 28, 2012 at 1:43 pm

          Your comment on living with a harpsicordist recalled to me the time Gordon Holt and I drove all over Wilmington Delaware to record a harpsichordist. She had the biggest insturment I can think of. And then I heard it. I think that harpsichord may be the most difficult insturment to catch in a recording, harder than the 3 classics, male voice, female voice and piano. I’ve never heard a recording come close to what I heard that day. The delicate tones from such a large physical insturment and overtones that are completely missing, at least the way they sounded live, from any recording I’ve heard. It stays in my memory over 35 years later.

          As lonf as we are on playing and how playing is good or not, I have a question. I didn’t think the piano existed in Bach’s time and yet most Bach keyboard recordings are on piano. If I’m correct, no piano Bach is anything like he meant it to sound and yet we persist inusing piano. This doesn’t even take into account we usually go to Bach concerts in large halls and much of his and many other great composers work was meant and voiced for much smaller spaces.

          • acuvox

            August 5, 2012 at 6:34 am

            I have always loved harpsichord, having heard one as a boy in a two story Library in a modern house, and it stopped me in my tracks both literally and figuratively. I remembered how it filled the room well enough that when one came in my studio with a flute twenty years later, I miked it with a pair just under the 120 degree ceiling angle and made the client very happy.

            The crest factor of the pluck is over 20dB so nearly all recordings are at considerable distances or compressed. The expression of a harpsichord is all in the timing, so the click is the most important part. It is the musical equivalent of an impulse function, and reveals any and all time distortion in the reproduction system. I use it to test speakers, but it drives everyone from the room at shows!

            My partner plays a Theorbenflugel, which is a double manual six stop Sorli with three lute-strung choirs and one brass. There are seven recordings to my knowledge of Lautenwerken (lute strung) and none of them capture the delicacy of the instrument. After our renovations including central air conditioning we will be moving the harpsichords out of a bedroom and into the Living Room, where I hope to remedy that situation.

        • acuvox

          August 5, 2012 at 11:19 am

          WOW! That was the worst Bach recording I have heard and I thought the Heifetz also supported my viewpoint perfectly. The Bach was mechanically note perfect and dead. The violin had intonation errors, tempo irregularities, alternately muffled and strident tones and I loved it! It was a showcase of techniques, but not ruled by them. It had the energy, the flair, the Human I seek in abundance. It had an arc that took me up and about, then climactically home. Maybe we really agree…

  3. Bassman23

    July 28, 2012 at 7:23 am

    My greatest memory of this came from a concert featuring Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin and Paco DeLucia at the Opera House in Boston (the tour was captured in a recording from their concert in San Francisco). Al DiMeola was all technique, no soul. John McLaughlin had monster technique, encyclopedic grasp of his instrument and a great sense of humor. Paco DeLucia was transcendent. Three acoustic gutiars, three completely different experiences. The contrast was the thing that made such an impression. This is to take nothing away from Mr. McLaughlin, whom I have seen in other contexts and has always been interesting; but the direct connection to a profound place such as was shown by Mr. DeLucia, flowing through flawless technique, are rare jewels in a lifetime of listening.

    • acuvox

      July 28, 2012 at 8:12 am

      I also saw the ‘Passion, Grace and Fire” tour and agree with your relative comparisons. Paco is an intuitive player. His association imparted more awareness of the moment and the consequent liquidity in McGlaughlin’s later work. But, I discovered an element that was not fully expressed by any of these three: Earth.

      Earth is what makes Badi Assad the leader in her trio with master guitarists Larry Coryell and John Abercrombie (Chesky), and Egberto Gismonti the leader in the “Magico” trio with Jan Garbarek and Charlie Haden (ECM). Badi is a dancer and singer too, who performs barefoot and uses every part of her body and her wonderful Humphrey guitar.

      Gismonti is connected to all of nature by his aural memory to where his visual surroundings disappear. His bandmates are individually in the elite of grounded players, but he is the foundation of the foundations.

  4. acuvox

    July 28, 2012 at 7:23 am

    I am working now with a lot of conservatory indoctrinated players, and I keep repeating “Human is better than Perfect”. They often focus so much on the minutiae of the score notations, they miss the living breathing music. Music is inherently non-verbal. If you have words in your head you are not free enough from conscious thought to speak the universal language.

    I dropped out of recording thirty years ago because studio techniques were boring and wrong. It wasn’t just the spatial distortion of multi-miking and isolation booths, the phase mangling of processing gear nor the destruction of dynamics by compressors, limiters and gates. The most egregious practices are overdubbing and splicing to achieve “perfection” which breaks down the musical conversation; yet this practice spread like a cancer from pop to jazz to classical. I built a mobile to record live, but stage sound was awful in 1980. With dozens of open mics and speakers creating a bad artificial reverb, poor hall acoustics and most released material “fixed” in the studio it was not much better; and the practices have only gotten worse.

    I finally figured out the right way to produce live recordings from unbalanced and/or electro-acoustic orchestration. The loudest instrument(s) remain acoustic, and each quiet voice is allocated a dedicated channel consisting of one or more microphones and one speaker per mic. The speakers are designed to mimic the acoustics of the voice and are placed next to the respective performer to represent their place in the room, using a variety of anti-feedback techniques with priority to acoustic methods. The ideal reproduction is to record all the channels and then play them back through the channel speakers, so a string quartet comes from a cello speaker, a viola speaker and two violin speakers arrayed in the traditional arc etc.

    If the intended reproduction system is two channel home systems, the live performance is captured by a near-coincident pair as in minimalist acoustic sessions. All mixing, monitoring, EQ and reverb is acoustic, no splicing or overdubs. The musicians balance themselves, so the engineer can enjoy the performance and the recording is ready to sequence and ship as soon as the last note fades to the noise floor.

    Of course, this assumes the musicians can perform – which is why I am working with MMP/DMP players (Master/Doctor of Musical Performance) and acoustic jazz veterans. I moved from Boulder to Manhattan to access this musical talent. I just opened an experimental studio to demonstrate the technology on the Lower East Side. The trained acoustic musicians hear the limiting trade-offs of general purpose speakers and how “stereo” Blumlein techniques are fake so I am meeting with unbridled enthusiasm.

  5. oliver T. Finch

    July 28, 2012 at 11:33 pm

    How so very right. It is what separates a great performer from the rest. After all music really hits the bull’s eye when it arouses emotions ( without being under the influence of mind altering substances). Some singers, for example, seem to give the impression that they are communicating with the listener as an individual and can be listened to over an over while others though their rendition is near flawless end up sounding no better than background music. It’s the feelings that count. As one gains more experience the difference between the two becomes that much more obvious. Regards.

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