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Talking Drums

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Talking Drums

Pierre Sprey — Made in the Shade
By Zak Fusciello

Somewhere down a winding, pothole-ridden dirt driveway off highway 301 in rural Southern Maryland lies the burgeoning of live jazz recording. The bumper sticker on the door of the eighteenth century plantation home reads, Mapleshade: the Excitement of Live Music, Recorded Without Compromise. Without compromise is exactly how Pierre Sprey, president/recording engineer, runs Mapleshade recording studio, the eclectic jazz label of the same name, and it's blues/roots spinoff Wildchild!

Mapleshade is not your average recording studio. Sprey, it seems, has intentionally set out to contradict the methods of the big, sterile multitrack studios, opting instead for a much more organic approach. He records everything live to a Sony TC-880 two-track and proudly uses no mixing board, overdubs, noise reduction, compression, reverb, EQ, multiple drum microphone, or drum booths. In fact, all of the recording takes place in the front parlor of the mansion where the musicians can actually see, hear, and communicate with each other. This eliminates the need for headphones, an obvious plus for us drummers. Sprey doesn't even like to use alternating current. Instead he powers everything he can with batteries to eliminate disturbance of the signal.

Instead of 8 to 10 microphones just for the drums, whenever possible Sprey uses only two Crown PZMs for all of the instruments. The PZMs have been modified by Pierre "the mad scientist" Sprey, then mounted on sheets of plexiglass and attached to a stand. This allows him to move the mics around to meet any recording situation's particular needs.

What was that about no reverb? Well, that's not completely true. Pierre uses only natural reverb by opening the heavy sliding studio doors that lead to the cavernous front hallway. The more reverb he needs, the more the doors are opened. If he needs extra reverb, say for horns or singers, he simply puts them in the hallway. In a connecting doorway, Pierre runs the controls of the sacred two-track recorder only feet away from the musicians. Look Ma, no control booth! Being at Mapleshade reminds me of a swinging late-night jam session at a buddy's house who likes to tinker with his wide array of toys.

I know all of you are saying "But how does it sound?" All of the Mapleshade and Wildchild! recordings that I have heard — and I've heard quite a few — sound absolutely beautiful. It's like magic. If you close your eyes while listening to the Norris Turney Quartet, for example, you feel like you're sitting at the best table of your local jazz club, only better. And that's the whole idea. Sprey actually got his start as an amateur, recording his favorite acts in Washington DC and Baltimore nightclubs. What he's trying to do is bring that exciting live sound home to you, and he succeeds. The Mapleshade sound is crisp, lively, and full of personality. The drums sound as drums should sound: full, resonant, and energetic.

And Sprey and Larry Willis, Mapleshade's musical director and in-house jazz pianist, don't mess around when it comes to getting talented drummers on the Mapleshade throne. While I was talking with the dynamic duo, Larry was often excusing himself to answer phone calls from other great names in jazz (that's why he comes in and out of the conversation). Willis was but a wide-eyed teenager when he started playing piano with Jackie McLean and Hugh Madkela.. He later went on to play with Blood, Sweat, and Tears and Dizzy Gillespie. He continues to play with the Fort Apache Band and now also leads hid own trio, quartet, and quintet.

Willis' high regard in the jazz community is evident in the names he brings to Mapleshade. From not-yet-legends-but-fantastic-drummers like Big Joe Maher (who sings in and leads his own seven piece blues band) and Jeff Williams (who plays with pianist Frank Kimbrough and has also played with Stan Getz and Lee Konitz) to legendary greats like Jimmy Cobb (Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderly), Vernell Fournier (Ahmad Jamal), and Michael Carvin (Dizzy Gilespie, Jackie McLean, McCoy Tyner, and Freddy Hubbard). Mapleshade's catalog is chock full o' great jazz and blues drumming.

How does Pierre do it? On-the-job experience from his former career certainly doesn't hurt. Before pursuing his recording hobby as a third career, Sprey was an engineering star at the Pentagon. He was part of the design team that developed the F-16 and A10 jet fighters. He argued that it was inefficient to build over-equipped jets that performed a multiplicity of superfluous functions. Sprey believed that it was more logical to have a jet do one thing really well rather than 100 things half-assed, a philosophy he has carried with him to his new recording career.

Besides his background in engineering, Sprey makes the music happen by making the musicians comfortable. A relaxed and comfortable musician is a musician who performs well. Everyone at Mapleshade knows this and puts it into practice. There is no time limit on sessions, and Pierre is always in the kitchen displaying another one of his talents: gourmet cooking (talk about your Renaissance man). Sprey feeds the musicians home-cooked meals and if need be, puts them up at the Mapleshade Inn.

The Mapleshade recipe for great recordings? Mix one part magic, one part science, and one part good ol' southern hospitality, stir in top-rate artists, and a healthy dose of veracity. Then bake in the Southern Maryland countryside until golden brown, and serve hot!

Pierre Sprey: Mapleshade

TD: Tell me about the Sony two-track you use — how have you modified it?

Pierre Sprey (PS): Well, we just made a huge modification a couple of months ago. It was one of the biggest modifications we've made, another major advance in sound.

TD: How did you modify it this time? I know that you've coated some of the parts in lead...

PS: The chassis is laminated with about 30 pounds of lead, that's to kill vibrations in the chassis that feed into the tape and muddy the music. We had already changed the tape path and some of the electronics.

This last time around we went in and worked on the electronics real intensively. The main this we did was strip out about 300 parts. Now it has a totally singular purpose. When you look at [the recorder] there are a whole bunch of holes in the front panel. Every one of those holes represents maybe 50 or 75 parts that we ripped out inside.

That means we've ripped out all kinds of controls and options. Like you can't pick speeds anymore, it only records at one speed. It only records with one type of tape. We took out the muting circuits so it doesn't mute anymore — when you roll [the tape] backwards it makes a horrible noise in the headphones.

Everyone of those controls hurts the sound, that's why we took them out. They are all for the convenience of the engineer, but each one of them involved a compromise. Each involve snaking the music signal through a few more amplifiers, a few more switches, and a few more feet of bad wire. And all this degrades the music. So the more of that stuff you take out, and the more directly you can feed the signal from microphone to tape, the more you can preserve the pristine quality of the music, the excitement and the drama of the music.

TD: So you try to run the signal through as little wire as possible?

PS: Absolutely. In fact, that's why I sit right there in the corner, in that doorway. I could have built a kind of control room back here with a glassed in panel, right? But that would mean I would have to run the microphone wires up through the ceiling and then down into the control room to listen to loud speakers. And that would mean maybe 75 feet of wire instead of 15 feet. Because I'm right there at the edge of the studio, we don't have to run them through the ceiling or floor or anything.

There's another good thing about not having a control booth, which I didn't realize at the time. Over time a lot of the things that happen by "accident" I now realize later that A) they weren't accidents and B) they turned out to be technically very sound. Like I think it's much better to record with headphones than to be in a glassed-in booth with loud speakers.

The headphones still have a lot of disadvantages. You really have to train yourself to listen to headphones. It's easier to listen to loud speakers, which is why engineers do it. But the good thing about sitting in the studio and having headphones on is that I can always take them off and hear the real music.

You get a much better sense when you can hear what's really happening in the room. If you're in a glassed-in booth that's acoustically isolated, then your reality is a set of very bad speakers. You're twiddling everything, adjusting everything, setting mics, setting tone controls and all of that, to the phony reality of a very bad set of speakers. So you're trying to make the bad set of speakers sound as good as possible. That makes for, you know, a fucked-up recording [laughs], right? This way, what I'm basically trying to do is capture what I hear when I take off the headphones.

TD: So what's the deal with Freud, is Freud made out of lead? [I saw a lead brick in the studio with the name "Freud" written on it]

PS: Well, Freud is one of our lead pieces. We have many pieces of lead. We also have Plato... and Aristotle... [laughs].

TD: I also saw a bucket of lead in the studio.

PS: There are many bucket that I use to weigh down the drum stage, for instance. Those are filled with lead shot, which is particularly good for damping vibrations, better than massive lead. The lead blocks (Freud, Plato, Aristotle, etc.) I use for a whole bunch of different purposes. One is just to hold down the microphone stands and to deaden them so that they don't ring.

Another purpose is when I put up a guitar amplifier on a stand. To make it sound really good, you kind of have to lock it down to the stand so there's a clear vibration path from the base of the guitar amplifier straight into the ground. Putting some lead on top of the amplifier usually makes it sound better. All of this has to be done by ear. It doesn't always make it sound better, but on most guitar amplifiers it sounds better.

Every once in a while on a drumkit it sounds better to put a lead brick on the bass drum. Because, again, it locks the bass drum into the drum stage, which tends to tighten up the bass drum attack.

TD: Do you use lead because of it's weight or is there some property in lead that helps absorb unwanted vibrations?

PS: Oh, it's much more than just being heavy. You could take the same weight of cinder block and completely mess things up. Lead is like the antithesis of a bell. The brass of a bell has that wonderful quality of ringing, which is exactly what you don't want for the applications I want. You want something that damps sound.

Lead probably has more internal damping than any common material, it's like an anti-bell. That's why when you hit it it goes "thunk" because there is no ringing at all, and that's the property that I want.

You have to be real careful if you put lead near instruments. How a bass sounds has a lot to do with the sound of the platform that it's on, and it's the same with drums. So if you put the lead too close to where the endpin of the bass is, then it deadens the stage that the bass is on and the bass sounds dead.

The same is true with drums. We found that out when Patato was here. I moved some lead in too close to his conga drums — he was on plywood and I needed to lock the plywood down with lead so it wouldn't vibrate too much — and I moved the lead in a little too close to the conga drums. He heard it right away. He has tremendous ears. So I had to back off with the lead because it was deadening the sound of the drums.

And that's something that I've gotten into more and more that I never anticipated: you learn a lot from musicians with great ears. You can learn a lot about what good sound is about. You have to be very, very open-eared. When a musician says something like, "I don't think that's sounding right" or "My experience is that when I play the bass it sounds better this way," I always listen because I've learned so much that way.

One thing I've learned is that multiple microphones on an instrument is a disaster, and the instrument that suffers the most from that is the drums. Because your standard drum recording is done with seven or more mics, you know, mic'ing the top of every cymbal, and the top of every drum head, and they've got another mic shoved into the bass drum.

If you have a real genius of an engineer, he can take all that mess and mix it back together to where it sounds like an approximation of the drums, but it's never what the drummer played. Ask any drummer and you'll hear more horror stories about how the sound of their drums had been converted into something that may please the engineer, but doesn't please them.

We just avoid that whole business. We record the drums from a fairly natural distance: a little closer than you would listen in a club, but at least three feet back from the drums. When we have a piano involved, probably four and a half feet back from the drums, so then what you hear is what the drummer played. If he plays the bass drum too loud, it's going to be too loud on the tape. But you let him listen, that's the whole point. And drummers, especially good ones, know instantly. All they have to do is get on those headphones once, listen to a little playback, and say, "Oh, I got it, I know what I have to do."

So I'm not messing with their mix, right? Whatever the mix is — of cymbals, snare drum, and bass drum — is what they played! And they can always go back and listen some more and see if they really like it. If they don't like it, they keep on changing around their playing until it's how they want it to sound.

TD: It seems like you're really trying to reproduce what a person might hear in a club. Is the plexiglass microphone mount meant to resemble the human head of a person sitting in a club?

PS: It's an analog, in crude way, of the human head. The two PZMs are a little further apart on that sloping wedge than your ears are [on your head], but it's the same idea. The PZM on the left hears basically everything around a hemisphere on the left, as the left ear works. The PZM on the right hears everything on the hemisphere to the right of your head. So what you hear when you listen to the playback of our recordings — if it was recorded on the PZMs — is the same as if you were sitting on a barstool with your head in that position.

When we record Larry [Willis] on the piano, we always have the PZMs in the curve of the piano, and we record with the lid off the piano. To have it open like that really does make it sound much clearer and cleaner. All the rich harmonies that come up off the sound board are basically reflected by the ceiling, which is much better than having them reflected by a lid. And then we do a lot of fooling around with plywood under the piano, because the reflecting surface under the piano is as important as the reflecting surface over the piano.

TD: What about the drum platform? Was that inspired by the suggestion of a musician you worked with?

PS: No, in a way that was forced on me by the idea that I wanted to record piano and drums with just a pair of PZMs. I didn't want to have separate drum mics. You haven't seen it as it's usually set up when we have a regular piano trio or rhythm section. The piano is right in front of the drums. The PZMs are, as I've said, in the curve of the piano and they are looking across the piano at the drums.

The way I set up the drums originally was on the floor, kind of the natural way you would in a club. I did that for probably two or three years or so, but I always had this feeling that the piano was blocking too much of the drumkit, because you had to move the drums up pretty close. And then when you're looking, say, from a barstool across the piano at the drums, half the drumkit is hidden by the base of the piano, right? It always gave me a slightly distant, muffled sound from the drums that I didn't quite like.

For a long time I didn't know what to do about it. And then it occurred to me finally that the thing to do was to raise the drums up so at least they would be above the level of the piano and not masked by it. It turned out that the real benefit of that was that the drums sound better on a stage than they do on the floor.

TD: Simply because they are elevated?

PS: Well, no, because the stage vibrates a little more freely than the floor does.

The drums are very sensitive to what they are mounted on. That's another reason why we never use drum rugs. Most drummers like to set up on a rug, because it keeps their drums from sliding. We always ask them not to. In fact, we ask them to unscrew the rubber feet on the drums. They can use the spikes and spike them right into the stage because we don't care about scarring the stage.

Spiking actually makes the drums sound better. Besides the fact that it keeps them from sliding, it sounds much better than being on rubber because the spike is a direct path for vibration going from the drum to the stage. So the drums sound cleaner and have a more powerful impact. You can also get a little deeper bass out of the bass drum when it's properly spiked.

In fact, the next set of improvements that I want to make in the drum sound here has to do with building a better drum stage.

TD: What's wrong with the one you have now?

PS: Well, it hasn't really been tuned. I tried several different thicknesses of plywood and this one was the one that sounded best, but I think I can go a lot further. If I had a few days with a drummer and had several different drum stages with different amounts of reinforcement...

The main thing is that's wrong with it is the stage is still mounted on cinder blocks. Cinder blocks are pretty rigid, but they're not a wonderful path for vibration into the floor. What I want to do is mount them on brass pipe. I think that would be a much better conduit for vibration. I could use plumbing type brass pipe and fixtures.

TD: What about the thickness of the wood, does that make a difference?

PS: Oh, that makes a big difference. That changes the resonant note of the stage.

TD: Do you want to tune the stage to a particular note?

PS: We would just do it by ear, by listening to the whole drumkit. You can't tune it to a single note because a drumkit is tuned to many notes. You just have to listen to the ensemble of the drumkit and decide where it sounds better.

But there is no doubt that a higher pitched and lower pitched drum stage would sound differently and change the drum sound. And maybe in the end what you need to do is adjust that. The lead weights will help you adjust that: the more weight there is on a stage, the lower the resonant frequency of the stage. We might get to the point where we could tune the stage for a given drummer. What we do tune right now is that reflector, the little voodoo ritual with the mirror.

TD: How did you develop that technique?

PS: Well, again, that was from this problem of the drums sounding a little too distant, having too much room sound reflected behind the drums. The drums were, in a sense, much more echoey and distant than the piano. That was when the drums were still on the floor, but even on the stage they weren't quite as clean and clear and present as I had wanted.

So I decided that maybe what I needed to do was use a reflector to get an earlier bounce of the sound from the drums. Rather than wait for the drum sound to bounce off the back wall of the studio and come forward to the mics, maybe I needed an earlier bounce, something closer to the drums. So I rigged up the goal post-type bar over the drums and bolted the plywood to it. We checked the acoustic effects of that very scientifically. Paul Murphy came over for those experiments. He's a brilliant avant-garde drummer who has recorded here quite a bit. He has amazing technical dexterity and he was wonderful for this experiment because he can repeat exactly what he has played. He can give you exactly the same dynamics, exactly the same brush strokes. So we basically set down some patterns, recorded them, changed things, recorded them again. It was a very scientific experiment.

What I found out is that the major advantage to having the reflector over the drums is not at all what we had intended. It did cut out some if the room reflection and it did give the drums a little more clarity, but the beautiful thing that it did was add an amazing amount of warmth to the cymbals, which was totally unexpected. As soon as we put up that reflector, the cymbals sounded so much nicer, and then we realized that the cymbal sound had been very deficient.

Thinking back on it, it's easy to see why, because we were just mic'ing the drums from where you would be sitting. So you're hearing the edge of the cymbal which gives you all the shimmer, but you're not hearing the full face of the cymbal. That sound is either going down to the stage or up to the ceiling. But if you put up the reflector and it's looking at the full face of the cymbal and is reflecting that directly into the mics, then you get all of that beautiful, warm brass voice.

TD: Can you tilt the reflector for different applications?

PS: Yes, the platform is adjustable. It's really simple: you just hold the flashlight next to the mics and point the beam of the flashlight at the little mirror, which is actually from a lady's compact; I glued it on there.

You shine it on the mirror, and the spot that it bounces to is the spot on the drum set that's most emphasized. The sound follows the same reflection path as the light.

If you want to emphasize, for instance, the cymbals, then you would rotate the reflector to a somewhat more vertical position. If you rotate the reflector to a more horizontal position, then you're emphasizing the snare drum.

You can play with it, according to what the drummer wants and what you think the music requires, to get a little stronger snare drum sound and a little less cymbals or vice versa. For instance, if I go to do a ballad and the drummer is going to use a lot of brushes — brushes on a whole tend to record a little too quietly — then I reset the reflector to put more emphasis on the snare drum.

TD: In what type of situation do you emphasize the sound of the symbols?

PS: First of all, that depends on the style of the drummer. But, if you had a situation where you wanted some really bright, splashy sounds, uptempo type stuff, and you don't want to be too oriented to the toms and the snare, then you move the reflector to accent the cymbals.

TD: The drumset on the stage isn't the Mapleshade house kit. What is the house kit?

PS: The one I normally use is Paul Murphy's set, which is a beautifully restored late 1960's Slingerlands with very resonant shells with many plies of maple. He stripped them down and refinished them with linseed oil. They look beautiful and sound great.

There's also a real nice set of old Gretsches on the porch. I want to set up those drums in a very different way so that, basically, they would be useless for gigs. All the mountings and stands would be so rigid and so heavy that you couldn't carry them around. That could lead to a much more beautiful resonance of the wood body.

TD: Are there any other things that you do now to eliminate unwanted vibrations from the drumset?

PS: I basically just check that everything is tightened down. I'm sure that there is more you could do and I'm very open, again, to listening to drummers who are really fussy about sound. I greatly admire drummers who are really careful about tuning their drumkit. It's really noticeable when a drummer has perfect pitch, because they always get some extra increment or beautiful sound from their drums. It makes all the difference.

TD: Do you ever make tuning suggestions?

PS: Yeah. I listen and I'm real careful when talking to people about their sound. I just say, "How would you feel if you had a little less 'boom' in the floor tom? Would you feel alright if we tuned it up just a touch?" Some drummers will say, "No, I can't live with that!" Others will say, "Oh, let me have a listen!"

The best thing is to work with people who will try something before they decide if they like it or not: those are the type of people that I work best with. I don't feel bad if somebody tries something that I suggested and says, "No, it sucks!"

TD: At least they were open minded and give it a try.

PS: Yeah! They heard it both ways and decided what their sound was.

TD: I was reading the liner notes you wrote for the Michael Carvin record (Drum Concerto At Dawn) and I thought it was funny that he listened to the playback of his drums once and said, "That's my drums, I'm outta here!"

PS: Oh Yeah! I was real disappointed because I was expecting to spend a few more hours, especially since we were doing an historic solo drum record. I figured we'd put in a few more hours and really get that drumkit dialed in. He was knocked out that it sounded like what he played...[laughs]...so that was it!

In a way, he was probably right because it was much more important at that point to prepare himself for that monumental session the next day. For him this was like martial arts discipline. He was just totally focused on getting his mind in the right space to do that project.

He even gave up drinking beer for a few months. He's a major beer drinker but he totally gave it up to get himself completely purified spiritually to do that, and you can hear it. I've never heard drums convey such a range of emotions as he did in that two-hour session. You just know that there had to be this enormous focus of concentration.

TD: Listening to that record, it seems like the whole experience was an emotional cleansing process for him. What was he going through at that time?

PS: I think part of it was the frustration of wanting to do it for 15 years and having people laugh at him and having record companies tell him it was a silly idea, that people wouldn't respond to solo drums and that nobody would buy it — you know, all that commercial stuff that record companies will tell you. And here is a guy who must know that he's one of the world's great drum composers. He can really compose music for the drumset, and not many people can.

In the music business, it's so bad that those pieces he created are not officially recognized as compositions. He cannot collect mechanical royalties for them, even though they are beautifully honed compositions, because they are not conventionally written-out, note-for-note compositions. He doesn't collect mechanical royalties, and he cannot get copyright ownership of those compositions.

All of that has to be part of the frustration of being a drummer who has reached that level of creativity and knows he can do that project, who is then told, "Forget it!" So I think that was a lot of the spiritual cleansing that was involved.

Some of it, of course, was the trauma of his past, part of which was Viet Nam. Those stories are shattering, and you know those things have been weighing on his mind. That's part of what makes the recording so powerful because he is able to convey violence and death and horror and all of that with a set of drums.

TD: Just to be able to interpret Monk's "Rhythm-A-Ning" to a strictly drumset format is amazing.

PS: I know, it really is. Standard jazz enthusiasts respond more to that piece than any other because they all know the Monk song, and when they hear that, they realize this guy can play songs on the drums! [laughs]

TD: Was the drum sound fine-tuned at all for Drum Concerto at Dawn?

PS: Well, we did use a lead weight on his bass drum. We listened to it with the lead and without — he liked it with the lead. In fact, if you listen carefully to the recording you'll hear at one point that the lead falls off his bass drum. He was hitting it so hard that the lead started to shift. You can hear this "clunk" — it's the only [percussive] sound on the entire album that's not actually part of his drumkit.

The funny thing is the lead fell right on a downbeat! [laughs] So you don't notice it, you think it's something he did. He didn't mind; he thought it was funny as hell! [laughs]

TD: That's as bizarre coincidence!

PS: Yeah! Otherwise we would have had to redo it, which would have really been a shame. The fact of the matter is that it probably wasn't a coincidence. I used to believe in coincidences too until I had been running the studio for about four or five years. Just so many things have happened here that I couldn't have possibly anticipated that we're all in the direction of making more beautiful music.

Like when I first went to find this place. I went through six months of agony to find a place that was acoustically right and felt right in other ways. We get here and I put down the deposit to show that I'm serious but it was on the condition that I could do some acoustic measurements and make sure it was all right acoustically. Otherwise, they would have to give me back my deposit.

TD: What did the Realtor think of that agreement?

PS: Oh, they thought I was a lunatic. They thought I had totally lost my mind. And so my friend George Weber and I came in here on a hot August afternoon. We brought in a computer which basically made test signals that echoed around the studio. It turned out, by the measurements at least, to be pretty good and by our ears it sounded pretty good.

What we totally failed to anticipate was that the hallway is at least as important as the studio. In a sense, we could never get the kind of sound that we get here without the hallway. We ignored the hallway and did all the measurements with the door closed.

TD: The hallway/reverb control was never part of your decision?

PS: No.

TD: It seems so fundamental to the studio.

PS: Of course. That just happened over time, kind of accidentally. I think it was some acoustic guitar blues that we first recorded out there because the reverb was nice in the hall and the singer was bitching about lack of reverb. So I said, "Alright, we'll try it in the hall." It came out great! And then slowly the light bulb lit.

Originally it was either use the hall or the studio. Eventually it occurred to me that, gee, this is working great and you can adjust the amount of reverb from the hall through the doors and use both.

Now it's become crucial. The only reason we were able to do a big band in here is because the hall is so good. It sounds good and it gives us space to put the horns — we put the rhythm section in the main studio. But initially, we had no idea.

TD: Do you think that certain characteristics of a room or building, like it's age or history, lend themselves to any recording done there?

PS: Oh, that's very important. The age of the room has a lot to do with how it's constructed. We were talking earlier about horse hair plaster. Horsehair plaster has a much better sound than modern plaster. The difference is like night and day. If this place had been built up with modern drywall, the sound wouldn't be half of what it is. The fact that it's old masonry and very thick laths, and built with heavy horse hair plaster makes a major difference in sound.

I'm not the first one to realize that at all, I'm just a beneficiary. It's one of the secrets of the great European concert halls and why when you build a concert hall here today, usually they don't sound as good unless somebody takes the care to have the right kind of plaster for the walls. Eighteenth-century concert halls sound so good in part because the materials of the walls and floors are right. So the age of the house has a lot to do with it. The structure of the floor is enormously important. People have known that long before I knew it. The architects of the great concert halls two and three hundred years ago knew it thoroughly well. I rediscovered it in the course of recording here because when you start to move certain instruments, like conga drums and basses, they sound different in different places.

We are real lucky that this floor is built on oak beams. They are 1 ½ feet by 1 ½ feet, they're huge. That makes for a much better sounding floor, and that's the major determinant of the bottom octave of the music. How good the bass octave of the piano is, how good the E string on an acoustic bass sounds, has a lot to do with the structure of the floor. If the floor was a concrete slab, the bass would be dead in here. If it was a modern floor it would just be booming. So, yeah, the age of the house has a lot to do with our sound. The history of the house also has a lot to do with how it feels, whether or not you want to make music here...I have never felt an unfriendly spirit in this house. And other people feel it. It's just like what's happening here is what ought to be happening here, which is really surprising.

The people who are most startled by that feeling in the house are the black musicians. That's because they walk up to the house and their first instinct is close to horror because they see the pillars and they know there were slaves around here and they know terrible things happened here. [Hamiet] Bluiett felt that and didn't tell me until years after. But the thing that's astonishing is that Bluiett and all the others who've felt that way walk into the house and by the time they're performing, it's hit them: No matter what that terrible history was, something has happened here that makes the place welcoming to music and to creativity and it somehow has righted the wrongs of the past. God knows what changed, but it was here before I got here.

TD: This is a pretty untraditional recording environment, how do most musicians react to the studio and your "unorthodox" methods?

PS: Experienced musicians who have done a lot of studio work have real culture shock when they walk in [laughs] because they see the funky wires and the funky stage [laughs]. Some people walk in and just instantly say, "Yes!" But people who are a little technically oriented — who are into mixers and EQ and so on — walk in and know right away that this is going to sound like dog shit. They have a real negative attitude until they hear some playback. Larry Willis (LW): There are two reasons why I was so receptive to it: I had an extensive experience recording in a studio in New York that was built by one of my dearest friends, Walter Booker. So I was attuned to the home environment. Plus, when I started making records, the whole concept of doing things right basically came from a guy who started out recording in the same kind of situation that Pierre has here, and that's Rudy Van Gelder. Of course, Rudy had his studio by the time I started making records, but the records that I listened to were recorded in his living room in Hackensack. For me, as a player and recording artist and as somebody who has played on a lot of records, the sound that he got then was unparalleled. There is no modern studio that has been able to capture the music the way he did back then.

TD: It definitely seems that there are a lot of parallels between the early Blue Note recordings and Mapleshade recordings.

PS: That was my ideal when I started. Those are the records that I collected and listened to. I love that sound. Rudy was doing all those recordings in his parent's living room in Hackensack, as Larry said. That was done with relatively few mics, probably a few more than I use, live to two-track. Rudy was working with all tube equipment then; tube tape recorders, tube microphones — that's all they had. He got a beautiful sound. He can't do it today because he's been trapped out by the technology. He's using a 32-track digital machine and a whole bunch of modern microphones and so on. He's got a wonderful, beautiful studio and he's a very good engineer, but he has not been able to get a single record that sounds as good as one of his 1958 Prestige or Blue Notes. The reason is that he's not choosing equipment by ear. If he was doing it by ear he would still be using the tube microphones that he had then or working with something that's in the style of those mics but better. But he hasn't; he's gone the technician's route and he's worried about the frequency response and intermodulation distortion and all the engineering horseshit that has nothing to do with what sounds good.

TD: So do you think the quality of his recordings was circumstantial because he equipment was the only style available at that time?

PS: No, I give him full credit. He was a genius with the equipment of that era. But he obviously was not a genius at picking the equipment because when the equipment changed he didn't pick stuff that was better, he picked stuff that was worse. But he got some of the very most beautiful recordings of that era when everybody else had that same equipment. He was obviously very gifted.

TD: Did he influence your recording style?

PS: The sound. I haven't imitated his microphone placement, and I haven't imitated any of his style of equipment. I tried some of those tube tape recorders, but what I have is far better than that. I own one, an Ampex of that era. It has a lovely, mellow sound but to my ears my mid-seventies Sony is just cleaner and more transparent and even truer to the music. The Sony records dynamics better, and it's certainly truer to the tone of horn players and singers than those old tube Ampex machines. It's like they coated a lot of things with molasses. [laughs] They lied, but they made it nice, real nice, especially if you had a horn player who was a little edgy. Those old tube microphones and tube tape recorders would take a little of the edge out and give a little more of a mellow, glowing sound, but it wasn't true to what happened in the room. I think that's a loss. Not everybody has a mellow sound or wants one.

TD: Are you totally against the use of multi-track equipment and equalizers or just for recording jazz?

PS: It's very simple. If you want totally faithful sound that represents what was just played in the room, you must go live to two track. But there are tremendous drawbacks to it. To go live to two track you have to have real good musicians. If they have flaws in their tone or if the singer has a little nasal thing going on, if you record the way we record here, you stand naked in front of God and country. [laughs] So certainly for pop music when you have musicians of varying caliber — some very good and some not so hot — and you need to do a lot of "band-aiding" of tone or pitch or whatever, you have to multi-track. You can't band aid real easily (with a two track). All you can do is re-record it or you can do some slick digital editing. We can't really change it, and we don't. What we do works very well if we have very good musicians. If you have musicians who are kind of mediocre — maybe they're great songwriters but not good musicians — it's real bad here. They would sound better in a multi-track studio. But what you get on the record may not be real close to what they played in the room, which is kind of our aesthetic. We're limited by the fact that you have to have real good musicians, but that's what I'm interested in anyhow, so I don't feel any loss.

But to be completely objective, there are tremendous advantages to multi-tracking. What I do is tedious and time consuming. Larry can testify that he has spent hours and hours of wasted time in here while I'm putzing with the microphones because they're breaking down or something's not right. It's sad when that happens because that takes some of the energy out of the session. So that's a drawback to what we do, too.

The plus is that we reproduce what was really played, and when things go right and the session is right, we reproduce more of the emotion in the music, there's no question.

There's no substitute for playing an instrument in a place. That's basically how you make good sounds. You pick a microphone by playing an instrument into it and listening to it. You pick a wire and a tape recorder the same way. That's basically the way we put all of this together, by listening to the real music.

TD: Is there such a thing as a typical Mapleshade session?

PS: They don't come typical! [all laugh] It's amazing how different they are, in every way. The feeling of sessions is so enormously varied because the relationships among the people are different and the creative balances among the people are different. Plus, there's the tension.

There's a lot of tension at a session. Sessions are not purely party time. Sometimes we have moments that are sheer joy and party. But at every session there are tensions just from the pressure of the tape recorder being on. We try to minimize them, but...

LW: And a lot of what goes on has to do, as Pierre said, with the personalities of the people involved. That's one of the interesting things about recording in this context, at least for me. Being here in this kind of situation adds more to the music, based upon the personalities.

The normal commercial recording situation tends to depersonalize your approach to playing music. You know that, for the most part, the drums are going to be in some isolated room. You know that you're going to have to record with headphones. You usually don't even see everybody you're recording with, so in that respect it depersonalizes everything.

Here there is the maximum of human contact. When I'm playing, I can always look up there to Jimmy Cobb or Paul Murphy, or Steve Williams. I can always look out into the hall and see what the horns are doing, see whose singing or who's playing. There is much more of a human factor, a personality factor, involved in what you do in this kind of context than anyplace else that I've ever recorded.

It's part of your personality and your interplay. These things are very, very, very crucial to how music is created, and this is what is captured on the tape. It makes this concept of recording far more unique than any other place. You know that you're personally involved. It makes you more aware, more in tune, more sensitive to whatever is going on because these elements are involved.

It's about playing music the way music is humanly played that makes this place stand out more than any other. It requires you to draw upon the utmost of your professionalism. You can't come in here messing around.

TD: I know you're trying to increase your amount of releases per year, but besides that, what are your goals for Mapleshade, where do you want to be in 10 years?

PS: Well, I'd like to be even more independent of the music business than I am now. What I'd really like is for the label to exist for a following who like what we do and to deal basically through mail order.

I want to make records that are just so good and so uniform in quality that people say, "Yeah, I'll take a chance on the next Mapleshade or the next Wildchild!, that's my kind of music."

We want to get a web site, and we're working hard on building up our mail order. There are a number of reasons for that. First of all, it insulates you from the music business, which is real important because they'll push you in directions you don't want to go. Even the distributor will do that. Our only real contact with the music business now is through our distributor, and even he will try to squeeze you into compromises that he thinks will sell more records.

The other thing that's real important to us — and where we've been very lucky so far — is to be able to continue to record guys like Norris Turney. Guys who are unknown, where any other label would say, "You're crazy to do that record because no one has ever heard of the guy." That's what we want to do.

We want to do at least half of our records of people that nobody's ever heard of, people that are geniuses. There are only two routes to do that: one is the audiophile route; the other is having a following of music enthusiasts — we want to head in that direction.

The route we have now mainly is the audiophile route. Audiophiles are so ga-ga over sound that they don't care who plays. Their perverted sense of values — i.e., sound comes first, music comes second — has helped pave the way for our artistic independence. If it means we can record Norris Turney or Frank Kimbrough or somebody else, as long as we don't mess up the sound, there's already a built-in audience of audiophiles who will buy it because it sounds good. That will at least cover our production costs. It also means that we can afford to record people who we think are good. That's a tremendous luxury.

And obviously we want to broaden our musical tastes. This is my third career. This work has made me happier than any career I've had before, and I'm very proud of what I've done before. The truth of the matter is that I probably would have paid people to let me do what I used to do. But this is even better.

A lot of the reason is because it's changed me. I used to be really narrow-minded, musically and in other ways, too. The music has really changed me. I'm really a lot more open to a whole variety of things, musically very much so.

And I've learned that from musicians. From recording great musicians like Larry I realized what a half-assed attitude I had. I used to listen to nothing but jazz and baroque music, that was it, anything else was not music. And it's people like Larry who've taught me that that's a really narrow-minded, stupid attitude. What there really is, is good music and bad music and categories don't mean anything.

TD: I think that attitude is reflected in the catalog. You've released everything from gospel to Texas electric blues to solo piano jazz.

PS: We'd like to do more of that. We'd like to make the catalog even broader and expand into all kinds of areas of good music. For me personally, that's kind of the gift of doing what I'm doing. It's made me less narrow-minded and more open to all kinds of things musically and personally.

I'm vastly more tolerant here than I was when I was working in the Pentagon. I'm really into the variety of people that I get to deal with and admire and respect for their work.

And when we have a really good session, the elation of that session — the fact that something worked that you took a chance on and it's opened a whole new creative avenue for you — lasts for a long time. It carries you through a lot of the small frustrations like the having to deal with printers who screw up things and pressing plants that slip their dates, all those small things. They kind of disappear when you have a session like that.