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THE WASHINGTON POST:

Setting the Record Straight
by Mary Ann French

Discarded cars lounged in the shade. The undergrowth was aggressive and unruly. He moved slowly, his big baritone saxophone in hand, toward what once were the fields. Then Bluiett stopped to glance back at the Tuscan columns of the mansion house, and sensed a presence that prompted him to reconsider his path.

Bluiett, 54, an artist who ranks high in both the avant-garde and rear guard of jazz, was seeking a respectful and more righteous way to record masters of African American music. He had come to Mapleshade Studio thinking this might be it. Then again, he thought, it might be just another rip-off for black musicians, another place where culture is appropriated and pockets are shortchanged.

"I walked through the fields and talked, talked to God. Said, 'Please tell me if I'm doing the right thing. If I'm doing anything to hurt my people, stop me, give me a stroke, anything. 'Cause I'm serious about this," Bluiett says. "I thought about how many of my people had been whipped on those trees, how many women were molested. I did my libation to the plantation, to the ghosts of Mapleshade past."

Then he wrote an excruciatingly painful tune called Runaway, and he told the studio's white engineer that it had to be performed and recorded outside, "because this is about somebody trying to get away from y'all."

The engineer - Pierre Sprey, who is also Mapleshade's founder, president and resident - took no offense. "I agree with most of his perceptions," says Sprey, 57, whose French parents raised him in this country to have "pro-black inclinations." The spirit of Runaway couldn't have been contained by the studio, which is set up in the front parlor of Sprey's old house. It was too huge.

So Sprey lugged all his recording equipment out onto the mansion's monumental neoclassical portico, which, he was relieved to find, had the acoustics of a band shell. And Bluiett blew a solo that Sprey says "sounded like the voice of God." Like a prayer answered.

Two years after his first visit to Mapleshade, Bluiett is now producing a series of recordings there featuring underappreciated and underexposed virtuosos.

Sprey himself plays no instruments, "never had any gift for it." But for years he made amateur recordings of jazz in clubs and at concerts. More than a hobby, it provided a balance for his day job. An aeronautical engineer and statistician by training, Sprey was a principal designer of the A-10 and F-16 fighter jets. While at the Pentagon, he also helped launch the military reform movement of the 1980s. Back then, Sprey denounced corruption and championed simplicity, arguing that you could ruin weapons by loading them down with too many sophisticated, expensive gadgets.

He gradually eased his way out of the defense industry to make the recording of music his major work, but Sprey is still wedded to simplicity. The entirety of his studio technique is listed, with plenty of room to spare, on the leaf-green T-shirts he had printed for Mapleshade: "NO Mixing Board, NO Overdubs, NO Noise Reduction, NO Compression, NO Multitracks, NO Reverb, NO EQ, Nothing BUT The Excitement of Live Music, MUSIC WITHOUT COMPROMISE."

Sprey employs a heavily modified old-fashioned open-reel tape recorder to make analog recordings, and avoids going into a digital format until the last step of his production - and only then so the music can be pressed onto compact discs by a small company called Nimbus in Ruckersville, VA.

Like many audiophiles, Sprey believes that translating music into numbered code creates a concoction that is cleaner than it is real, too perfect for people, sound with no soul.

"Digital is like a horrible step backwards," Sprey says. "You have to use your ear to sort out where the new technology helps the music and where it hurts...especially with the most expensive and most complex stuff that conventional studios are using."

Bluiett calls the Mapleshade approach "the next wave in recording."

"Being an artist is not about being perfect," Bluiett says, "it's about being good. I'm coming from another kind of perspective. See, I don't need perfection. It's already perfect. You understand?"

"What we are doing now is sort of like revolutionizing a lot of stuff, trying to take the sound and everything back to what the sound should really be about - instead of what the industry is demanding, or what they come up with, which is not really top-level.... They spend all this time taking the music apart and then putting it back together, supposedly to make you sound like you sounded from the very beginning. They have gotten so far away from real life and into the technology that it's pitiful."

But they only defeat themselves by trying to surpass the sounds, the nature, of life.

What used to be called the "record business," back when Bluiett began performing professionally, quickly grew to become the "record industry," and now is metamorphosing into global conglomerations like Time Warner and MCA. As a result, Sprey claims, decision-makers at the major labels are so far removed from the creative process that the artists they choose to record are often as ill-prepared as the recordings themselves.

"The jazz end of recording is being run like a smaller clone of the pop industry," says Sprey. "If a big company decides to take on a young artist, they know they're facing a quarter-million-dollar investment in publicity and tours and radio promotions and all that, so they want to make sure that they've got some kid that they can create a whole story around - he's from New Orleans and he's 19 years old and he plays classical music, too, and he went to Yale - all of which has nothing to do with making great jazz...

"If you look at the labels that are the real history of bebop - Prestige, Riverside, Blue Note - and the people that ran them, they were all people who really loved jazz and knew it. They weren't all sweethearts, and some of them screwed musicians to a fare-thee-well, but what's astonishing is how few poor records they put out. You look at Blue Note today, now that it's owned by [Capitol/EMI], and they put out an astonishing sequence of bad records. When they put out a good one, everybody's surprised."

Sprey is saying all this as he piles ears of sweet Maryland corn, husks intact, into the oven. He cooks, he cleans, he records, he wheels, he deals, he drives the "Mapleshade Stretch," a crunched-up '87 Chevy Nova, chauffeuring musicians to and from airports and train stations. Trim and fit, clad in Khaki shorts, he does it all. Everything technical or logistical, that is.

Bluiett sits quietly, introspectively, at the kitchen table, waiting to eat and thinking about the recording session he will begin producing the next day. His eyes are half-closed, as always, which makes him look meditative, sleepy, or mad. His shoulders are rounded by the weight of the big baritone sax that has hung from his neck all these years. The iron-gray streaks in his hair and beard, the gruff voice, the stern bearing - combined, they bring to mind the Old Testament prophets.

He clears his throat constantly, as if he is always about to play. He doesn't speak all that much, but when he does, it's often to r estate a theme in a tone that's as bluesy as his music.

"You only get recorded twice in life," Bluiett says, "when you're young and when you're old. Once you get to be about 90 years old and you're about to die and you really don't need to be running all over the world, then they want you to run all over the world and play. In the middle, you're lucky if you can work."

That's true of more than a few musicians, but Bluiett's plight is hardly that grim - though he has to scramble sometimes to pay the rent on his Manhattan apartment. "The way I play, they're not gonna ask me on 'The Tonight Show,'" he says. Bluiett roves over five octaves - 5‡ "when the spirit's with me" - sounding sometimes like elephants trumpeting and farting. He also plays the blues down and dirty, and in the next breath he might take you to church. Despite, or perhaps because of his eccentricities, he has been well recorded during his career. Especially considering the back seat that has traditionally been assigned his horn - far from the spotlight, and usually only in big bands.

"It's a workhorse," Bluiett says. "If you play something like baritone saxophone, you almost have to make your own way, create your own work, come up with your own parts."

Which he has. India Navigation is preparing to re-issue Bluiett's 1977 "Birthright," which the label's owner, Bob Cummins, says is certainly the first and probably the only unaccompanied solo baritone saxophone record ever made. Mapleshade is hitting the stores this week with a new CD called Young Warrior, Old Warrior by a Bluiett Sextet that includes Jack Walrath on trumpet, Mark Shim on tenor sax, Larry Willis on piano, Keter Betts on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums. And Mapleshade is following that up with something called If Trees Could Talk, a recording of duets inspired by the studio's plantation setting played by Bluiett and Willis, who is Mapleshade's musical director.

Nevertheless, musicians have advised Bluiett for years to change instruments. Back in the early '70s, when he was playing in Charles Mingus's quintet, even Mingus - a particularly iconoclastic composer - told Bluiett that his life would be easier and he'd work a lot more if he switched to the higher-profile alto saxophone.

"But that's not my horn," Bluiett always replied.

"He really is a leader and a major thinker in terms of the way he wants his music to sound," tenor player David Murray said in a telephone interview. "A lot of people go with the flow, but Bluiett is the kind to create the wave."

Bass Hit

His decision to record Fontella Bass with the World Saxophone Quartet was typical. Matching a singer who last hit big in 1965 with her song Rescue Me with an avant-garde jazz group was far from an obvious move - until he did it. Bass immediately tapped into the quartet's deep R&B and gospel roots, creating a sound considerably different from anything it had done before. The 1994 recording, called Breath of Life, made the charts, and Bass's career is now snapping back into gear.

Bluiett has come to think of himself as a musical make-over artist. "You know those talk shows where they show the 'before' picture, then they bring the woman out from the back and she look gorgeous and everyone says 'Wow'?" "I've started doing that with musicians," he says, "I nip, snip, do this, do that, take their old suit and give it back to them looking like the tailor made it. I know how to take something to the end and say, 'That's the end of it.' And walk away. But a whole lot of creative people, left to their own devices, they think so damn much, they never stop."

Techniques of transformation came naturally to Bluiett. Growing up in Brooklyn, Ill., a township founded on the Mississippi by free blacks in 1837, he was surrounded by quick-change artists. People who looked one way during the day, and entirely another way at night. Like, presto. With the setting of the sun began the real business of the town, which had no blue laws. An aunt and uncle went to work as glamorous club owners. His father took charge of a craps table, which he ran big, Vegas-style. The neighbors who played music in church on Sunday suited up to play in the bar bands. People came from all over the open plains, the g et-in-the-car-and-go region that produced Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Clark Terry, as well as Jr. Walker, Chuck Berry and Redd Foxx.

"We were like wild horses, used to space and running free," says Bluiett. "Out in the Midwest, we had Geronimo and all that [stuff] all up in us too. Underground Railroad stops. It was a different way of thinking. It was the drum 'n' bugle corps all mixed up with hoot 'n' holler gospel. We got barbecued up in that church. Slow cooking. It was heavy blues country. Afro-gospel-blues country, where you had to sing a blues so hard that you hurt everybody next to you, and whoever left 'em ain't no good 'cause he hurt, and everybody else hurt, and that'll make you think about who you left, or who you gonna leave tonight, or maybe I better go get my woman now, or something."

It was French-West territory, with St. Louis right across the river and New Orleans just downstream. Laissez-faire reigned. "Meaning they left our black asses alone," Bluiett says. "So we got a chance to come up with our own brand of whatever it was. All of that is missing to me here on the other side of the Appalachians and the Alleghenies."

All that freedom, space. All that churning. One of the reasons Bluiett enjoys producing music so much is that he can listen to artists perform and know precisely how they'd be different in another world. It's a vision that will not fade.

'Edison's Lab'

First of all, the mansion house, which was originally built in the 18th century, appears from the outside to be a lot more polished than it is within. The front of the house, which serves as the studio, is devoid of furniture and jumbled instead with equipment that looks as if it came from a garage sale. Some of it did. The huge old amp that Sprey picked up for $200, for example.

Musicians are generally stationed in the front parlor for recording, while singers and soloists are set up in the connecting high ceilinged foyer, which provides natural reverberation. Sprey chose the house for the acoustics generated by its wood floors and heavy plaster walls. Modern drywall absorbs bass notes and muddies the sound. He also selected the house for its remote location - an unmarked turn from Crain Highway, and far enough down a deeply rutted dirt road that cars can't be heard passing. The house is so well isolated that there are no close neighbors to share the transformer on the main power line. As a result, Sprey says, it gets "cleaner" electricity.

Most of his recording equipment is battery-powered - the little preamp he uses instead of a mixing board, the tiny pressure-zone microphones that he modifies until they are precise enough to pick up the actual click of a drummer's stick on the cymbal before the ring of the brass; the impact of the piano's hammers on its strings; the intake of a horn player's breath across his reed. Amazingly, the change Sprey's equipment makes in the quality of a recording is not reserved for audiophiles who can afford $20,000 sound systems; the difference is easily detectable on an inexpensive boombox.

The only thing Sprey plugs in to a socket is his tape recorder, and for that he uses expensive, exotic wires that he spent years researching and developing. They are about half the diameter of a strand of human hair and are encased in silver-plated copper tubes. On his battery-powered amplifiers, Sprey uses wires that he has custom-milled, thin ribbons of copper wrapped in a saran-looking case made of polypropylene.

"Standard speaker wire is made of PVC, which is the worst plastic for sound there is," he says. "They had much better sounding wire in the '20s, when they used like a cotton or silk webbing around it."

Sprey does without mixing boards - which can cost upward of $250,000 when they have 48 or 64 channels, like those used by "state-of-the-art" studios - because he says they distort sound in transmission.

"You have all these knobs for adjusting equalization of sound, treble, bass, midrange and on and on and on," he says. "And each knob represents a set of amplifiers, so even if each of those amplifiers is brilliantly designed - which they mostly aren't - through the cascading process, you remove 1 or 2 percent of the music at every stage, and if you have 50 stages, you know, three-quarters of the music is gone. That's what the problem is.

"I have one stage per mike. That is, I have one set of amplifiers behind each one of the volume knobs. That's the only control I have....If a horn player thinks his sound is too bright, then we either change the acoustics of the room or the position of the mike. But we don't bandaid by twiddling knobs here. We get it right at the beginning."

Corrupt power sources are enemies of sound, according to Sprey's creed, so before he records anything, he unplugs. The refrigerator always, air conditioners in summer and the furnace in winter. "The oil furnace is bad because it's got to have ignition, a spark to keep on lighting the flame, and that spark is almost like a radar jammer or something, it puts out so much radio frequency energy," he says. "That's one of the worst devices in the house."

The computer, of course, gets unplugged. And if a very sensitive recording is underway, the fax machine and the little charger cradles for the cordless phones get unplugged, too. The CD player is the biggest offender, Sprey says. "Nothing will screw up the sound in your home hi-fi, if you're listening to a record, like turning on a CD player. The minute you turn it on, you can hear your LP records turn harsh and dull. That's because it's digital, and all digital devices put out very high radio frequency energy and pump it back into the wall."

In fact, just about anything that draws power from a wall plug also feeds junk back in. "You can turn on a fluorescent light and that hurts the music," says Sprey. So that means when sessions run into the night, he sometimes records in a mostly darkened house. But one of the policies Mapleshade prides itself on is that unlike most studios, it doesn't bill by the hour, so there's no time pressure squeezing the creative process. In fact, Mapleshade doesn't bill at all.

Sprey puts up the studio time, the equipment and all expenses against the artist's time and expertise. They sign a simple, one-page contract that makes them 50-50 partners. After they've recorded, musicians are even free to shop their master tapes to other labels, as long as they split the profits with Mapleshade.

That's because Sprey has never been entranced by the music business. His love is recording, and his challenge is doing it as simply and purely as possible. "I still don't really want to be a label," he says. But as he became friendly with musicians and they recognized how superior his recordings were in some respects to commercial studio products, they began asking him to produce them. Then he was faced with selling his tapes to an established label, a task that was probably doomed from the start given his convictions.

"I got interest from labels, but not too many that wanted to simply buy it as-is," he says. "A whole bunch that wanted to mess with it, right? 'Oh, this is real interesting - if you would add so-and-so to the session.' Or 'if you would add some reverb to the session.' Or 'if you would add a background singer.' Right? And everything they wanted would have worsened the sound.

"But worst of all was that 95 percent of the time, they were people I had a very hard time shaking hands with, because they were very slimy, you know? People had warned me that I would feel that way about the musician side of it - that I couldn't open up my house to musicians, that I would have lots of trouble with all kinds of habits, and they were dead wrong."

Sprey made his first professional recording in 1986, with singer Shirley Horn. Since then, he has released 28 CDs commercially and has another 90 or so in the can. It takes a lot more time to package and market a CD than it does to record one, and for now, Sprey employs only a couple of part-time apprentices to help him with the legwork. "The lag is my fault," he says. "If I got the packages done quicker, we'd have more albums out, because they're sitting right there."

On the other hand, Mapleshade is breaking even, meaning Sprey no longer has to work as a defense consultant to support himself. And he's doing what he loves.

Inaction, and in Action

"He lies there like he's in state, and everybody thinks he's asleep," Sprey says. "Until, you know, suddenly somebody plays something, sometimes just a lick that he's heard, and he is up out of that couch like a shot. 'What did you just play? Play that again.' And then something beautiful grows out of that, because he's been listening like a hawk."

On this day, Ken McIntyre, who calls himself Makanda, is before the mikes with 18 instruments he plays. What do you do with 18 instruments? That was Bluiett's dilemma. But he was determined to record Makanda, who is attempting to rekindle the performing career that he abandoned for the security of academia to raise a family. At 63, he is now retired from the State University of New York at Old Westbury, where he founded and chaired a department of music, dance and theater.

As a young man on the jazz scene in the '60s, Makanda was respected and accepted by the masters. "But he never went along with all the junk in the industry," Bluiett says. "He hasn't had a record date in I don't know when." Instead, as the years passed, he taught students - and himself - to play instrument after instrument after instrument. Eighteen of them.

"Bluiett came up with what in retrospect seems like a totally simple idea," says Sprey. "But like all brilliant ideas, it cuts right to the heart of the problem. Makanda is a great composer, so Bluiett had him compose a bunch of suites in which he could use every instrument in a given family. There are only four families of instrument" - reeds, horns, percussion and strings - "meaning we'll have four suites, and that's a record."

Makanda, who had two of his former students perform the compositions with him two weeks ago, was exhilarated throughout the recording session, he said, by Bluiett's "artistically liberating" concept.

Another day, during a session with the veteran Cuban conga player and percussionist Carlos "Patato" Valdez, Bluiett turned an ensemble on its head, making Patato's five drums the lead voice, with five horns behind him as a sort of choir.

"No other conguero gets as beautiful and melodic sound from the drums," Sprey says, "mainly because he spends about three times as much tuning them as playing. And he plays in a beautifully open way that only masters can, hitting so few notes and expressing so much."

Normally Patato plays with Latin jazz and salsa bands, so his music comes enveloped in a larger sound. "It's very hard to pick out how good the conga player is when you also have a very good timbale player and a very good bass player and you hear the ensemble of it," Sprey says.

Hamiet Bluiett is rectifying that.

He's done 14 projects with Mapleshade so far, and plans to return for plenty more. Old masters and black classics. New ideas and forgotten streams. Back on the plantation. But this time getting respect and giving due.

September 3, 1995