Grand Mixer DXT
Conversing With Jazz HistoryBy Randy Alberts
In Carnegie Hall on November 29th, 1957, a rare historic event in the lexicon of music occurred. It was the night the Thelonious Monk Quartet—Monk, Ahmed Adbul-Malik, Shadow Wilson, and John Coltrane—spoke from that stage. The Voice of America recorded their epic performance for a one-time radio broadcast.
Forty-seven years later in January 2005, a supervisor and jazz specialist with the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., discovered a dusty, long forgotten file cabinet in the Library's basement. When Larry Appelbaum read the faded handwritten label, "T. Monk," on one of the VOC's long lost 1/4-inch mono tapes in that cabinet, he surely must have fallen from the sheer gravity of his find. Until that moment, remarkably little of the short-lived quartet's recordings had been released or preserved.
Months after Appelbaum's discovery Grand Mixer DXT, himself an historic figure in the language of music, paid one of his regular visits to Cecil's Swingin' Jazz Club in West Orange, New Jersey. He shared a small table with the legendary jazz drummer and producer Cecil Brooks III as the two talked in low jazz tones. DXT—a North East Bronx-born drummer and producer who in the early '70s was the first DJ to perform live with a band using a turntable as a musical instrument—told Mr. Brooks about Transfer Master, his new analog-to-digital archiving company. Cecil's immediate reaction was to hook D up with Thelonious Monk, Jr., another regular at the club who owns a studio just 'round the corner.
"Monk stopped by the Transfer Master studio soon after I spoke with Cecil to check out our work," DXT recalls. "I was doing sound editing and film scoring at the time for The Untold Story of Emmett Till, and he said I was the man for the job. I'm grateful to have had the opportunity of doing something of this magnitude."
"The job" Monk, Jr., referred to was, of course, the restoration and archiving of his father's Carnegie Hall priceless tapes to CD and vinyl for 2005's Blue Note and Thelonious Records release. Today, The Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall lives.
Peak: A Helping Hand In Jazz History
DXT, the turntablist and Herbie Hancock's bandmate at the time scratching in the song and early MTV video "Rockit," had rarely used Peak 4 until literally the end of Transfer Master's At Carnegie Hall project. The original Carnegie recording had ended abruptly as the final notes of "Epistrophy (incomplete)" rang out, sans the crowd's end applause. DXT used Peak to copy, paste, and seamlessly blend applause from earlier in the concert to the end fade. He dug that one move enough to add Peak Pro XT 5 to his newfound forensic engineer's audio restoration tool belt.
Peak 5 is now DXT's "digital 2-track machine forever" that he's next putting to an even bigger challenge. Transfer Master's incredible success story with At Carnegie Hall has led to numerous tape-to-digital restoration projects, none the least of which is their current undertaking: the Monk Quartet's Live At The Five Spot, recorded four months before their Carnegie Hall date. This time, Peak Pro XT 5's latest playlist and edit features and onboard plugin bundle—including SoundSoap Pro—are really being put to the test.
"The Five Spot tapes are in horrendous condition," says DXT, "much worse than the Carnegie Hall reels. I'm using Peak and SoundSoap Pro to eliminate the tapes' 60-cycle ground loops, but the noise problem is mainly in the audience. And I don't mean tape hiss, either: the microphone used to record the show was placed much closer to the audience than the stage. I got rid of that 60-cycle hum completely with SoundSoap, and I mean completely—it used to be audible on every second of the performance but now, thanks to SoundSoap, it's gone. I'm also using SoundSoap to help see my way through all that crowd noise. There are many more restoration projects coming our way now since At Carnegie Hall that we'll be using Peak 5 and SoundSoap Pro on a ton."
DXT attributes Peak's superior editing tools and plugins access for his faith in the program.
"Being able to layer, manipulate and work with crossfades so fast is a blessing for me," he continues. "I really dig that about Peak. Now we can do the Monk Five Spot project and all of our future 2-track work from here on out in Peak."
Transfer Master has also archived hundreds of analog reels to digital formats for rap great Van Gibb, as well as the entire Strong City Records catalog—the latter including all the recordings of the man who started Def Jam Records, The Original Jazzy Jay, Following the Monk Quartet Five Spot project will be another historic undertaking: transferring the entire Herbie Hancock analog reel catalog to digital format.
"I'm being entrusted with Herbie's life work," adds D. "Those transfers, as well, will all find their way through Peak 5."
When asked about his impressions of SoundSoap Pro, Grand Mixer DXT had this to say:
"It's very interesting how BIAS has laid it out," he comments. "It shows you a spectrum of frequencies that, and meaning no disrespects here, look like those visual graphic displays on the front of the big boom boxes. It allows you to easily set the threshold of noise reduction per frequency. It's pretty hip, man, and I'm still studying how it works. BIAS gave me a demo of it in their NAMM booth and SoundSoap was very, very proficient at what it does. I knew immediately that day that Transfer Master will be putting SoundSoap Pro to a lot of work this year and beyond with all the restoration and archiving projects we have coming in here now."
"As for Peak 5, it's now my two-track editor—permanently, or at least until BIAS improves it further in future versions. Now I don't have to go anywhere else."
Talking To Monk 'n' Trane
Software and synchronous meetings with the descendants of jazz greats aside, let's revisit the pivotal experience that brought the rest of us The Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane At Carnegie Hall. It's a story worth another telling.
Once the project was in hand, DXT had three options. First, he could've safely just added a little compression here, sprinkled a dash of subtle EQ and noise reduction there and submitted that master. Or, he could have tried something more aggressive and perhaps gone down in history as "the guy who screwed up the Monk tapes restoration project." He knew there would be no recovering his career following a crestfall from such heights.
Instead, DXT chose the least common approach of all.
"I decided to just sit here and listen to the tapes and let Monk and Trane tell me what to do," he recalls. "That's when I went into this whole spiritual thing with the project. I sat here for a week straight, man, just listening and learning every nuance of those performances as if I was going to play with them. But that whole purist jazz thing of, 'Let it be, so what if there is tape hiss?' was always in my mind."
After almost two weeks straight at Transfer Master, fasting with only water and the Library of Congress' pre-transfer CD copy of the Monk tapes looping endlessly, D had his epiphany.
"But Monk and Trane was telling me something different," continues DXT. "They told me, in those great jazz voices they spoke in, 'Hey, man, when we did this concert we wasn't playing tape hiss into the audience, you dig? That was added by the imperfections of the technology of 1957. So, D, could you try to get rid of as much of that as possible from on top of our music, man, could you do that for us, brother?'"
Besides tape hiss, DXT recalls encountering many non-musical ambient anomalies in the tracks, as well. So after less sleep, more conversations, and wondering how he could remove all that without being destructive to the source music, he came up with a concept. It was a left field, non-traditional theory about using plugins linked in a specific series—and it worked.
"I decided at that moment to approach the tapes as if it were a crime scene," he says. "It was a crime committed upon their music by the technology of their day. That's when I came up with the term 'forensic editing,' and I even later trademarked the term. My approach was to listen to it and determine what was music, and what wasn't. It's crazy, because after two weeks in here I started thinking like a madman. In the middle of all that listening and talking with Monk and Trane, my assistant James thought I was crazy. He actually wanted to quit until I convinced him I was onto something. That day Monk came in the room again and said, 'Why don't you go home, man? Take a break, go get some rest.' That night I discovered my formula, my technique."
"When I showed James the theory I'd discovered that next day and demonstrated it on the first song, he said, 'Oh shit.' The anomalies were gone, or at least it appeared to the human ear to be gone, because its all still in there. That's when James followed my notes and theory and started working on the files."
Not surprisingly, sitting between "Monk's Mood" and "Epistrophy" on The Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane At Carnegie Hall, is the fourth track. It is appropriately titled "Nutty."
Look for Transfer Master's upcoming restoration work with Peak and SoundSoap Pro on the 1957 Monk Quartet's Live At The Five Spot recordings, as well as DXT's poetry 'n' jazz project set to the music of Herbie Hancock's Blue Note catalog. Also check for his upcoming turntablist album on Blue Note featuring Herbie and other jazz and turntablist greats.