Recorded at the Carmel, California, Sunset Center with a single Altec mic onto an Ampex 600 full-track tape deck on September 16, 1955, this concert became one of the best sellers in the Columbia jazz catalog. The recording was not ordered or planned by the record company. Sound contractor Jim Meagher and Armed Forces Radio host Will Thornbury happened to run tape all night, with Thornbury's likely intent to get some concert sound to go with an interview with the band, which he conducted after the show. And what a show it turned out to be: pianist Garner, bassist Eddie Calhoun, and drummer Denzil DaCosta Best lit up the joint, feeding off the enthusiastic audience response. Later on Garner's manager, Martha Glaser, found out about the recording and took possession of the tapes. She struck a deal with Columbia's George Avakian to release an edited version of the concert. It quickly became a hit and has remained in print since its original LP release. For three generations, Avakian's production was the version fans heard. The release media was made from a "cutting master" dub, and the whole thing sounded like an amateur recording, about on par with a very good 1940's radio transcription. Indeed, a spectrum graph shows that the Avakian master — both as played from the original Columbia LP and from the 1987 CD reissue — contains nothing above around 5 kHz. It's possible that there was a sharp rolloff to eliminate tape hiss during the dub, but the end result is that the upper harmonics of the piano don't exist, and the cymbals and brush-snare drums are barely audible.

This deluxe three CD issue goes back a generation, to the unedited "work tapes" that Avakian used. Co-producer, and The Magic Shop studio owner, Steve Rosenthal found the reels mislabeled in the Sony/Columbia vault. In addition to going back a tape generation, Rosenthal chose to employ a Plangent Process transfer and time-alignment, with further restoration and mastering by (Tape Op contributor) Jessica Thompson. The result is much improved overall fidelity, slightly more top end (extended out to about 7 kHz now, with brush strokes more audible), and a firmer bottom end, without adding too much boom. The entire band sounds about 20-feet closer to the listener, but with the same balance between instruments. It turns out this was a very good single-mic recording, and the Plangent time-alignment completely stabilized the formerly wow and flutter plagued piano sound. Discs 1 and 2 are the complete concert, in original running order, including some hip commentary by concert producer and emcee Jimmy Lyons. Disc 3 is the original album sequence, but made from the new transfers rather than the old "cutting master," and is followed by Thornbury's interviews with Garner and the band. As has always been the case with this album, it is a great way for a "jazz-curious" listener to check out the genre. Some reviewers have called it a "pop crossover" album, but Garner was definitely schooled and skilled in pure jazz playing and improvisation. What people have liked about this album for 60 years is its accessibility; Garner's joyful playing and the band's swinging accompaniment come through, simply and clearly. The uncluttered sound works in the primitive recording, and the result is a music-centric experience that probably sounds and feels much like most seats did in the audience that night. It is well worthy of the Grammy nomination it recently received. 

Remastering The Complete Concert By The Sea

During the remastering of The Complete Concert By The Sea I spent a lot of time thinking about the concert hall at the Sunset Center in Carmel, California. How big was it? How high were the ceilings? How many people filled the seats, and were those seats upholstered or wooden? Where on stage was the piano situated? Where was that single microphone placed that captured this magnificent concert? Because the recording had been a last minute arrangement, it never sounded like an accurate representation of the concert. The bass was distant and mushy, and the drums lacked body and snap, but in glorious mono it still managed to capture the spirit of Erroll Garner’s brilliant performance. My goal in remastering was to make up for the limitations of both the recording process and the physical media in order to recapture the soundprint and sensation of that room on that night. I wanted the remaster of this iconic live recording to transport listeners to the front rows of the performance.

One of the first things I did was line up the new tape transfers with transfers of the original 1955 Columbia LP, as well as the most recent CD reissue. The speed variations among these three versions was shockingly apparent. I cannot overstate the importance of working with Plangent Process’s Jamie Howarth and John Chester on the new tape transfers. They were able to lock down the correct playback speed, as well as fix the wow and flutter that left the piano sounding swishy and unfocused. Hearing the upper harmonics of the piano and cymbals slide into phase alignment was utterly magical! The piano notes rang like bells instead of plunking. The recording finally sounded, and felt, viscerally right. With brilliantly clear and stable new tape transfers to work from, I could focus on delicate sculpting: shaking the sonic dust off the piano, clarifying the woofy bass, minimizing the intrusive and distracting sounds of the recording process and media — such as mic placement and tape hiss — without interfering with the airiness and lower-mid build-up that are shorthand to the listener. This worked well for the size and density of the room, and the historicity of the recording. Every move I made — and there were times when we debated .1dB EQ changes — was in service to the concert hall and how it must have sounded sitting in the front rows of the Sunset Center on that night in 1955.

I finally got to visit that concert hall during the Monterey Jazz Festival this past September. The room has been renovated since 1955, but it was no less thrilling to stand on the stage and listen to the ambiance. It’s hard to say whether it sounded as I had imagined it. In retrospect, my envisioning of the room was largely abstract, informed as much by the sensation and emotion of listening to Erroll’s performance, via the Plangent tape transfers and the new masters, as by the physics of the actual space. That enigmatic relationship between sound waves bouncing around in a room and our emotional experience of a live recording — especially one captured by a single mic — is the magic of recorded music. - Jessica Thompson

jessicathompsonaudio.com

Tape Op is a bi-monthly magazine devoted to the art of record making.

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