There is a tizz to the piano sound on this video that is also evident in the bass and sax, which indicates to me that it is a distortion not in the original sound of the instruments at the performance.
My suspicion is that someone was offended by either mag tape hiss or dirt and scratches on an optical soundtrack, so they rolled of the treble with a filter. Then someone else was offended by the resulting muted sound, so they used an old audio trick of slightly overdriving the transfer to a new medium, so that the resulting harmonic distortion would provide the missing upper harmonics -- only they over-egged the pudding.
There are some other videos of other performances of the work that don't sound like someone left strips of paper on the piano strings, and the harmonic richness is still there.
Apologies if the tizz wasn't what you meant. But it is always sobering to me when I work to hard to make perfect recordings to find yet another example where obvious technical problems with the recording are no-barrier-at-all to appreciating the underlying musical genius in a performance.
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Love me some Brubek. The man was an artist.
ReplyDeleteDid he have the piano tuned atypically for that, or was he just that good?
ReplyDeleteI'm kinda-sorta a pianist (learning but not that good yet) and I'm fascinated to try to figure out how he did that. Using a different melodic mode?
An amazing talent, and look at the intellects of the people who played with him. It is beyond my poor powers of reasoning to understand it fully.
ReplyDeleteI saw him in person years ago in a very small venue in Lincoln, Massachusetts. He was inventive, creative and a master of music.
Fillyjonk --
ReplyDeleteThere is a tizz to the piano sound on this video that is also evident in the bass and sax, which indicates to me that it is a distortion not in the original sound of the instruments at the performance.
My suspicion is that someone was offended by either mag tape hiss or dirt and scratches on an optical soundtrack, so they rolled of the treble with a filter. Then someone else was offended by the resulting muted sound, so they used an old audio trick of slightly overdriving the transfer to a new medium, so that the resulting harmonic distortion would provide the missing upper harmonics -- only they over-egged the pudding.
There are some other videos of other performances of the work that don't sound like someone left strips of paper on the piano strings, and the harmonic richness is still there.
Apologies if the tizz wasn't what you meant. But it is always sobering to me when I work to hard to make perfect recordings to find yet another example where obvious technical problems with the recording are no-barrier-at-all to appreciating the underlying musical genius in a performance.
Douglas2 - what you were referring to ("sounds like paper on the strings") is what I was hearing (it's especially prominent at the beginning.)
ReplyDelete