All the ETA recordings were done live to 2-track tape, correct?
Yes.
How did the ETA sessions get started?
For me, it goes back to getting burned out on studio recording. When I moved to Los Angeles, I was engineering multitrack records for probably too long. I did that for almost ten years. I always built gear on the side, like I did at The Hangar. But as music recording got more intensive on the computer, I was never that good at Pro Tools. I'm good at using it in my limited way, but as the years went on people would demand more of the engineer, and I just wasn't good at that. I'd use it in a basic way, but when it came down to more intensive editing, software usage of [Antares] Auto-Tune and things like that, I didn't have an ear for it, and I became more and more frustrated. I was always an engineer, not a producer. I was lucky to work with a lot of great producers, and I enjoyed being just the engineer. But, at one point, I was doing it too much. I started working at United Recording. I got a room there, and that's when I quit engineering. The gear designing was what I found inspirational, at that point. I was never a producer and never wrote songs, but that move to United and focusing 100% on gear design felt cool. It was my version of writing a song and having a creative outlet. I was happy. But after a few years I started to miss recording. Plus, I wasn't as inspired to make new gear. I had made the [Highland Dynamics] BG1 [tube compressor, Tape Op #136] at that point, but hadn't really used it. People said it sounded good, but I didn't know. It sounded great in my office, but I was having trouble being inspired to make new gear. Nothing was coming to me. I noticed that [guitarist] Jeff Parker had moved to Los Angeles; I was always a big Tortoise fan. I would also see [drummer/percussionist] Jay Bellerose leave United early on Monday nights. I had heard he was playing with Jeff at this little place called ETA. I didn't know what to expect. Was it going to be like Tortoise? It was Jeff, Jay, Josh [Johnson, alto sax], and Anna [Butterss, bass], and they were doing standards. I thought it was great! I've always been into jazz, and I'm a big fan of Rudy Van Gelder [#43], Roy DuNann, and the records they made. Then it hit me, "I've got to record these folks here." We had Jay Bellerose, who's an insane drummer. Anna and Josh are ridiculous musicians. I would sit there listening, and I started getting annoyed that I wasn't recording it because it sounded so good. I'd never recorded any of those people. I almost worked with Jay in the studio a few times, but it never happened.
Jeff Parker on the ETA Recordings
Did having Bryce tracking at ETA affect the shows for you?
It was really natural. Over the course of him recording us, the direction of our music changed. He was there from almost the very beginning, just recording us and not even to really document anything. Just as an exercise for something that he was interested in. I have recordings of us from him that go way back; like random quartets at ETA. They were completely different line-ups, and we were playing standards, kind of jam session jazz repertoire. They all had a certain quality to them, but he was open to feedback. He played me some where I wouldn't be super happy with the way that my guitar was captured, and then we talked and he would move things around until he got it dialed in. He was live mixing the band to the 2-track tape machine in the way that Tom Dowd and engineers way back used to record jazz in the '50s. It was a growing process for all of us. It went from a way to keep ourselves busy and learning through this process, to things becoming a lot more refined in terms of the band. Our band was finding an improvisational identity through a lot of trial and error, and an organic natural processes of discovery – creating these relationships and community.
Did having Bryce there to document these sessions have an influence from playing standards to doing more improvisational performances?
Yeah, totally. Nobody came into this thing with any commercial ambitions. It was more about dealing with the art of improvising and recording. After a while, the word got out and more musicians wanted to play there. A real community developed around what was happening at the place, and the music started to become viewed as an important piece of what was happening in the creative music community in Los Angeles. That's when it seemed like Bryce was really documenting things. He was there every night, recording almost every group that played there. Cats like Terrace Martin and some really high profile musicians.
How did that feel for you as an artist to be in the middle of that?
It felt great. It was really Michael Ehlers from Eremite Records, who was always passing through L.A. He came by ETA one night, heard the band when we were freely improvising, and he was blown away. He was saying, "Man, you guys really got a thing." Ehlers is an improvised music aficionado; from the Grateful Dead to William Parker, that's his wheelhouse. He felt like what we were doing was something special, and then when he saw Bryce, he asked, "Who's this cat over here in the corner with this tape machine?" That's when he decided that he wanted to put out a record. It was captured so beautifully and well put together. We spent some time curating the recordings – we sifted through hours and hours and hours of material until we settled on those four pieces that were on Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, and it was really well received.
It's nice to see Bryce doing this and what you all did there. It's really special.
Yeah, thanks. He's pretty brilliant. He's a special human. I've known a lot of engineers and a lot of brilliant cats, man – dudes who build compressors, wire studios, and tech guys. I can't think of anybody who is more brilliant than that dude. That's straight up – I've never met anybody like him, you know?
How did you get started recording at the club?
I asked Ryan [Julio], who booked and co-owned ETA, and I got to know him. I got to know Jeff a little bit, and I got it started. I bought a stereo Nagra IV-S [tape recorder] from a guy in Chicago. I hadn't used tape in a long time, as we'd had computers in the studios for years. I'd also wanted to build a mixer, but I didn't have one at that point, so I used an old Ampex MX-10 [four by two stereo mixer] at first. I wanted to do this purely for fun. That's the other part. The engineering work I had been doing had become less fun. Learning engineering at The Hangar was a no pressure situation – creative and fun, with a lot of experimenting. In Los Angeles, the sessions became more formulaic. "I'm going to use this mic here. I'm going to do the drums like this. I'm going to do the strings like this." It got really boring. [laughter] I'd done it so many times, and I missed not knowing how recordings would work out. I missed those early days at The Hangar, when I could experiment in a low-pressure situation, learning from everybody there, and using different mics. That hadn't happened in a long time in L.A.
What gear did you use for recording these shows.
I gutted the MX-10 mixer, modded it, and used that with a BG1 for bus compression. It was so much fun. I would sit in the corner. I had four microphones, one per player. Everything was a crazy experience, "I'll put a microphone in front of the drums and see what happens." But the mics were all sonically connected in a live setting. I could only hear so much on headphones because it's loud. I'd do a recording and listen back to try to pick out what was happening. Maybe the upright bass mic would be where all the bleed was. I'd try a different mic. Every session was, "Try something once and listen later." Everything about it was so different from any studio experience; zero control and just four knobs. Everything's connected. Sometimes I'd find that I needed more bass. But I was using an AKG C12VR, and I kept cranking it up and wondering, "Why does this sound so shitty on one side?" The mic was picking everybody up. I learned which mics sounded better for different instruments. The mixes are a blast. I can make broad, major changes, but it's not a problem when I'm listening back. I started listening to all these old Rudy Van Gelder records, and I'd hear all the crazy flaws and big moves on volume control that I never noticed before. I'd hear that in my recordings, and I started to love it and embrace how chaotic it was. Later on, it got more complicated, especially with the synths. I wouldn't always know what was going on. Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, and Gregory Uhlmann all have pedals and stuff, and all of a sudden Josh would be so loud but his fader was all the way down. I'd realize, "Oh, it's a different synth." Turn that down, and then turn Josh back up. Nobody cares, because it's all packed together and everybody...
...there's bleed on other mics.
There are huge amounts of bleed. People are fretting about half dB difference in mixes, when there's a six dB jump on something here. My new mixer has fixed panning at left, right, center, and three quarters. Sometimes I'll do a set, and I'll realize something is panned in the wrong place. How do I get it over? I have to fade it down, click it over, and sneak it up. [laughter] But I love that part of it. I embrace not having control.
Ryan Julio
After talking with Bryce and Jeff, I wanted to speak with Ryan, who booked ETA, and get his perspective on the shows and the recordings done there.
There's a very specific throughline between my days in the indie rock scene and how we would eventually approach a jazz program at our restaurant, ETA. Born and raised in L.A., I did the whole 2000s indie rock scene, and I always noticed that everybody in L.A. had their "main" band and then a side project. Once they'd build a local fan base, it felt increasingly harder to get people to come out, yet they always seemed more intrigued by one-time-only side project shows.
Jeff [Parker] approached the Monday residency in the same fashion – at the time he had The New Breed, which had albums out on International Anthem. But he also wanted to do something different and pull together other artists he'd worked with – that's how we ended up having the ETA IVtet. Over the course of a few months, he realized that Josh, Jay, and Anna, were his go-to people in the ETA space. Jay, Josh, and Anna at the time were busy as session musicians during a majority of the year. For example, Anna Butterss would be busy touring with Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers, or Jenny Lewis, but then would come "home" to the residency at ETA. We were a small bar, so knowing that it wasn't a high-paying show we wanted to make it extremely creatively satisfying. It's not a monetary thing, and that was how I approached booking. Musicians would reach out all the time saying, "I want to do a show. Can I bring my band there?" and that wasn't of interest to me.
By the time it really got rolling with Bryce recording, the whole point was that it became an ethos of artist development rather than just a "venue." We would often hang out on Monday nights, which were always usually Jeff as a resident, but the other nights when the IVtet weren't there we'd get new people in to record their experimentation – always via two sets and fully improvised. I would mostly book these shows in-person, because I wanted to talk to people about their music and challenge them to bring something new into the space. "Who have you been wanting to play with? What haven't you done in a while, and what would that be like?"
The focus on being "just a bar" would help reinforce this. A handful of musicians who are all friends would be having a drink at the bar, and during the break I'd joke, "When are all of you going to get together and finally play?" Sure enough, three weeks later they would be doing an improvised night together. Everyone was working their ass off post-COVID, so going free for two sets was a welcome release from the rehearsed acts they had been touring. Then Bryce would record it, and they'd have this awesome analog recording of this new concept to take back, listen, and edit. That itself became a resource.
Bryce was also being challenged. He'd come in each night and ask, "What do we have today?" It would challenge everybody, including Bryce, to improvise on the fly based on what the different artists wanted to bring in. For instance, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes, and Gregory Uhlmann started this whole contingent of ambient-focused solo/duo/trio sets. They would set up all these pedals across the floor and everyone would sit down. They had four or five different amps that they would use for different things. It would be Bryce's challenge to home in on how he could capture all this in an organic setting and live mix it.
The idea was to give people a place to stretch in a safe environment, knowing that it would be archived in a way that's not totally devoid of soul. Not just throwing up a Zoom recorder or a sterile Pro Tools setup. Bryce's mix actually resembles someone listening to it, because he is trying to pick out what their dialogue is all while it's happening in real time. This is especially the case with artists that may not have had a chance to play together before. A lot of the shows and recordings then became the genesis point for full albums that they might record elsewhere.
My goal, now that we don't have a space anymore, is to keep the community going and keep that same ethos of experimentation over it just being a jazz show. It's letting the artists build a community together and interact, because that's still more important than just having one space.
At what point did you abandon the Ampex MX-10 and build your own mixer? How many recordings were on the Ampex?
About 20. I was bouncing around to other places. I did some at Lodge Room, the old Blue Whale, and The York. I was finding places where it would work. Lodge Room recordings would be cool bands. But, listening back, it was a performance. That means somebody was singing out of tune and someone played too many notes, and I can't capture the good time or the party. That's what was so great about ETA. Jeff set the pace there for improvisational playing where musicians are really communicating. It can be a great show, but live recordings can be all over the place. What worked about the ETA sessions is that they were fully improvisational. You can feel people communicating together. Sometimes it's not working; sometimes it sounds like the bass player and drummer don't like each other! [laughter] A whole session might be useless, but I'm always learning something, and when it's done, it's done. The mix is done at the end of the night. Another part of my reasoning was that there's so much cool music going on, if I could provide a cool document of it – a mirror – that would be neat. You can pull your phone out and capture what you play, but that's not fun to listen to. Does someone enjoy listening back to an iPhone that was sitting on a music stand? These recordings with the Nagra and the bus compressor, they were fun to record and listen to. Early on, Jeff was abandoning doing standards and the full improvisational sets started happening. He would ask me, "How much room is on a reel?" I told him, "It's 42 minutes," and he moved to these improvisational sets. It was so cool. It sounded like Tortoise mixed with Josh, Jay, and Anna. I was inspired to build my own mixer, and I probably would not have done that if there wasn't inspiring music to record.
You were all feeding off of each other: Jeff changed what he was doing because of the recordings, and you responded to that and upped the gear.
Absolutely. None of us, all five of us – well six, Ryan too – had any idea that we were recording for any reason. I wanted to do it, and they were playing. That first record [Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy] is so cool, because there was zero thought that we'd put out a record. None of that. We were all having fun and inspired by each other. That first record is interesting; the first three sides are on the Ampex mixer, and the fourth side is the new mixer. I hear a sonic difference. I made the new mixer when I was living downtown and I had these old chassis. But I didn't have a mic preamp design, so I thought, "I'm going to cut this thing up and ruin it." I was inspired to build mic pres because I was using them. I had circuits; I built the mixer, and the first time I tried it it felt as if every microphone was a few feet closer, even in headphones. Super clear. I loved it, and it felt inspiring. I thought, "This is the best recording situation for me." I've liked all the recordings I've done for different reasons, but this way of working made sense to me. We had tried to do some live to 2-track at Adrian Younge's [Tape Op #119] studio [Linear Labs Studio, across the street from ETA]. It was cool, but we felt a bit like, "This sounds good, but what's the point?" Then I thought, "I can take the studio across the street, use small mic stands, and make my role be forgotten about during the performance."
How much of that is having the audience there?
I think it's pretty much all of it. Along with using low mic stands, I would set up in the back of ETA in the bar, so I would really disappear. I think a lot of people forgot I was there. They knew I was there recording, and we'd talk about it, but I wasn't even a thought on their mind. They wouldn't even go back to where I was. Once I, and the recording process, disappeared from the performance, it got super interesting. Jeff set the tone for the improvisational thing, which worked in there. There was no PA, and it was tiny. You couldn't do singer/songwriter sets, but it worked well as a living room with people right next to each other, and that's what translates on the recordings. Live to 2-track is simple. Every mic goes into the same transformer, same tube, then one capacitor, and then summing. Everything you hear, it's all preserved. I got addicted to that clarity from live to 2-track. I was inspired by people like Roy DuNann of Contemporary Records, and how his recordings sounded so clear. Why did live to 2-track sound so clear, and why do a lot of newer recordings not have that now? I never would have made the jump to understanding that it was from doing it in a little club, live to 2-track, without this experience. I might have thought maybe it's from a microphone, a mixer, or a preamp. I had to go through all the motions of figuring out that the upright mic can't be a condenser. It needs to be the Beyerdynamic M 160, because it's hypercardioid. It grew from the constraints of live recording, which I'm sure people like Rudy Van Gelder and others struggled with back then. My recordings started to remind me of those recordings, but with new music.
Was the audience respectful, in terms of not talking during songs? There are not a lot of audience sounds on Jeff's Mondays... album.
That was part of it. I had to make some choices, like, "I can't use these types of mics. I can't use this type of mic placement." Because I wanted to minimize the audience noise, I quickly started using hypercardioid mics as close as they could be. Then it started to sound like old live to 2-track recordings, where you hear some noise but not a lot. Right away, I realized room mics are useless. That's not going to work. I got just enough of the audience but, for the most part, ETA was pretty quiet. A lot of times it would be totally silent. Every once in a while I'd hear a glass, or this and that, but that would be it. But even in the front of the room where the music was, it would be dead silent. Everybody was focused on what was going on. Not every night though. Sometimes it'd be a rowdy night, and the bar would get taken over, and that would be a ruined recording. You don't want someone's random conversation and yelling, but thankfully that was rare.
Let's zoom in on the mics and the mixer a little bit. How many channels do you have on the new mixer?
The mixer has four mic channels. The channels have switches with three different impedances. They have UTC A-10 input transformers. There's a high pass filter, probably around 60 hertz, that doesn't do much. There's a phase switch. The big thing is a variable input pad. If I have a tube mic in front of a guitar amp, it can get super loud, and I don't have to click around on pads. I set it and get my mix on the four knobs. Then there's five-way panning. It also has two line inputs, and sometimes I have a box with step-up transformers – basically passive DIs in reverse – that dumps into the mix bus as well. Say I use the [AKG] C 12s on the bottom of a Hammond B3. There's enough gain there, and I don't need a preamp. I'll use a step-up transformer dumped into the bus. It's clearer. That's a Roy DuNann thing – skip the preamp. My next mixer will have a switch to take the preamp out of the circuit, so I can turn it more into a passive mixer. A lot of times, especially using active mics, I don't need a preamp – I can just have an input transformer that goes into the bus.
No EQ?
No EQ. I can't really hear EQ with headphones. I mix with headphones set really quiet, so if I take the headphones off the music in the room is much louder. I can't really hear much, and it's uncomfortable if they get too loud, so I'm just looking at the meters. The mixer has my Delta preamps on the bus, and then a BG1 bus compressor built in. If a saxophone's playing, and I see the compression go way down, it's too loud. On the Nagra, I'll pick out a part where the bass plays solo, and I'll see the meter move on that side, and I'll know the bass is there. Later on, I'll transfer through a pair of Avedis [E12G] graphic EQs. If the bass is too loud, I'll push it down on the side that it's panned to. If the guitar is too low, I'll bump up 1 kHz or such and it's better. Everything's hard-panned, so I can do a lot with those EQs later to pound it into shape. In some rooms there's bass build up, so in the headphones there's no way I can hear any low end. So, that's the workings of it. I also have a sidecar with four extra mic pres and two extra line inputs that I sometimes use.
