You started working in college radio. Were you doing recordings at the radio station or DJing?
It was actually the beginnings of public radio. The radio station that I started at in Pittsburgh was an interesting station in that it had been on air five days a week, five hours per day, at 5,000 watts, and the antenna was five feet below average terrain. Then along came the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and they started seeding all these public radio stations. By the time I got there it was in its first year as a 25,000-watt stereo station. We covered the tri-state area of West Virginia, a portion of Ohio, and western Pennsylvania. I saw it go from 12 hours a day to 18 hours a day; I left just as it went to 24 hours a day. It was my first job out of college; I spent roughly a year and a half working as an engineer. I had my FCC license and all that. I was also producing the morning public affairs slot from 10 to noon every day, five days a week. Then I oversaw the jazz announcers at night. Occasionally when someone was sick, I'd have to go and do a two-hour shift. It was great training.
I'd imagine. Are you a musician yourself?
My major in college was music education, so my major was French horn. You had to have a minor too, and mine was piano. My parents made me get my education degree, the old 'just in case, you can go teach.' The funny thing is that I'm the last of five of my siblings, and they're all teachers. They're all retired; they laugh at me now because in September I have to go back to teach school.
How long was it into your career when you started teaching?
I was with NPR from '74 to '80. I left there and freelanced from 1980 to 2003. In fall 2003, we started the Clive Davis Institute. It's now been ten years. I still freelance and engineer, but the primary work I do is at the Institute.
How did you get handpicked for the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music?
It was a very funny meeting. I was co-chairing the AES convention with Zoe Thrall back in 2003. I went by her office [at The Hit Factory]. I was being considered for a job at another university. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her I was waiting on this other job. She told me to hold on a second. Troy Germano was there [The Hit Factory's owner], so she said, "Let me get Troy in here." Troy came in, flipped open his phone and said, "No, that's not what you're going to do. This is what we're going to do." He called the Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and said, "I've got the guy you've been looking for." He flipped the phone closed and told me that I was going to get the job. The Dean called the next day. I went down and had an interview that was almost two hours long. I had 10 pages of questions and research that I'd done over the course of the weekend. She looked at it and said, "You've done some research on us, haven't you?" I said, "Of course I have!" So I grilled them as much as they grilled me. The funny thing was that about a week or two later, I was in the studio and I got an email from this other institution that wanted to offer me the job. It turned out that the fellow who was supposed to send out the email to me went on vacation, so it was delivered two weeks late. In that two weeks was when NYU found out about me. That's how things can change so quickly!
Just one phone call.
Yeah. My friend at the other institution said, "You mean if I had sent you that note, you'd be with us?" I said, "Oh yeah, that's exactly what would have happened." I didn't have to sell the house and move and all that. One of the deans once said to me back in the early days, "You don't understand the significance of this. No one ever gets to start a program at a university. You always step into a program that's been running for 50 or 60 years. You're in such a unique position." I was a visiting professor my first year, and then I was the chair for four years. Now I'm a full professor with tenure there, so it's very cool.
Nice. Did you have to build the curriculum concept?
We built it and we've taken it down and changed it. In fact, we had to build all four years of curriculum as we went, and then we'd look at it and see what worked and what needed changing. We've had to mold the curriculum to match the changing times. I think that's one reason why people watched us. I was once told by the head at USC that we were their main competition. I said, "What do you mean? We've only been up for two or three years!" He said, "No, we've been watching you guys." I think we've set the modern mold for what a music program could be, because it's a more holistic program, with music business, production, and criticism all wrapped into one. You don't just come out as a businessperson, or an engineer, or a producer. We're looking for somebody who can stand on their own two feet and figure out what they want to do.
Yeah. I've heard from people that it's a very well-rounded academic path.
I have to say, we've hired an excellent faculty. Everybody has their specialty. We have diverse engineers, excellent businesspeople, excellent history and criticism people. Everybody's been cherry-picked for their abilities.
How many students go through the program and graduate each year?
We started out thinking about roughly 32 per year, and we're now at something like 48 a year. But we read close to 400 applications for those 48 or so slots.
How do students get picked?
Well, we have an interesting application. We ask for a statement of intent, which is essentially for us to see if they know what we're about and how they'd fit into the program. Then we ask for a desert island disc, like, "If you were on a desert island, what ten tunes would you take with you? Write about one of them." From that we get a sense of their tastes, as well as their ability to write and think. We try to get a fairly well- rounded population, in terms of gender, geographic location, and music sensibility. We don't want all 18- year old guitar players. We try to get songwriters, journalists, and vocalists.
How many bands end up starting during the course of a year?
Quite a few. We have a very interesting thing, and I think some other universities are starting to take this up. We have something called a capstone, which is a project that students spend their senior year working on. Our students are not just thinking about what they're going to do when they graduate, or what they can do for a job. They actually have something to do with their hands and minds. They could be recording their album, or a friend's band. Or they could be creating a label, bringing five bands they know onto the label, and cultivating a certain aesthetic. One of my advisees was a student from Hawaii; she wanted to go back and live there, but nobody was really servicing the film industry with all of the music from Hawaii. So I said, "Okay, what if we expand it and think of Pacific Rim and go down to Micronesia?" That became her capstone, and her idea is to license this music for television, radio, and whatnot. She can use all this music that she knows about and try to get people talking about it, because there hasn't been anybody who is doing that. We try to get them to see what unique position they can put themselves in.
It's not about wrapping up school; it's about starting your career and your life. That's a cool thing.
You could treat it as an exercise. Or, if you're smart, you think about what you're going to do beyond that and take it from there. Fortunately most of our students actually take it that way. Another thing they do is present their capstone in front of an industry panel. If our faculty have done their jobs right, there will be people on the panel who are interested in these ideas. We have students who sometimes walk away with a prospect, an investor, or a job.
That's pretty unique. You've recorded a lot of different genres, but you seem to always be working with a lot of live, performance-based music, as well as a lot of acoustic-based instruments, right?
Well, you know, it's funny. I learned a long time ago that if you're not working on music you like, you aren't going to be a very happy camper. You're not even going to like the people you're working with, frankly. In college, I was essentially a jazzer. We had a jazz band, and I played lead French horn at Duquesne University. We had two French horn players, myself and another guy named Steve Irwin. We'd write stuff that had these wonderful French horn lines just sailing over the trombone section and everything. When I had a chance to go to NPR, I was probably the only engineer at the time that actually had a music degree, could read a score, and could play an instrument. So I got a lot of the music projects that were coming up. One of the shows was called Jazz Alive. I recorded the opening show for that series, which was Ella Fitzgerald in New Orleans. There's a track on a record, We All Love Ella: Celebrating the First Lady of Song, and it's the encore of Ella's concert where Stevie Wonder comes up and sings "You Are The Sunshine of My Life" with Ella Fitzgerald. I present it to students to say, "Here, this is my first professional jazz recording." Two tracks, 7.5 ips, no noise reduction, no backup, no nothing. I play it and I say, "Here it is." Now, imagine yourself three or four years from now, and this is your assignment. That was my job. So when you come back to work and have something like that in your hand, you can't do anything wrong. That was a weekly show, and we needed a lot of material. In doing that show, I got to meet people like Phil Woods and his producer Bill Goodwin. I went on to record probably six or seven albums with Phil; maybe even more, now that I think about it. I also met Toshiko Akiyoshi and Lew Tabakin; I still work with them. I met them back in '79, or something like that, at a live show at Carnegie Hall.
Do you think people saw you could handle any kind of pressure?
Well, that's the thing about broadcast. You have to be good, fast, and right on top of things. With this Toshiko concert, I was onstage at Carnegie Hall setting the mics for Jack DeJohnette on drums and George Duvivier on bass. The front line was Lew Tabakin, Curtis Fuller on trombone, and Dizzy Gillespie. I went out there and set the microphone nice and high. I pointed it up where Dizzy's trumpet would be. He looked at me, smiled and nodded like, "You're right. That's where it goes." That was the kind ofworkIwasdoingwhenIwas26or27.I'dgoback and in three or four more hours, it was on the air nationwide. It was essentially working without a net. You're on the air. Also, at the same time, I was doing All Things Considered. I even did Morning Edition when it came on. I did press conferences and long-form sound documentaries, because I was interested in that stuff. Noah Adams and I originally proposed a show on stock car racing. We thought it would be fun to go to Daytona and do a documentary on stock car racing in stereo. Scott Simon ended up doing the show, and it was Scott's first long-term piece. I was co-producing with Deborah Amos, who now is reporting from Syria for NPR. If you can imagine, we were all 23, 24, 25, or 26 years old. Carl Kasell was the "old" guy. We would come up with these crazy ideas of things to do. We didn't have any multitracks in-house, so I had to use separate 2-channel machines. I'd try to make these difficult mixes together. I'd have ten different 2-track machines running, with effects, background, and narration; and I had to roll this all in and mix it live. It was a great experience. Then we went on to do another series that I produced with a few other guys from NPR, called Segovia, where we went to Spain and spent six months with [Andres] Segovia in Madrid and all over Spain. There's actually a pretty picture on my Facebook page of me in 1982 standing at Segovia's desk, and he's signing a picture that's now hanging on my wall in my office at NYU. But again, these were projects that were ideas we came up with and said, "This is something we have to do on the radio."
It seems like budget cuts have killed wonderful creativity like this.
Yeah. In fact I just finished a project with Jane Ira Bloom, her Sixteen Sunsets album. We mixed in surround and did a playback for her yesterday of the final mastering. She said that she loved the pacing of the record. It was funny, because I was listening to it at my desk and I'd have notes for the mastering people saying, "No, half a beat more here. Two more beats here." She told me it was my radio background doing that. It's the kind of pacing that other people don't pay attention to. It all comes together at some point.
