Claude Bolling - Suite for flute and jazz trio
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This album was recorded in the early nineties of last century. The cover says I play bass. The reality is very different.
The piano player came to my studio and recorded his part without a click on my master keyboard (a Yamaha KX76 semi weighted 76 keys keyboard) connected to my Atari computer. At that time my sequencer was C-Lab Notator. Because he was a pianist not used to play on a semi weighted keyboard he made lots of small slips although he was an excellent musician. I had, then, to clean up his performance looking at the notes on the computer monitor and the original score on paper. Only electronic musicians can imagine what that means!
Once the piano part was done, I added the bass part in real time and the drummer, playing my Yamaha DD5, 4 pads drum midi controller, added his part.
I don’t recall exactly what the midi expanders for keyboard sounds, bass and drum sounds were but I think the drum sounds came from my Alesis HR16 and the other ones came from some Kurzweil expander we probably borrowed.
When the rhythm section was done we moved computer and midi expanders to a recording studio equipped with a 16 tracks tape recorder. We recorded a SMPTE signal on the outermost track of the tape recorder in order to synchronize the computer to the audio ones that we were going to record and started recording, bouncing the midi tracks first and then recording the flute part (the bass flute part was done playing a flute through an Eventide harmonizer).
It took months of work recording both midi tracks and audio ones. The flute player considered this album his album and basically took ownership of it. After lots of discussions I did not keep in touch with him anymore and only recently found out, by chance, that this album was on sale online.
None of the people involved on this project received any compensation (me, the piano player and the recording engineer) for our work. I did not even received a copy of it so, in order to have a copy, I bought it online. At this point you can easily imagine that I do not get any compensation if you buy it. I would suggest you simply listen to it on this Youtube channel.
As Nelson Mandela said: “I never lose. I either win or learn”.
Nevertheless, I am still surprised we were able to get such technical and artistic achievement.