Does the Overdub Undercut Jazz?

In 2002, jazz pianist Brad Mehldau released Largo. His most experimental--and best--record, it was produced by Jon Brion, celebrated for his film scores and his production of Fiona Apple’s records. It’s a real studio record--it doesn’t sound “live” at all. Here’s an example: Mehldau’s exquisite, moving, and effects-heavy cover of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android.”

Inside the packaging appears the following statement. “All music was recorded live, on the floor. There were no overdubs.”

Why not? Because overdubs are more or less forbidden in jazz. They smack of inauthenticity. Jazz is music improvised live; if you overdub, you’re not really interacting with your fellow musicians. You’re faking it. Do a google search on “jazz” and “no overdubs” if you don’t believe me. Practically every aspiring jazz artist proclaims loudly that they don’t overdub. Ever.

What most people don’t know is that the first overdubbed record was made by one of the giants of jazz, and it was truly a jazz record: Sidney Bechet’s One Man Band’s 1941 “The Sheik of Araby.” This was done in the era before multitrack audiotape, so the fidelity grows worse and worse as Bechet layers on each instrument (soprano and tenor sax, clarinet, bass, drums, and piano). The American Federation of Musicians was so outraged by the record that they banned overdubbing for years. As for multitrack recording, it was invented by a jazz musician, Les Paul, whose most famous overdubbed recording was his absolutely wild 1947 “Lover,” featuring eight guitars recorded at various speeds.

Here are a few more landmarks in jazz overdubbing.

For Lennie Tristano’s 1955 “Line Up,” Tristano had the bass (Peter Ind) and drum (Jeff Morton) parts recorded first, then altered the tape speed and overdubbed his piano part.

Miles Davis’s 1957 masterpiece Miles Ahead relied extensively on overdubs. Here’s the ebullient “I Don't Wanna Be Kissed (By Anyone But You).” As Loren Schoenberg explains, “during the taping of the orchestral track for ‘I Don't Wanna Be Kissed,’ Davis unexpectedly played a few random portions of his solo. Months later at the overdub session, he had to tailor new passages to lead in and out of what he had already played on the prerecorded track. During five attempts, Davis used a variety of rhetorical devices (many borrowed from his mentor, Lester Young) to solve a musical problem.” In other words, the Miles Davis playing you hear was stitched together from six different takes, five of which were overdubs.

When Dave Lambert & His Singers, who would soon become Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, recorded their debut album Sing a Song of Basie in 1957, each singer sang his/her part separately, all overdubbed. Here’s “Little Pony” from that record.

Creed Taylor produced not only the Lambert record, but Bill Evans’s 1963 Conversations with Myself, an overdubbed and Grammy-winning three-piano album. But Evans may have been taking a cue from Lennie Tristano’s 1955 “Turkish Mambo,” also featuring three overdubbed piano tracks. Here’s “How About You?” from that record. Conversations with Myself sounds pretty gimmicky at first, but I don’t think Evans’s rhythmic genius was ever put on better display.

Charles Mingus’s 1963 The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady relies on extensive overdubs. The first 2:45 of “Track C: Group Dancers” is recorded straight. At that point, Charlie Mariano’s alto sax begins wailing, the guitar comes in, and the collective improvisation begins. Well, Mariano’s entire 4-minute-plus brilliant alto sax solo was entirely overdubbed.

The overdub never really died. Pharaoh Sanders used it on his 1970 album Thembi. Pat Metheny used overdubs on Bright Size Life and New Chautauqua later that decade. Smooth jazz hasn’t been hesitant about using overdubs, even overdubbing over dead people’s music (e.g. Kenny G overdubbing lame sax solos over Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World,” which caused Pat Metheny to throw a memorable fit.) To conclude, here’s Matthew Shipp’s “Space Shipp,” from his 2002 Nu Bop, on which I surmise, from reading an interview with Shipp, that William Parker’s bass is overdubbed; and Jason Moran’s overdubbed take on Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” from his breathtaking 2002 album Modernistic.

If one sticks to conventional wisdom, there’s something very wrong with all of these tracks. They’re studio gimmicks; they’re not real jazz; they violate the very principles of jazz. They’re fake, phony, inauthentic.

Back in 2002, when The Future of Jazz, a book I edited, came out, I gave an interview about jazz in which I said, “Classical music is a written art form; rock is (or has become) a recorded art form; jazz is a live art form. Of course, this is essentialist thinking, but I do think it gets to the heart of the music. The major appeal of classical music lies in harmony, in the play of resolutions and dissonances. The major appeal of rock music, at least after 1965, lies in the manipulation of electronic sound. And the major appeal of jazz will always lie in improvisation, which really has very little to do with the recording process. Improvisation is done on the spur of the moment, live.”

Here I stated in a concise form jazz’s essentialist position, one which I’m reluctant to deny now. I really do believe that overdubbing goes against jazz’s fundamental nature.

So why do the tracks I’ve posted above sound so good? Why is there more improvisational brilliance on every single one of these tracks than in the mass of Wynton Marsalis’s non-overdubbed records?

Because playing with new technology has always been a fundamental part of jazz too. If Sidney Bechet, Les Paul, Lennie Tristano, and Miles Davis aren’t enough to prove that, just think of the fact that the saxophone was one of the newest instruments around when it became one of the central instruments of jazz, and that both the electric guitar and vibraphone began as jazz instruments. Jazz has always been experimental, cutting-edge.

Studio trickery can get in the way. I find Miles Davis’s studio electric albums, with their splices and cross-fades, less satisfying than his unedited and live cuts from the same period--there’s a momentum to Agharta that Jack Johnson only hints at. Most of Jason Moran’s Modernistic is even better than “Planet Rock,” its only overdubbed cut, and I’d rather hear Sidney Bechet’s small-group sides or Bill Evans’s piano trio over their overdubbed work any day.

But as long as musicians ensure that studio trickery doesn’t interfere with the thrill that great improvising can create, let them use as much studio trickery as they want. Not all, but the majority of the most exciting jazz records of the last decade have been impeccably produced studio products, records that sound in some ways like rock records. Even if presenting something fresh and new occasionally smacks of inauthenticity, its rewards can be irresistible.

- Yuval

Comments

[Hugh Barker]

It's an interesting one. I've known at least two rock bands who've also had issues about overdubs. One band, who were a great live band, used to infuriate their producers by refusing to put anything on the record that they couldn't recreate live. But the result was that the records sounded weak, as a lot of the art of recording rock music is in the overdubs.

With respect to jazz, I can't help feeling that there is a confusion between improvisation and 'single-take' improvisation. I used to record with a trumpet player who would play something different every time you pointed a mike at him. The best thing was to do it over and over till you got a really nice take. Sometimes the final recording would be one take, sometimes it would be cobbled together from a few attempts. But even though it took many overdubs to get the final result, the result was no less improvised, as each time he was improvising.

I can understand that a jazz band is often reacting to each other as they go along, and this creates some of the most interesting improvisations, but to make a great record, I can't see any harm in going back and improving on the first take (or on the best take). But I'm not a jazz purist though...

[John]

I'm curious to know the lineage of the electric guitar. I had thought that it started in western swing, which doesn't get put in the jazz bins at record stores (though maybe it should).

[Yuval Taylor]

I view overdubbing as very different from choosing from multiple takes, because it eliminates the interaction with other musicians. And as Miles Davis attempted to prove with Kind of Blue (and Neil Young with Tonight's the Night, and Bob Dylan with any number of recordings), the more takes you record, the further away you get from the kind of spontaneity that can lend real magic to a record.

[Yuval Taylor]

As for the electric guitar, the first recordings featuring the instrument were some sides by jazz guitarist George Barnes and Eddie Durham's recordings with the Kansas City Five (featuring Lester Young), all in 1938. The first famous electric guitarist was Charlie Christian, who died in 1942. This preceded the use of electric guitar in western swing outfits.

[john]

The western swingers were amplifying their guitars by the early-mid-'30s.

http://www.texasplayboys.net/Biographies/leon_mcaulife.htm

But these were lap steel guitars, a somewhat different instrument.

[Hugh Barker]

Re overdubbing vs choosing from different takes. I'd agree there's a difference, but you can also choose from different takes of an overdub. So choosing from different takes of the whole band is "OK", but choosing from different takes of one particular instrument is "bad"?

I see the argument but it makes my head hurt. I'm just used to a recording process where the only aim is to get a good final result, no matter what the means. A lot of rock recordings these days overdub everything - you might play the basic instruments together to try and get a good feel, but as often as not you'll only keep the drums and go back to replace everything else later in any case.

It is usually true even then that the more takes (of backing tracks or overdubs) you need for a result the worse it sounds. Though there's a contrary thing here, which is that often you can only record a song quickly and well if you have played it repetitively over a period of time in rehearsal and ideally live. There's exceptions to that of course, but I think that's often one of the things that allows you to be loose and 'spontaneous' in the studio.

(Actually 'Tonight's The Night' mostly sounds under-rehearsed and badly worked out to me, rather than spontaneous, but I won't go on about it...)

[yuval taylor]

In rock recording, the aim certainly is to get the best final result. But in jazz, it's to capture an ephemeral interaction between a group of players. That interaction gives the live jazz recording a spark of something that no overdubbed performance can capture. In a sense, the nine overdubbed MP3 files I posted function as great pop tunes more than as great jazz tunes. I guess I should post a great non-overdubbed jazz tune for comparison's sake? I mean, besides the Brad Mehldau number, which doesn't highlight improvisatory interaction. Or listen to a track from the Wayne Shorter Quartet's last album, Beyond the Sound Barrier, on Napster to get my drift.

[john]

There's a lot of interesting work to be done in figuring out how that "spark of something that no overdubbed performance can capture" actually works.

Some of it has to do with looseness of texture or ensemble, which makes for a more complex listening experience.

But I would guess that there's a sharpness of attack and accenting that occurs when several people are improvising together that may not happen in an overdubbed environment. What people call "energy" or vibe really does affect how musicians play their instruments, in subtle ways that are rarely described but that people hear concretely.

Thanks for stimulating me to think about it. As did your book. So -- thanks.