Adventures in New Orleans Part 1

The Year is 2012. We pitched 30 production music tracks to our publisher Audio Network, across 6 genres. We expected them to accept a few., then they said yes to everything!

Where to even start?

This is the first of our series documenting our adventures recording in New Orleans. 

Part 1 takes us back to our first trip in 2012/2013 - looking at the writing, and recording process and the fun we had along the way!  From Jazz through Blues and Cajun, to an explanation of how we wrote a piece in 10 minutes at the end of a session...

#podcast #musicpodcast #composerpodcast #productionmusic #librarymusic #musicindustrypodcast #filmmusic #jazz #neworleansjazz #musicindustry

Transcript

David (00:05.102)

We're going to be talking about the year 2012. Think back, Jeffrey. 2012.

Jeff

I remember something about a brief. We were pitching an idea to Audio Network once again, to go to New Orleans to do some recording. And I believe the brief said something like 30 pieces of music crossing six different genres over four days.

David

Yeah, and I don't think at the beginning we thought they'd say yes to 30 pieces of music. We thought they would probably say, let's do some of that.

Jeff

We wanted to make it worth their while. That's pretty much why we-

David

Well, that was the pitch. And then they said...

Jeff

They said, yeah. And we were like, okay.

David

It was at this point, Your Honor, that I lost my presence of mind. 

Jeff

Hi, I’m Jeff Meegan.

David

And I'm David Tobin.

Jeff

And this is Two Composers Two Continents

Appropriately let's call this section, What Were We Thinking? 

David

That is true.

Jeff

Okay, so what needs to happen here, right? You just got a gig to do 30 pieces of music in a place you've never recorded before or even been, really, because you hadn't even been there.

David (01:20.364)

No, and can you remember, I mean, off the top of your head, can you remember what genres we were talking about? We can figure this out together.

Jeff

Yeah, it was New Orleans blues, trad jazz, instrumental pieces. There was Cajun and Zydeco. There was some media like New Orleans based media music, which, you know, it's just like, dramedy kinda stuff.

David (01:44.566)

Yeah, and then we did some sort Dr. John swampy stuff. And then we did some spirituals. Yeah. So this was hugely varied. And how did you feel? You take this brief. And I mean, what were your emotions?

Jeff (02:01.46)

I was frightened, you know, I was just scared. We'd never done it before. Never done a remote recording before.

David

You mean as in remote, as in going to a place you've not been.

Jeff

Yes, we'd recorded either, you know, in the UK where you are or in Chicago where I am, but we'd never gone someplace that neither of us had recorded. And then we were on the line. They said yes to four days of recording 30 pieces of music, I mean, that is that's insane. 

David

What were you thinking? 

Jeff

Oh my God. So I was I was a little stressed out. But before we even get to that, yeah, let's talk about why we wanted to go to New Orleans in the first place.

David (02:44.558)

Well, for me, I'm going to talk about, as I so often do, talk about me. I remember, I mean, being nine years old and having a record, a vinyl record that my dad bought me. And it was a record of some Disney tunes. One of the tunes on it was, what's it called? I Want to Be Like You.

Jeff

From the Bare Necessities?

David

No, it was, it was, I want to be like you. It was Louis Prima and the band singing, I want to be like you. And Louis Prima is, you know, this is the NOLA sound, the NOLA sound. And I wore this thing out. I was just mesmerized by it and over and over and over again. They must have been sick of it in my house, but I love this thing. There's just something about that sound to me that it says both authentic, but live but it just spoke to me and there was just something about it and it's always been that way for me. Also in my teens I had a bunch of Dr John pieces, I just loved that rolling piano sound. I don't know, it just spoke to me and I was always, also the costumes and seeing pictures of it always seemed so different from my world, always fascinated by it. So what about me, what about you?

Heff

Yeah, much the same. I mean, from a young age, I do remember, God, being very young, being in the school library and coming across a book about New Orleans or maybe it was a magazine and seeing the French Quarter. And there's no place else in America that really looks like that. And I was pretty fascinated by that. But then musically, I mean, both my parents were musicians and, you know, I had always had that kind of music going on in my house, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. I those were, those are just music that I and so many other people grew up with, right? But then when Harry Met Sally came out and Harry Connick Jr. came on the scene thanks to that soundtrack. And that was like, wow, so this guy is our age and he's playing this music that, you know, was always cool, but now it's even cooler.

David

I didn't even know until not that long ago that he was even, well, at the time I didn't know that he was a New Orleans guy.

Jeff

I remember an interview with him because of that soundtrack, and it was in New Orleans, they were doing the interview. And you could hear the steamboat whistle going behind him. He referenced it in the interview. Like, here we are in New Orleans. And I was like, wow, that's just so, it's a magical place.

David

Yeah, for me, my emotion going back to that about when we knew we were going to do this, I had the terror like you had the terror. I was certainly uncomfortable thinking what were we thinking? How are we going to write so much music? But as so often in my lack of zen-ness, I immediately thought, what about the process of all of this? How do we even approach doing all this? Not just the writing, but all of it.

And we knew from very early on that Andrew Sunnocks was going to be coming with us, the founder and chairman of Audio Network. And I just didn't wanna look like an idiot.

Jeff (05:58.018)

That ramped it up a little bit.

David

Oh yeah, and you know, we're on the on the line for all the money and but also just don't want to look like a fool. Yeah. But you know, normally you've got some sense of stability of, OK, well, we'll pick people we know. You know, the safety. But there was nothing

Jeff

That did not exist.

David

No. So we ended up talking to a contractor.

Jeff (06:20.642)

Well, let's go through the process. Listen, I'm just going to read these really quickly. We need to find a contractor, understand the recording rules. We needed to find a studio. We needed to agree the musicians, find musicians, find singers, write 30 pieces of music across six genres, get them approved, do demos, do the music prep and then bring them home and mix them.

David (06:47.79)

Yeah, you just... Where? What were we thinking?

Jeff

So how did this process begin then?

David

We needed to start with where are we gonna record it, who's gonna help us find musicians, how are we gonna do that bit, because it was all wrapped up, because normally where we record isn't related to how we find the musicians, in that sense, you've got an independent contractor. But what we ended up finding, I think we hugely lucked in in this case, was a studio where the producer in the studio happened to also be a contractor.

Jeff

The owner of the studio.

David

Yeah, the owner of the excuse me. And his name is Mark Bingham. And this was Piety Studio. And I rang Mark after we'd talked about it and looked at things. And some of the credit lists and things that had gone through the studio were really legit. That was the thing for me, that looking at a studio where Dr. John had recorded some stuff, where the brass bands had recorded.

Jeff

Yeah, there was a history there.

David

Yeah, John Fishwick who worked at the studio had credits on Songs in the Key Alive I felt safe that we were in the right place But still I mean you're taking a big risk you're booking all these musicians on his say so and you try and look people up and find out what they've done and but still yeah.

Jeff

Mind you, I mean, it's not that long ago. What year was this? We said 2012.

David

Well we recorded in 2013 but 2012 when we were doing the prep work

Jeff

Yeah, maybe even 11 too. I mean it sounds like maybe more, but the internet wasn't quite as robust as it is today, right? Not everyone had a web page. Not everyone had stuff on, you know, so accessible to listen to.

David (08:30.174)

But also you've got to bear in mind that some of the musicians in this there is a sort of the overlapping if you will venn diagram of the musicians that would have web pages that you would then listen to stuff or there'd be information on. It wasn't necessarily like that . And this takes us to another issue when finding these musicians that Mark was very upfront when I spoke to him. He said, I remember this, the tricky bit was that a lot of the musicians you might work with to create the sound of the city were not music readers. And we needed, you know you've got four days, you've got to have this process down tight. 

Jeff

Yeah, we needed people to read music.

David

But you want people who read it but also have the authenticity, the reality of the sound.

Jeff (09:15.852)

Sure. Which really, I mean really, that probably helped us out because that made the pool of people to use much smaller.

David

Yes, it did. So then we've got a list of musicians that we're going to work with and we checked out availabilities and we've got all of that. I remember speaking to him and saying, what about the union rules? What about how much can we do? What can we overdub? Because in other cities there's very specific rules. And at that time, I remember there just being a little silence on the phone and then he laughed.

Jeff

“You don't have to worry about it.” 

David

I'm not sure it's the same now, but certainly then. And I don't know how I felt about that. I felt kind of like, what are we walking into here? It felt like another world.

Jeff

Well, yeah, I mean it was definitely another world. There's no question about that.

David (10:06.347)

But what about singers?

Jeff

So, well it was much the same, right? I mean, he referred singers to us and we tried to do as much research as we could about people. So we had gentleman by name of Big Al Carson who was a pretty popular dude down there, right? And he was on Bourbon Street all the time.

We had Meschiya Lake who is still down there singing. Just amazing voice, just so unique.

David

And in the Cajun world we had a Zydeco guy called Carol Berzas.

David (11:01.742)

We also had a group to do the spirituals that we talked about, the Friendly Travelers. 

Jeff

I keep hitting the microphone sorry folks.

David

A four-piece singing group. 

Jeff (11:20.558)

Wendell Brunious who was our lead trumpet player for the whole project but he also at the time was one of the head guys at Preservation Hall.

David

Yeah, we were supposed to have Al sing this song that when he then sang, it just wasn't the right style for him to sing. 

Jeff

It was the wrong vibe for him yeah.

David

But the information on that singing, he was being guided by Wendell. And eventually as Wendell was guiding him and singing lines to him to guide him, we eventually I remember said, but you're singing it. How would you feel?

Jeff (12:03.478)

Yeah, how would you feel about singing this?

David

He was not jazzed about the idea to start with. 

Jeff

He was a little shy. 

David

Reluctant. But we are getting well ahead of ourselves here. We should talk about the logistics.

Jeff

So well, I mean, before we do that, let's talk about, don't we need to talk about writing all this stuff or how it all happened?

David

Probably, yes.

Well, I mean, ideas were flying about all over the place.

Jeff

The big thing that worried me was actually getting enough material, good material to record over these days, you know.

David (12:34.87)

I seem to remember we weren't sending each other at this stage fully formed, finished, long things. We were sending very short snippets. Is this worth pursuing? And they were going both ways all the time over very slow internet at my stage, which is hard to send stuff.

Jeff (12:50.946)

I mean, it's such a vast and rich, you know, part of music, jazz music and the brass band stuff. mean, there's just so much involved. The New Orleans backbeat drum stuff. I mean, there's so many things that you could bring to it.

David

I didn't know, I mean I should say that my process personally, I didn't grow up with that all of that stuff I grew up with some of the styles but not all of them so I spent a fair amount of time locked away just listening. Repetitive listening until I felt like I really understood where we're going here and I'm not sort of just picking a style and trying to approximate.

Jeff

Right. I mean, I had been listening to this stuff my whole life. I mean, we talked about the Cajun, Zydeco stuff. I was a big little feet fan and that they do a lot of that kind of stuff.

David

Yeah that was all new to me.

Jeff

Squirrel nut zippers. I love them, which has a real sort of dark New Orleans sound. And I mean, certainly here, Connick Jr. and, you know, all the, know, Satchmo stuff. I mean, there's a lot to it yes. That's a wide range of music to pull from.

David (13:54.926)

And I mean some of that stuff I was really intimately familiar with and some of it I mean like the Cajun and zydeco stuff I mean we said we were gonna do this stuff, and then I thought okay. 

Jeff

I don’t know how to do it. I don't even like this music.

David

Yeah. Well, I it was more I just I don't know this yeah, and then I suddenly had a I've agreed to do something that I'm not quite there with. So a lot of listening.

Jeff (14:23.128)

Again, back to the top, what were we thinking?

David

There were a lot of ideas flying about from each other and so you send an idea to me I send an idea to you. How do we then proceed with that?

Jeff

I do remember we were throwing demos together left and right. I mean, there was a lot of, you know, I'll work on this, you work on that. And then we kind of meet in the middle. And then unfortunately, a huge amount of the work fell on you just to get it on paper, just to be able to bring it down because that's not my gig.

David

And then at that stage, the arranging part of that, that's where I suddenly start thinking, I don't want to approximate any of this. So I start becoming really nitpicky about listening to voicings and lengths of intros, I mean some of the notice stuff there's some really really long intros on songs before you get anywhere near a vocal right and so that's part of the style, it's part of the field, so that's what we do. And it doesn't matter whether it's TV music. I’m not giving that a second thought in those areas. This is about being true to the style.

Jeff (15:30.043)

To the region.

David

So we're listening to specifics of instrumentation, of voicing, of lengths of different sections, all of that stuff. And then, yeah, then it's paper time when we get to that. 

Jeff

Paper time. 

David

And then I had a meltdown and I remember having a moment, bearing in mind at this stage, we'd probably been writing together maybe 18 months, two years. But not 15 years. And I think I can't do all of this. I'm doing 18 hour days at this stage and I can't do, this is just...

Jeff

Oh right, so alluding to Freddie right?

David (16:11.188)

Yes, we're going to need, and I think I feel bad because you know, we're already writing as a two and then and part of my gig in this is arranging. And I have to ring you and say, I think we need another arranger to do bits of this because I just can't get it all done. And I remember feeling that I look like a schmuck bringing in somebody else. We rang our great friend, Tim Garland, and said, who can you recommend? What you got in the back? 

Jeff

Yeah who’d you got in the back?

David

And he recommended... Freddy Gavita.

Jeff

Freddie is great. Is he still in the Ronnie Scott's band? 

David

Yeah. Yep, still going strong with all of that stuff. And we've worked with him many times since. And so he took on three or four of the arrangements, I think, can't remember, something like that. And it was such a help, such a relief because just there's only so much before you're gonna miss a beat, you're not gonna be creative, you can't get it done.

Jeff

I'm sure there's a weight off the shoulders. I know. For me too, just to get the stuff done. I he's like, we got to go...

David

I mean there was only one of the tunes that I was really comfortable I could get done just thinking about it which was When The Saints Go Marching In because I wrote one bar, I wrote the title and said please play When The Saints Go Marching In. And that was literally what was on the page. And when we did that just jumping forwards and they hit record they said we got this. I always felt slightly bad because it was not our arrangement but hey.

Jeff (17:43.214)

So anyway, so let's move forward. So let's talk about the recording and just the day. You show up the first day of recording and what happens?

17:55

David

The outside of the studio, there's no sign. It's in a pretty rundown neighbourhood. There's no signs on the door. There's nothing to say welcome to a studio. I was even unsure we were in the right place and we walk in and there's, I mean, there was an engineer there maybe. I don't know.

Jeff

He was there making coffee in the kitchen.

David

Yeah, but that was it. There were no musicians and we get to the time that we're going to start and we're used to it's 10 o'clock, go. Everybody's in their seats, go. And we get to 10 o'clock and nobody turns up.

Nobody, not one person. And we get to 10 past 10, to quarter past 10, to half past 10. 

Jeff

They're strolling in slowly.

David

Yeah. And then they get there and then most of them said, just going to go for a smoke.

Jeff (18:36.994)

They go out back and they're sitting at the picnic table having a smoke and talking.

David

And you know what, Andrew Sunnocks didn't say anything, he just raised an eyebrow. And I felt like...ohhh.

Jeff

But in the end, that's was just how, you know, how at that time for this particular session and in our conversations, I kind of discovered, I think a lot of this was how it was presented to them. Just as a, “hey guys, I got a gig for you guys. Come on by.” But they weren't they weren't concerned about when they finished. They were like you know -

David

Yeah, was a, this was a just a, there was a NOLA time kind of thing that you do it and we're here now, we do it. But in fairness, I had conversations with a couple of the musicians who've become great friends who said that once they saw how carefully we'd planned what we were doing and how it was charted and the great songs that we'd written and all of that stuff, it became more, okay, we're going to really, -

Because there is a little warming up process in this. It was not like other recordings we've done. It was much more fluid.

Jeff

Yes, there was a lot of producing on the fly and just making it sound the way it should sound within the constraints of what the dots we had on the page.

David

Yeah, and there were some musicians there. I mean, there were some colourful characters. 

Jeff

Oh my god, so great,

David

I mean, Chaz Leary on washboard.

Jeff

Chaz. Washboard Chaz. He has a washboard and a little bicycle bell on the top and a tin can.. And so we're playing whatever song he's playing going... Then PING. It's the bell and we're both like - 

David (20:11.374)

And I remember Andrew saying to him, so why have you got your name on the board? And he just said, “marketing”. It's fantastic. 

Jeff

Oh man so what an adventure.

David

Absolutely. And we spent that time doing the styles that were not Cajun with those musicians. But then we had a changeover when the Cajun musicians came in. It was people who were from that style.

Jeff (20:36.514)

And really it was, I think it was only three tunes, right? But yeah, we brought in an accordion player and fiddle player and Carol came in to sing.

David

Oh there's a funny story with that. So, I mean, I'd left you with lyric writing on that stuff. That was all you. And yeah, and they, I think they, it's a beautiful lyric you came up with was, euden daden day, euden duuden daden day. So it's genius. And I mean, I did think he was going to approximate that. And then, yeah, I mean, he came in with a sheet.

Jeff

He literally wrote out...

David

Yeah, syllable by syllable. And it was there. Absolutely brilliant.

Jeff

So the four days have gone amazingly gone by right? And well, we had a of vocal days at the end. Tell us a little bit about, certainly big Al.

David (21:31.394)

Yeah, I mean Big Al was such a character. I mean, not related to his vocals, but he was called Big Al because he's in US terms, he was probably at least 500 pounds. And in UK terms, I mean, he was pushing 40 plus stone. So, I mean, he was an imposing character, but just such a lovely man. But I don't know, I don't want to speak out of turn. I don't know how much schooling he'd had. So reading words was not his strong point.

Certainly computers, not a thing. Going back to when you want somebody to learn a tune, now you email things backwards and forwards. And I spoke to him on the phone and I said to him, so how do you want things? And he said, can you sing me the tunes?

Jeff

So do you what you were singing the tunes to him over the phone do you think he was he was recording them?

22:35

David

I think he was recording a voice memo. At the time that did not occur to me. I just thought yeah, I just feel like an idiot. I'm just singing to you down a phone. Where is this going? And yeah. 

Jeff

I mean the amazing part of that story is that when he came in the studio, he knew he was the only one who knew what the hell was going on as far as the vocalists. I mean, everyone did a fantastic job, but he knew every word. I mean, he had practiced those tunes.

David (22:46.414)

But I think probably because of that that was his process and then he got completely that was how he learned. But yeah, they were on it. Recording with Al, that was different from any other vocal recording I think I've ever been a part of. I was wide-mouthed watching that.

David (23:15.906)

And then recording with Meschiya was a wonderful process because she just had such a laid back, different way of doing things.

Jeff

Just such a unique sound to her voice.

David

Yep.

Jeff (23:38.28)

She sounds like Billie Holiday to me. 

David

Yeah, she sounds 35 years older than her age, don't think? I mean, was just completely different. And Carol, yeah, we've spoken about the Friendly Travelers, that was a kick. We'd got four vocalists in a room and we realised very quickly that the arrangements that we'd written, this was not gonna be read, it just wasn't their thing, that these are guys who work in the gospel field of, you know, within a church scenario that reading these arrangements wasn't going to work. So I remember standing in the middle of them and just constantly turning circles and singing them a line. They would sing it back and singing another line and we pieced it together and did that until we got to doing things like Wade in the Water when we listened again to a demo and then they just said, I've got this. 

David

And then I don't remember the guy's name but the guy was singing bass. He said I've got an idea. And he just sang a bass line over it that was like he was a bass guitar. It's a fantastic time. 

Jeff

Towards the end of the writing process that came, I wrote a song called I Climbed, which was, wrote the song about someone overcoming the crazy experience of Katrina, right? 

David

Which was only what, eight years before? 

Jeff

Eight years before, yeah, something like that, And just, you know, so it talked about the suffering and still rising and I climbed at the end. Nothing's gonna keep me down. I'm gonna climb and this and that. So it was a cool song, you know, and -

David

Did we have a vocalist planned for that at that time?

Jeff

I don’t know. I thought the travelers were going to try and do it or one of them but – 

David

It just didn't work out.

Jeff

So we got back to Chicago, I got a guy named Lacey Brown, who John Blaine gave us or introduced us to.

David (26:13.966)

And John Blaine we've worked with as a musician, he was also the music prep person out of out of Chicago.

Jeff

Yeah. So Lacey Brown was great and he came into the studio and he sang that and he sang Great Big Smile.

And then he did I Climbed, which was total and other end of the spectrum of as far as songs are concerned. And so as I was driving him back to the train because he took the train up, he told me this that he had cancer and he'd been fighting cancer for years and that this song literally described his dealing with cancer. So I just thought, my God, this is such a beautiful and he was like, this song is a gift that came to me and it gets me little choked up talking about it.

David (27:07.79)

I don't think I've ever told you this, but I remember when we came back and we'd got all of these songs and I'd got all these songs and I played them all to my family and at that stage my son, who are now two sons, but at that stage one, and he was mesmerized by that song and he said, play it again, play it again, play it again. He was only young, he was maybe four five, put that song on. He didn't even have to name it. 

Jeff

Wow, that's so cool. 

David

And used to go round and round and listen over and over and over. Yeah he loved it.

Jeff

So, yeah, a very special, unexpected moment.

David

So one last quick thing we should talk about from the session, because one of the pieces of music we didn't write, I mean, before the session. So we got 10 minutes before the end of a session, just a funny story. We’d kind of finished. And then I can't remember whether you said it or I said it. Somebody said, anything we didn't cover from the whole world of... 

Jeff (28:02.99)

Of New Orleans, the New Orleans Canon.

David

And what did they say? How did it go? Somebody said...

Jeff

The meters? Do something like the meters and we're like, okay.

David

Has anybody got a riff or a thing and this was a collaboratively I think our piano player Larry Siebert played a riff and then then Matt Perrine on Sousaphone actually, I think it was bass.

Jeff

Yeah I think we sang a couple lines out, can you do something like this?

David

Yeah, and we took a 10-minute wrote something, recorded it

David

It’s been used many times. God bless you for my mortgage payments. But yeah, was just so organic, so wonderful.

Jeff (28:50.752)

And what a great way to finish all those crazy, crazy days of recording is to just throw something together at the very end.

David

And what was your final abiding memory coming out of all of that?

Jeff

Final abiding memory, it was just, it was such a learning experience. I can't even explain how much we learned about the recording process, about preparing. That was the most valuable part about it. Some of the greatest music that we've written, I think, I just love listening to so much of that stuff. And then, I wanted to come back and do it again.

David

Yeah, and you know one of the things I think I got from that trip was that I learned to trust myself and my instincts and to trust you and your instincts. If it doesn't feel right, it isn't. And if it does, then don't second guess it. If it feels right, it's right. And I learned that from that trip. Yeah, that and Andrew Sunnocks doesn't like grits, but that's another story for another day.

Jeff

There you have it. Well, we hope you guys learn something and enjoy us spouting on about our adventures in New Orleans. Who knows? There may be another podcast about New Orleans.

David (29:58.882)

Yeah, we've been a few times. More stories. Until the next time.

Jeff

Thank you so much. 

Special thank you to Audio Network for allowing us to use the music you heard on today's podcast. We'd also like to dedicate this podcast to the late Big Al Carson and Lacey Brown. Now here's Lacey singing, I Climbed.