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 October 15, 2006 Chesky Records: 20 Years of Excellence When you remove a Chesky Records CD from its jewel case, an insert asks, "What makes Chesky Recordings so special?" The answer boils down to the answer provided: "We produce the purest, most natural recordings made today." Two paragraphs then briefly clarify how Chesky achieves this level of audio quality: "No overdubs. No compressors in the signal path." And so on. When you play a Chesky disc, you soon realize how much even some of your favorite recordings have been doctored on the way to their final release. For 20 years now, Chesky has maintained its audiophile standard in classical music, jazz, Latin jazz, and the occasional pop recording. Pianist, composer, and label cofounder David Chesky is as well regarded for his talents as a musician as he is for his commitment to faithful recordings. An accomplished jazz composer, he has also studied classical techniques and has built respected bodies of work in both genres. He recorded his first album for Columbia, Rush Hour, in 1980, but his frustration with the record business, including the ways music was recorded, led him to search for a better way. He and his brother Norman established Chesky Records in 1986 with a remastering of pianist Earl Wild’s recording of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2. Disappointed in the sound of the original LP, Chesky had asked Wild if he could hear the master tape.
One of the high points of the set is "Recorda Me," from McCoy Tyner’s New York Reunion (1991). The late tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson composed the tune, and his performance on the disc helped revive his career. David Chesky and engineer Bob Katz recorded New York Reunion in RCA’s Studio A in Manhattan, using a single stereo microphone. Chesky, who believes that good recordings are the result of minimal miking and correct mike placement, had noticed that music sounds natural at the conductor’s podium or the center seat of a jazz club. Modern recording engineers typically mike every instrument, then reconstruct the performance from these multiple tracks. To Chesky, the results sound contrived. He would rather have you experience the actual acoustics of the recording studio, jazz club, or concert hall, the sounds of the instruments coming to you as they would if you were listening to them live. The result, on "Recorda Me," is a realistic sense of where the instruments are in relation to each other, as well as the sound of music taking place in a real room instead of in a deadened studio. And because Chesky records live in the studio, the musicians react to each other and play with more spontaneity. Another impressive example on this sampler is John Faddis’s "Laura," recorded in 1998 with a 14-piece orchestra. The orchestra is naturally placed across the soundstage, the tones of the instruments blending in ways they wouldn’t have had they been individually miked. This recording aesthetic is hardly new. As David Chesky has noted in interviews and on the label’s website, the fine art of microphone placement was second nature to audio engineers in the golden age of hi-fi. Those engineers even knew how to design their own preamplifiers and other equipment as the need arose. In that spirit, Chesky and his recording engineers, such as Katz, have been very particular about the tools they use for their sessions. Although Studio A included state-of-the-art equipment when Chesky began recording there, he and Katz used custom-made gear, even down to the cables.
While Chesky Records is dedicated to audiophile values that one normally associates with analog (tube microphones and preamps, for example), the label has always recorded digitally. And David Chesky is a strong advocate of surround sound who has even recorded a disc, Dr. Chesky’s Musical 5.1 Surround Show, to demonstrate the format’s virtues. By retaining or even resurrecting technologies from the past and adapting them to the innovations and possibilities of digital sound, Chesky Records has managed to retain the warmth and musicality of analog recording while taking advantage of the detail and dynamic range of digital. Pick up a copy of 20th Anniversary Chesky Records for a taste of what the label’s been up to. You won’t like every single track, but Billy Burnette’s version of "Oh, Well" will show you how a rock band should really sound -- and the selections from two of David Chesky’s own projects, The Body Acoustic and Area 31, will help expand your musical horizons. …Joseph Taylor
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What he heard on that tape confirmed
his suspicions that a good recording had been badly transferred to vinyl, so he and Norman
gave this recording the transfer it deserved: dynamic, warm, and spacious, with no studio
trickery. It sounds live and real. A selection from Wild’s performance, the Allegro
scherzando, opens 20th Anniversary Chesky Records, a two-disc, 28-track
set that gives you a taste of the label’s devotion to presenting, as purely as
possible, a wide array of music. There are some surprises -- I’d forgotten that David
Johansen and the Harry Smiths recorded for Chesky -- as well as tracks by musicians whose
work for the label has long been well received by critics, such as Clark Terry, Jon
Faddis, John and Bucky Pizzarelli, and McCoy Tyner.
Live from Studio A, a
single-disc compilation, comprises 15 jazz and Latin jazz tracks recorded there between
1988 and 1993, when the studio closed. Every track demonstrates how much truer and more
musical a simply recorded session sounds when recorded in an acoustically impressive room.
The liner notes shed some light on how surprisingly old-school Chesky’s recording
techniques can be, as in this description of a session with John Frigo and Bucky
Pizzarelli: "The ‘mix’ was tweaked in the most organic way possible -- by
moving the musicians and vocalists closer to the mic to make them louder and further away
to lower their level." Phil Woods, Clark Terry, Paquito D’Rivera, Peggy Lee, and
many others are presented here in the best sound imaginable.
Two other new discs, Carlos
Franzetti’s Songs for Lovers and Xiomara Laugart’s Xiomara,
demonstrate Chesky’s continuing commitment to good music and exceptional sound.
Franzetti has written film scores, operas, and other works, and has arranged music for
such Chesky artists as Paquito D’Rivera and Jon Faddis. On Songs for Lovers,
Franzetti’s beautiful string arrangements accompany his own vocal and piano
performances of ten songs, most of them standards. One of the best tracks is a tune he
cowrote, "The Things I Miss About You Most," but his version of Paul
Simon’s "I Do It for Your Love" doesn’t come off. The remaining tunes
are richly orchestrated, and the recording is up to Chesky’s rigid standard. In the
end, however, Franzetti’s arrangements are more exciting than his voice, which is a
bit too smooth and lacks the playful feel for time that came so naturally to the pop and
jazz singers who no doubt inspired this disc.
Vocalist Xiomara Laugart is a Cuban
singer based in New York who is a member of the Latin-funk Collective (their description)
Yerba Buena. Xiomara, her first solo disc, is a wonderfully tuneful mix of
Latin jazz and pop. Guitarists Octavio Kotan and Andres Levin set the tone on most tracks,
with the help of Axel T. Laugart’s tasteful and swinging work on Fender Rhodes
keyboards, which is both retro and delightfully current. As on other Chesky recordings of
Latin jazz, the percussion instruments on Xiomara, such as congas, sound more
natural and resonant than on many recordings from bigger labels. Xiomara is yet
another example of David Chesky’s love and support of Latin music: "I was raised
in Miami, Florida, a large Latin population, and was exposed to it as a child," he
told me in an e-mail. While its sonic qualities will pull you in, the first few times you
play Xiomara you’ll be busy enjoying the memorable tunes and the singer’s
expressive singing.