The Now Spinning crew one again returns to their infamous desert island, this time with Lansing Community College, Steve Robinson. This episode delves into profound insights about the impact of record production, with Steve highlighting the innovative use of the studio as an instrument, exemplified by Brian Eno’s work. They further explore the essence of live recordings, particularly Bill Evans’ "Sunday at the Village Vanguard," which captures an once in a lifetime musical moment.

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Website: LCC Vinyl Record Club

Hello everyone and welcome to Now Spinning, the official podcast of the Lansing Community College Vinyl Record Club. We meet twice a month to listen to vinyl and talk about music. Stay tuned to learn about how you can get in touch with us and attend our meetings.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Now Spinning. With me today I have.

I'm Steve Robinson.

Jacob Zokvic

Leo Ackerman

And Simon Medina.

Welcome back. Steve, we were just here last week. We talked to you about your musical past, all that kind of stuff. You were.

Great conversation. I really appreciate it.

Go tune in if you haven't heard it, please go listen.

It was good. We talked. You guys ask great questions. Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah.

And we talked a little bit about the kind of music that you were influenced by when you were, you know, growing up and that kind of stuff, what you're listening to now. But today I thought we'd take kind of a deeper dive into that and ask you, you know, what records you would bring with you to a desert island.

That's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, desert island record. But I was wondering, when you hear that, what do you think of?

Well, I think of impossible choices. I think record people were big on lists.

And the other thing I think of is you could ask me this question at different times of the day or different parts of the year and the answer would be different. So I struggled with it.

And before I answer, I can answer, I brought 10 records, figuring depending on how they ask the question, I might pull something different out. But for actual physical LP records, vinyl records, I sort of have two main veins that I listen to the records I bought.

Literally a lot of the records I bring to Vinyl Record Club I bought when I was a teenager. I bought before I could had a driver license, my mom or somebody take me to the record store and buy them. And so they've sort of imprinted on me.

And that's all the post punk stuff that we talked about. I also, in my office I have a turntable set up that I have for years and years and years. And in there I listened to mostly mid century jazz.

That's jazz from the mid-50s to the mid-60s, as it turns out. If I could do two, not just one desert island record, we got plenty.

Of time for that.

Yeah, it has to be one of those things where you love every second of the record. It really hangs together as a unified artistic statement.

You didn't give me any rules, but I'm a sort of self imposing, like no greatest hits, no anthology anthropologies, right? Because that seems like cheating. It's an album.

I love Greatest Hits. I think Greatest Hits are great.

Jacob, don't you think they're cheating? For Desert island, you gotta respect the format.

You have to respect.

If I was being dropped off at a desert island, I would bring a Greatest Hits, probably.

So you'd also be the one to bring, like, a book of short stories or something. Right. Like, if this were novels or films or something, you're not going to watch, like, six minutes of one movie and eight minutes of another. Right.

So, anyway, these are the rules I'm imposing on myself.

All right, fair enough.

So you gave me leeway of more than one. I'm going to try to do two. So on this stack of ten, I mean, this. If you gave this stack a name, it would be like, records I couldn't live without.

Unfortunately, I could add a lot to them. But if it's like, take 10 records, I think these are it. But I grabbed two, and I'll make a distinction.

I haven't heard you talk about it on the podcast, but I know the club. We listen to Beach Boys.

We listen to a lot of 70s pop where artists turned the recording studio into one of the instruments that it's not written out the way it is. The whole creation process is part of it.

And, you know, Eno didn't do this alone, but as a producer for all the artists that I've heard you talk about and love, this is a great example of an artist using the studio as the instrument. And I love every second of this record. The first four solo records for Brian Eno after Roxy Music are indispensable for me.

But there are not a lot of, like, songs on this. And it's also not ambient. It's just its own thing. And I love Another Green World.

So I know you guys know a little bit about this record, but that's my first one, the studio as an instrument. I don't want to be the only one talking.

No, it is interesting. Brian Eno really was.

I mean, from what I know, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but Brian, you know, from what I know, was super early on in establishing sounds that literally could not be played live.

Yes.

Like effects that you could not recreate live even if you tried. And I think his like early 70s work. Taking Tiger Mountain by strategy.

A record I can't live without. I mean, that's an amazing record.

Here Come the Warm Jets. You know, another one. I mean, like his. His initial run in the 70s is almost untouchable from both. Like a songwriting standpoint.

He was the keyboardist in Roxy Music.

Yeah. But he often didn't use a keyboard. He was played the synthesizer.

And if you like, pull up some YouTube videos of Roxy playing on like Old Gray Whistle Test or German TV and you look at his synthesizer rig, sometimes it doesn't even have a keyboard. He's just twiddling knobs and put. And patching things in.

Classic Moog style.

Super early on, like modular synthesis.

Absolutely, absolutely. And he also was big on this. The non musician making music. It's not this one, it's more Taking Tiger Mountain by strategy.

He's got the Portsmouth Symphonia, which is this famous group of amateur musicians playing out of tune, out of time, out of. On purpose. It just sounds great. So the whole novice or being new, and there is this artistic thread of finding the beginner's mind. Right.

I think that's a part of what, you know, always wanted to do. He wanted to. And he also just loved to sing. Early on he said, I made these records because I like to sing.

He still leads like an acapella singing group of just regular people, really. Yeah.

Very cool.

In the uk.

That's interesting because, you know, this album, I've listened to it quite a bit. This is probably one of maybe my favorite Eno record of what I've heard so far. But there's not a lot of singing on this. Like, I can only.

I think there's like one song near the start where he sings on it, but the rest of it's really.

Yes, I'll Come Running. I think it's got.

There's a couple, I think.

Right. And they're very textural. Right. But. But these are musicians, you know, Like, Robert Fripp has amazing guitar solos on this. Like.

I mean, I love every track of this record from beginning to end. But there's a tune on here called St. Elmo's Fire, Right? Yeah. And the Frip guitar solo on there is.

It sounds new to me every time I hear it every time. And so I love this record.

You mentioned texture when describing this record.

I think another really admirable thing about Brian Eno and the thing that makes this record all the more essential is I think Brian Eno was also very. On, very early on in discovering that Texture is as important to music as melody is or as, like, rhythm is.

Especially his work with, like you mentioned, Robert Fripp. Like the Fripp and Eno records.

Unbelievable. No pussy footing, all that stuff. And Frip is on most of these records.

And he goes on to work with him on, like the Talking Heads records he produced. There was this live in Paris Frippin Eno record. I've never heard anything like it in my life.

I think his exploration of texture was as groundbreaking then as it is now.

Oh, I agree, I agree. Another one of the piles.

This is sort of cheating, but another record in this pile is his collaboration with David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which is very textual record, but also in pre digital sampling and remixing. And that record's really groundbreaking. But I think you're right about texture. Another Green World is as much about texture as anything else.

There aren't a ton of melodies. I'll come running to Tie your Shoe has a great kind of hooky melody, but mostly it's things coming in, things coming out, things layering. I just.

I couldn't tell you how many times I've listened to this record.

Ties back in a year, like using the studio kind of thing too, I think of what's the song off of that first album.

Some of them are. Some of Them are old.

Some of them are old. Him. His vocals on that are layered into him over and over again, just magical way.

And you know, like, we talked about the Beach Boys and stuff and they did it too.

They did, they did.

But theirs was very, very harmony focused and based and. Which is amazing. Yeah, we love all of that Wilson harmony stuff.

But.

But Some of Them Are Old is like kind of, like you said, textural. You know what I mean?

It isn't just the harmony to it, because a lot of it he's singing the same note and he's just kind of like putting an inflection on his voice, a raspiness or something, just to kind of fill out the sound behind it, just to make it kind of overwhelming, you know what I mean? You hear so much at once.

Yeah. And he was also a visual artist and he did the same thing with the COVID of that record with Taking Tiger Mountain. They're like Polaroids of himself.

So it's like what you said he did with his voice, he also did with his face. He's like one of my favorite artists, period. So this was my representative of all those great records where they're a creature of the studio.

I mean, there's this dichotomy between what artists do in the studio and what they do either live or in performance. Right. And so that's how I was able to only pick one. This is the representative of what artists do when they use the studio as an instrument.

Yeah, that's. I think you picked a very good representative for that.

I love it.

Yeah. And, like. Like you said, just, like, not just Eno, but, again, all the artists he's worked with. But, like.

And before.

And before. Yeah. One more thing. I just. Before we move on. Yeah.

About this record, but, like, especially with, like, a lot of records, like, I think that this one is able to, like, just conjure, like, not just, like, the texture, but, like, there's, like, a feeling to it, you know, Like, I can't. I can't really describe it when I listen to it.

Like, one of the songs, like, the Big Ship, there's no words at all in that song, but it's such, like, a very. It's such a powerful melody, you know, I just make it just, like, brings you to your knees. Like, that's all happened to me.

It is, you know, and, you know, isn't much of a piano player. He'd be the first to tell you that. But those chords, they're simple. Brock chords in first and second inversion. The Big Ship.

And, you know, even if you don't play piano, you could sit down and kind of figure it out. And that makes it so accessible.

The one last thing, I almost brought them, Eno and a colleague of his, they made a lot of their artistic decisions based on these playing cards they built called Oblique Strategies. I have a set of them.

And so when they would reach a place where they were struggling in the studio, they actually go into this card and it would say, make it darker or find the thing you don't want to do and do it. I mean, these are the kinds of things, those sort of almost vague or opaque, like, go outside and scream and come back in.

I don't think any of those are on the cards, but those kinds of things to kind of change artistic direction. Not only are they using the studio as an instrument, they're improvising with it as well.

There's a real sense of play to everything Eno touches. It's almost this, like, childish wonder.

Yes, that's it.

That's is. I feel that this record represents that. Yeah.

Wins.

Whimsical whimsy.

Oh, yeah. Very good. Yeah, yeah. Great.

Very whimsical.

So your second choice.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. Okay. So I figured to go in the exact opposite direction. So this is probably a record that I have listened to as many times as this.

This room is still set up the way it was when this record was recorded. Without the cigarette smoke, I think. But. But. Right, so. But here, in contrast, the.

This is a record of something that happened and then will never happen again. The saxophonist Eric Dolphy has this great quote about music. He says, the thing about music is once you hear it, it's gone in the air.

And before we talk about the music that was captured there, unlike the studio, I am obsessed with how this record was recorded. It is often used by audiophiles to test their high end systems, but it was recorded with like three microphones.

Do you know who produced this?

I do, I do. So this is a Riverside record. And the recording engineer is a guy named David B. Jones.

And he built a custom Ampex recording rig on springs that he could take down. And if you ever go to the Village Vanguard, you got to kind of cram down these stairs and around the corner. Not a great place to record.

And I don't think we have a record of the exact microphones that we use, but they were brand new, like condenser type microphones, like Sony C37s and not recorded in stereo. Probably one mic for the bass. This is a trio piano trio. Piano, drums and bass. And this recording is so simple that it sounds like you're there.

There's no artifice. Except for. Jones was prepared to capture great live music. You can't really do much with mixing it.

They panned it stereo a little bit and you can hear that. But this is a recording where you can close your eyes and it's like you are there.

You can still hear the room.

Oh, that's what you hear. And the cool thing, not only can you hear the room, you can hear the conversations that people are having.

The Village Vanguard is a very small club, holds about 125 people. You can literally hear a conversation this couple is having you hear the cash register go.

I have listened to this record so much, and I love it so much. That's the recording part. I do want to talk about the music part, but I wonder if you. Any other things about it.

Can I sneak one in here?

Yeah, absolutely.

You said it's a record that could only happen, like, in this moment.

That's it.

I have a similar one from my childhood. So I used to. Growing up, I wasn't as into music, and I just kind of figured it out slowly.

And I was really into jazz because I was pretentious, and I thought jazz made me smart, you know?

I think it did.

Thank you.

Thank you.

But even now, it doesn't mean you weren't pretentious. I'm still pretentious. Anyway, I can't remember the name of the album, but I got it as a cd as a kid. It was like the Summit or something.

But it is Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and I believe they recorded together a couple times. But this is, like, the one I really liked. Duke and Louis, the titans of jazz. You know what I mean?

Hearing that for the first time and just going, like, I'll never get to hear this. Like, I'll never get to go see these people. You know, they died well before I was born.

Right?

You know, but that. The moment of it. And, like, could you imagine, like, having been there and we're like, yeah, I got to see both of them at the same time.

You know what I mean?

And it happens with rock groups too, nowadays, where they'll do a show together and they do, like, one song, like, one of the most popular songs of one of the artists, but they play it together and everybody just, like, loses their minds. And, like, I think that's so special in that, like, live recording setting that, like, you can get just this amazing thing happen and then.

And then people's reaction to it too, you know, and you're just like, well.

You all did an episode on live records, and that was really cool. But you make an interesting point about jazz. This is an art.

This is an art form that is about, like, this is the only time it will be like this, right? You don't want to play it, you know, the same way it's built on improv. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

It's very true. No, I was just. The one thing I was gonna mention about this is like, I've actually.

This isn't normally the kind of record I'd listen to, but I have heard this one a couple times before, so. Happy I was going through a. There was like a. It was a book, but I found it as like a list on the website.

But like that, this was one of the ones I heard and that was very. I thought it was awesome.

Well, you can really picture yourself there. And now let's talk about the music for a minute. So there's another generational component to this.

You know, he famously was in Miles Davis's band and brought in a lot of these sort of European, like Debussy and modal approach. So a lot of pianists sound like him, but they didn't at the time.

It's like the Rachmaninoff problem where like so many people are like, I want to sound like Rachmaninov. And it's like, yeah, I hope you have like 6 inch long fingers and can practice all day long. But why? Because it does sound cool.

The other thing about this. Yes, and the other thing about this trio is, which was sort of new. The piano trio is probably particularly the jazz tradition.

It's stripped music, stripped down to its bare elements. You know, Western music is traditionally about three things. Harmony, melody, rhythm. And that's it got three people and that's it.

And usually, you know, the bass player is, prior to this, was relegated to just walking and playing the fundamental. The bass player here, Scott Lafaro, doesn't stick to conventional time. It's very conversational.

You can hear that they're all taking equal parts in playing these standards. They two of these tracks were composed by the bass player Scott La Faro. And the reason for that is really, really sad.

And nobody was doing with the bass what he was doing. I mean like Ray Brown, probably one of the most famous bass players in jazz.

When Scalofaro died, they said this will set the instrument back 10 years. He plays it like a guitar. He plays in the upper register. He plays so fast. And he was largely self taught on the bass.

He went to Ithaca College as a clarinetist he got into jazz. He picked up the bass, had a few lessons. His teacher was Red Mitchell. And then he just. He went deep.

He and Charlie Hayden, the bass player, were roommates in LA for a while. He had a very short career.

Would you say? We talked in the previous episode about your history, learning the bass, kind of influential and part of that decision?

Well, absolutely. Well, actually, I discovered this music when I started studying upright bass. It was my teacher who told me as well, you got to check this out.

I was actually. It's interesting. I. You know, we've talked about Keith Jarrett. I love Keith Jarrett, and I loved his standards Trio.

And I pulled in some of those recordings, and my teacher said, well, you know, those are great recordings. They're kind of still riffing on the great Bill Evans trios, and so go back and listen to those.

And the first record that they only recorded together for a little while because of Scott's untimely death. There are actually two records were produced from this one Sunday. They did a few sets Sunday afternoon in the Village Vanguard.

It turned into this record, another one called Waltz for Debbie, which is a great.

That's one I've heard. I did not know that was the same session.

Same session, same day. But then they put this out quickly as a kind of a memorial for Scott. And the Waltz for Debbie, I love that as much.

In fact, there's a reissue of both of them together, where they also have the recordings that Jones captured of them discussing their repertoire. It's so cool. You can hear, like, Bill Evans putting his pencil on the music stand and saying to Scott, well, why don't we start with your tune?

That one, the new one, right? And that's the opening. Here is a tune called Gloria's Step. Scott's girlfriend was a dancer in New York. That's a tune about him.

But they only did four records together. But to your question, the first one they did was called Portrait and Jazz.

And they open up with probably the most recorded jazz standard, Autumn Leaves. Play Autumn Leaves. The whole band goes through one chorus, and then they stop, and lafaro plays the whole song form by himself, solo.

And I remember watching my turntable like, oh, my gosh, I need to quit the bass. You can't I don't care. Never play that. It just rips your head off. And so I love those recordings.

There are only four records, and two of them are from the same afternoon. Wow.

Could you imagine being, like, at that venue? Just one was random. One off afternoon. Turns out two of them.

I have all the time, since I was 18. I really. That's interesting. Yes, I have. When I listen to this record, I'm like.

At first, I was like, why are these people being noisy during the music? They should be quiet. They should be reverent. This is one of the best. And I'm thinking they're participating.

Like, they're cool enough to have known to go to this basement club, and they're talking, and they're probably smoking and trying to hook up a date and, you know, ordering a drink. And they're. It's a participatory music. So I've. Not only have I thought about being there, but I've gone to that club.

On my 21st birthday, my stepmom took me to New York, and I'm like, I gotta go to the Village Vanguard. I spent more money than I had to get. It's still not that expensive to go to the Village Vanguard, but there's a drink minimum. And so I went.

I saw my first show there. I saw Milt Jackson, the vibraphonist. We're going in a couple weeks. Gonna see Bill Frizzell.

That's.

That's going to be cool. Looking forward to it. But I've seen great shows at the.

Vanguard, I think, like, especially this last record. I mean, it immortalized this guy who died 10 days later, this legend.

And not only did it immortalize him and his bass playing and cement his legacy, it also immortalized the people in the room.

Yep.

There's just something kind of haunting about, like, you're lifting. Everything is preserved in amber.

No, that's it.

It's as it was that many years ago, and it will still be that way. And I don't know, there's something really. There's something very captivating about, like, specifically a live performance to me.

I agree. I agree. And, you know, come back to that Dolphy quote. You know, it can't. It's gone in the air and they were captured again. But I would.

I would encourage you to listen to this record and listen to it with one pass. Don't listen to music. Listen to the people in there. You can hear them move. You can. There are little pieces where you can.

Yeah, you can make out what they're saying to each other, it could only have happened then. And there were only 125 seats there to be present when it happened. And so those are my two desert islands.

One where the studio is instrument and one it's like it's a capture of an event that will we can fantasize about and to try to relive, but we weren't there and we'll never. There were 128 people who participated in it and we just have this shadow that's left.

Wow, those are some great picks.

Definitely. Incredible.

Great conversation.

Oh, really funny. And you guys, again, great dialogue. Appreciate it.

Yeah, the two halves right there, I think you've summed it up pretty perfectly.

Thank you.

Yeah, that does wrap it up for today, I think, though. Thank you for coming on, Steve. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. Big, big, big thank you to you.

No, thank you. But if you're interested at all in hearing music like this or any wide variety of stuff, you can come on down to the Record Club.

You can check out our website. It'll be linked with the show.

You'll find any past meetings, future meetings, past playlists, past podcast episodes, themes, anything you'd really need to know. You'll all find it there. Thank you for tuning in and we appreciate you coming in. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I love you.

Love you. Bye.

Bye.