The art of recording music has been born and revolutionized time after time in just the last century and a bit. One man, with a beautiful heart and a soul that was simply musical, is little known to the lovers of modern music but made undisputable contributions to several of those revolutions and helped give us an amazing amount of many different types of hugely popular music.
Tom Dowd and the Language of Music is a loving biography of that man, made in the months before Dowd passed away, during a time when he was still making new music with modern talent in his mid-70s. He began as a recording engineer when Atlantic Records was founded in the late ’40s, built the first real commercial stereo and multi-track studios and took to the computerized studios of the ’90s and later like he was born to it.
Who did Dowd record? Jazz and R&B artists like John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Otis Redding. And rockers, man did he work the board magic for rockers: Eric Clapton (both The Cream and Derek and the Dominos), The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Young Rascals, The Drifters, Bobby Darin, Dusty Springfield, Rod Stewart and Cher. So many more, just an awesome discography.
There isn’t too much detail about the technical aspects of what Dowd did, though he does go back to the original Layla tapes and give a little taste of how the individual tracks fit together in the mix. Some discussion of his pioneering work in stereo and multi-track recording. Lots of interviews with artists he worked with–Clapton talks about believing so much more in Dowd’s musical instincts than his own and Gregg Allman cannot say enough about Dowd as a man. Plus his important partners at Atlantic Records, his boss and company founder Ahmet Ertegun, producer Jerry Wexler and protege Phil Ramone.
A sweet taste of the last half century of music. A portrait of a man who was a key piece of connective tissue across musical eras and genres.
Recommended
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