Posted on: 07 November 2002 by JohanR
The other day, when repositioning my HiFi system I found a CD with Ray Charles I once bought at a sale, played once ("Shit, it's Jazz.") and then forgot about. Called "The Great Ray Charles".
I put it on now. The sound is really excellent and the music is in fact listenable even for a Jazz hater like me. It's recorded at Atlantic in 1956 with Tom Dowd as engineer.
I just started reading a book about the history of Soul, and our Tom D. is in fact mentioned (the technical guys are seldom mentioned in this type of books). It says he was engineer at nearly all Atlantic recordings for about a quarter of a century!
As it was put by Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records: "Nobody is perfect except Tom Dowd and he is replaceable."
Let's hope they have good recording studios in heaven...
JohanR
