Whatever happened to Stu Black?
ChicagoB...@aol.com
Whatever happened to that incredible blues engineer, Stu Black? I was just
listening to his work on Delmark...(J.B. Hutto's "Slidewinder".)
CB
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Blue Stew
mike
ps, thar's room in this town for only one Stu...Stew but he's Blue not
Black.
Scott
disappeared many years earlier and he had no idea where he'd gone. If I
remember right, he also said the Black has "some problems" which may have
been related to his disappearance. FWIW, I wasn't as impressed as you are
with his work for Delmark - I got the impression that he had learned his
trade on tube equipment, which is generally a lot more tolerant of really
hot recording levels, and was working on solid state equipment on those
Delmark sessions. When solid state equipment is pushed like tube
equipment, it's prone to some unpleasant and non-musical distortion, which
I hear on some of the Delmark stuff he did.
Scott
Christopher Burger
kept up at nights wondering whatever happened to "Al Smith" - no, not famed
New Yorker who was the '28 Democratic nominee for president, but AL SMITH,
producer of a number of gems on his BLUES ON BLUES label, some of which
ABC/Bluesway picked up. (These have somehow mostly escaped the digital era -
at least officially).
Smith and Stu Black collaborated, too, on gems like the hard-to-find/
unfairly-never-officially-digitalized album '76-77 by Detroit Junior
called "Chicago Urban Blues," featuring Mighty Joe Youngon, put out on
Antilles label. The sound on this has also been called "primitive,"
and "bad," but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Personally, I like the very sound that you seem to dislike, Scott. I like
the old Delmarks and early Alligators that Mr. Black worked on. That very
sound to me is part of what made them special - unless it's just the
nostalgia for the music itself, but I doubt it. The rudimentary sound of
many things (the old Chess Records stuff, for one) is part of the charm, in
my book. By contrast, the recent Delmarks often have a too bright and clean
engineering, despite some decent performances, albeit with songs that run
on too long....
So, Stu Black and Al Smith: Come back...All is forgiven, We hardly knew
ye...etc.
-Chris B.
Robert J Dewar
> kept up at nights wondering whatever happened to "Al Smith" - no, not
famed
> New Yorker who was the '28 Democratic nominee for president, but AL SMITH,
> producer of a number of gems on his BLUES ON BLUES label, some of which
> ABC/Bluesway picked up. (These have somehow mostly escaped the digital
era -
> at least officially).
Hmmm... sounds interestiing. Can you tell us more?
>
> Smith and Stu Black collaborated, too, on gems like the hard-to-find/
> unfairly-never-officially-digitalized album '76-77 by Detroit Junior
> called "Chicago Urban Blues," featuring Mighty Joe Youngon, put out on
> Antilles label. The sound on this has also been called "primitive,"
> and "bad," but I wouldn't have it any other way.
I picked this one up in Ann Arbor on my way back from the Chicago fest. I
love it. One of my fave pickups in the last year or so.
>
>
> Personally, I like the very sound that you seem to dislike, Scott. I like
> the old Delmarks and early Alligators that Mr. Black worked on. That very
> sound to me is part of what made them special - unless it's just the
> nostalgia for the music itself, but I doubt it. The rudimentary sound of
> many things (the old Chess Records stuff, for one) is part of the charm,
in
> my book. By contrast, the recent Delmarks often have a too bright and
clean
> engineering, despite some decent performances, albeit with songs that run
> on too long....
I tend to agree, Chris. They have something that many modern recordings
don`t. So many modern jazz recordings are so clean they are antiseptic.
Scott
<cburg...@YAHOO.COM> wrote:
>Scott, thanks for the answer to this interesting question. Personally, I'm
>kept up at nights wondering whatever happened to "Al Smith" - no, not famed
>New Yorker who was the '28 Democratic nominee for president, but AL SMITH,
>producer of a number of gems on his BLUES ON BLUES label, some of which
>ABC/Bluesway picked up. (These have somehow mostly escaped the digital era
-
>at least officially).
Al Smith died sometime in the late 1970s if I'm not mistaken.
>
>Smith and Stu Black collaborated, too, on gems like the hard-to-find/
>unfairly-never-officially-digitalized album '76-77 by Detroit Junior
>called "Chicago Urban Blues," featuring Mighty Joe Youngon, put out on
>Antilles label. The sound on this has also been called "primitive,"
>and "bad," but I wouldn't have it any other way.
I would. Given the choice between a well-recorded performance and a poorly
recorded performance, I'll take the well-recorded performance. The key is
the performance obviously, and I do really like a lot of the performances
Stu Black sat at the helm on, I just know he could have done a better job
recording them. Given the technology available at the time, there's no
reason that these couldn't have been clear, warm, airy and alive recordings.
I think that most of the Chess sessions recorded in the early '50s sound
MUCH better than the Stu Black sessions we're talking about here.
>
>
>Personally, I like the very sound that you seem to dislike, Scott. I like
>the old Delmarks and early Alligators that Mr. Black worked on. That very
>sound to me is part of what made them special - unless it's just the
>nostalgia for the music itself, but I doubt it. The rudimentary sound of
>many things (the old Chess Records stuff, for one) is part of the charm, in
>my book. By contrast, the recent Delmarks often have a too bright and clean
>engineering, despite some decent performances, albeit with songs that run
>on too long....
Actually, I do like the sound of the early Alligator stuff Black recorded.
Since those were a few years later, my guess is that he had gotten a handle
on solid state equipment by then. But talking about the early Chess
recordings, up until around '55 or '56, they were anything but primitive and
rudimentary. Chess used one of the best studios in the country, Universal
Recorders, on ALL of those classic early sessions, and the results speak for
themselves. Just from a technical standpoint, there are recordings made
today that don't sound as clear and warm and vibrant and airy as things
recorded at Universal 50 years ago. It was only after Chess opened their
own "legendary" studio at 2120 S. Michigan that the sonic quality took a
nosedive and we got all those flat, murky, distorted recordings for a few
years in the late '50s. Give me something done at Universal Recorders any
day...
I agree about most of the recent Delmarks - a lot of them are engineered by
someone who approaches all recording sessions like modern jazz sessions.
I'm sure that everyone who has ever produced a recording session has their
own "expert" opinion. Here's mine: most blues sessions benefit from
recording them as if you're recording the whole band as if it's one big
instrument, rather than a bunch of individual instruments that are going to
be slotted into their positions later. In other words, try to get the best
recording of the perfomance rather than the best recordings of the
individual pieces. And I will give this to Stu Black - he seemed to
understand this.
Scott