By Jason West

One feels fortunate after a few minutes in conversation with Jay Thomas. To have the attention of a man who is a very cool cat, funny, opinionated, and full of stories about music, musicians, gigs, recording dates...one feels very lucky indeed. In fact, this jazzfan would love to spend entire days absorbing the multitudinous seas of Jay's musical exerience; and I'm guessing you would too. However, a single hour must suffice for the both of us.

JW: Talk about the Jim Knapp Big Band recording at Bear Creek Studios. You were the lead trumpet?

JT: No. That section has got Brad Allison on lead trumpet, Jack Halsey plays second trumpet, and I play third trumpet and solos. Knapp's writing is very interesting because the standard roles are broken up. I do get a chance to play some lead because he has different sections within each piece. I may play lead, split off from the trumpets, with a reed blend, or lower brass and reeds-while the trumpets are doing something else. So it varies quite a bit. I play mostly improvised jazz stuff in the trumpet section.

JW: I just assumed that being an improviser and soloist in the trumpet section meant you were the lead trumpet.

JT: No. No, often times the lead trumpet player, those duties are so arduous, so heavy-usually you have to have a very high range. Most of the time the jazz player is not required to do that in the section. Although there have been some notable exceptions: Bobby Shue, Carl Saunders, Chuck Findley. In my case, I'm more like the quintessential jazz player in that I don't play lead. It's a physical way of playing. My playing is a little more soloistic. I have a different syllable inside my mouth when I play. It might be a little less focused, but possibly a little rounder. A lead player is going to be more laserlike and focused all the time.

JW: How did you prepare for that recording? I guess the group has been together for awhile.

JT: Yeah, we've been playing for awhile. We were familiar with the material, which helped. We've performed it. We had a couple of good rehearsals before we went in and did it.

JW: I know Jim got to take home the rough mixes after each session. Did he make those available to you? Did you get to listen to the playbacks?

JT: No. We listened to the playbacks sometimes while we were making corrections. Basically what we did-and I like this, too-is these were first and second cuts. As soon as we got one that felt OK, instead of going for the perfection-there might be a note here and there that was chipped or clipped-usually we'd go, "That felt pretty good," and we'd listen to it, and if there was some minor cosmetic fixes, we'd go in and do that. We'd punch in a couple notes for the bone or sax.

JW: Yeah, I was there on the second day when you started off with fixes.

JT: Right. That way we didn't have to come back later. We listened to it then, and it went good that way. We stayed fresh; we kept going. Because sometimes, in the pursuit of perfection, if you have to do it to many times, you lose the music. The music usually happens on the first or second take. It's like sex. You know, how many times can you say I love you? After you're initial blast it's time for a rest and re-evaluation. (Laughter)

JW. So that was a good thing, that recording session?

JT: It was great. Didn't take long, and I thought the sounds were real good. In recording…it's so weird…sometimes you'll wonder what they really hear in the control room. I'll hear back on tape this tiny, bright, little knat-sized sound that's my trumpet, and I'll go, "Geez, what happened?" This guy, [engineer, Paul Wickliffe], he knew what he was doing. The mikes were just right. We picked up the full spectrum of the trumpet sound. The trumpet is kind of hard to record. Usually they'll close mike it; it'll be miked closer than the full blossoming of the sound. Recording is like taking an audio picture of the sound, you want the full spectrum, so you have to be far enough back. A lot of engineers who don't understand jazz; they're into tight production. Their idea it that close miking is better because there won't be any leakage. It has some advantages, but it just sounds bad. Often times we're at odds with engineers because they have a different idea. Their idea is one that's related to cleanliness: a clean sound. But the imperfections of the sound are also good. You want all the color in there. You don't want to weed out the slop in the sound. Sometimes there's a little buzzing or hissing or different things, and they'll try to get rid of that. There are several ways they'll do it. One is with reverb. They'll do really close miking and then put reverb on it. Reverb just gives the illusion that you're in a big room. Reverberation increases the room sound, so it's like a cheat. But when you listen to a lot of the classic jazz recordings for instance, you can hear the sound of the room, also. They weren't that close miked, often times just in a circle and they could hear each other naturally and play.

JW: Do you like that?

JT: Yeah, I like that. I like that the best. I don't like that isolation of being in a separate little booth or room. It feels weird. I like the sound of the way it is when the mike's in front of the band. In fact the latest recording I did down at Tula's-it's on a CD now-Jim Wilke came out and taped it in front of the band and it sounds fine.

JW: How did they do it at Bear Creek? Did they mike each instrument?

JT: Yes. The mikes weren't that close and there was some bleed, so occasionally, making a fix, they'd have to fix more than one person. That's a very nice sounding room out there. It's a big wooden room. Sometimes that's the key to it, I think: the size of the space you're in. I can tell. I played a wedding a week ago and the sound of my saxophone was stupendous and it was because the ceiling was just the right heighth. It was wood but it was kind of unfinished wood. Wood floors. Just the size of the room and everything…the sound was just perfect. Often times you'll go into recording studios and they'll have rugs everywhere-they're into basically building the sound of the room that isn't there.

JW: Well, you talked about mike placement and how that's important. How did Wickliffe handle that?

JT: Well, we were just off mike a little; we just kind of played to the side a little bit. Paul took both hands and spread'em apart and said, " OK, from thumb to thumb." So what is that, fifteen inches? I have a fairly bright sound, Brad has a bright sound; we all have fairly bright equipment so we were concerned, because sometimes if you get too much signal on a trumpet you'll just fry it. If you're too hot on the mike and you hit it too hard, there's no way they can fix that. So we didn't want to be too close.

JW: Do you have a favorite sonic recording?

JT: Well, I guess the Gil Evans recordings with Miles. That was all done live and they were in a big line. And there were people running around, moving mikes in and out. They had socks on, no shoes. And they learned where to put the mikes. All those Miles Davis 60's recordings at Rudy Van Gelder's studio. That was real simple. It's funny, some of the piano sounds that everybody grew up hearing, they'd say, "Oh, God, how do you get the famous Rudy Van Gelder sound?" Well, I guess he just wrapped a rag around a mike and stuffed it in the f-hole. It was a dirtier, darker sound that we were used to. But it was more pleasant to the ear than the real clean digital stuff that we have now.

JW: I'd like to ask you about your CD, " 360 Degrees," that you recorded and produced at Ironwood Studios here in Seattle.

JT: Ironwood has a pretty nice room. It worked out good, and for the most part that session went down fairly easy.

JW: Was it difficult for you to act as musician and producer simultaneously?

JT: Oftentimes it is, because I'm thinking two different ways. What's good for me is not necessarily good for the overall cut. As a player, I'm concerned with how I'm doing and how my role is being fulfilled in the group. As a producer, I look at the strongest cut for a lot of different reasons-maybe how strong the tempo is, how the bass solo is, piano solo, different things. When you're in a producer position, you want to get the best overall sound for the song, for the music. You want to bring the music to the forefront. I had to make logistical decisions-whether to tape over something that was good. A producer has to make split-second decisions, and they're not always right. That one was a very weird deal. When we did that and, right off the bat the piano was out of tune. That stopped everything from happening so the first day was almost a wash, but once we got started it went really good. It took a lot of work to get it sounding as good as the rough mixes. Because as soon as we started mixing it, it ruined it. The raw stuff sounded the best. I have no idea why that is. Sometimes when you get into mixing it you turn everything down. It's like you go to ground zero: "OK, let's start with the kick drum. Let's find the bass sound and this and that and the other thing." You get into isolating each instrument. I don't think the answer is in isolation really, but often times that's the way it's done. I don't understand, like you listen to an old Paul Chambers recording and that's what bass players want to sound like. And it's so hard. These days they can't seem to get that. We've gotten high tech, but it's not better. My favorite mike is a real old U-47 Neumann. They're over 30 years old. Telefunkin, things like that. They have their own color; there's more magic in'em. The worst stuff was in the seventies; that was pure shit. The sounds that were recorded in the seventies were, for the most part, terrible. Horrible amounts of reverb. Reverb masks a bad sound and bad intonation, but it also gets rid of that "up front" sound and all the color. When there's a bunch of reverb there's no color. It's impersonal, and the more reverb you put on it, the more it sounds like it's in the background so you get these strange, disembodied sounding recordings sometimes-it sounds like there are ghosts floating around a mile away-and you wonder what in the hell that is. I like the early Chet Baker records where he sang. There were no effects and very little reverb, and he was real close and up front. Boy that sounded good, but you have to be right on the money. I love the Ella Fitzgerald 40th Birthday Party recording, those vocals, I mean that's beautiful. But even with great equipment, it's only as good as an engineer's sensibilities. Now there are a lot of different kinds of music and some of it is just fine the way the majority of people are recording, but I think that for the most part there aren't a whole lot of engineers that are big jazz fans. A peeve of mine is we have this mania for separating everything. A lot of times the bass is recorded real loud. Well that's not the way I hear the balance of the music. Actually a lot of times I hear more drums. On the recordings that I really like I hear more drums than bass. These days they've got it backwards: they'll have the drums way back, have the bass cranked, have the piano cranked. On classic jazz recordings the piano is pretty far back, too, unless it's a piano trio. The horns and the drums will be most present and the piano and bass are supplying harmony and context for what's going down.

JW: Is Seattle a good place to record jazz? Do our engineers for the most part do a good job?

JT: Yes, there are all kinds of capable engineers around here. I've never been involved with any project of my own where I haven't been able to work it out with an engineer, eventually. Sometimes it might be a struggle for a while, but I've never been in a situation where it just went down the tubes. There were a couple of times, through my own ignorance, when things almost got away from me when I was first starting out. I've learned some things. Once, I was doing a recording and had a famous person I was recording with when the entire board went down in the studio. We couldn't wait for somebody to come in and fix it, so the only option was to go direct to two track.

JW: Instead of 24 track?

JT: Yes. Well, in order to do that you have to pre-mix. However you record it, that's the way it goes. So here's a guy who has been recording the whole thing, and he's practically asleep at the wheels, you know, just kind of going along, watching and monitoring stuff…

JW: The engineer?

JT: Yes, and all of a sudden an emergency goes down. In five minutes he had it ready to go direct to two track. I liked that mix on the project as well as any of the mixes that we labored over for hours.

JW: Hours of 24 track mixing?

JT: Yeah, all the mixing and, you know, hairball examination, and bullshit- get it under the microscope and sniff it. Five minutes. With some snap, he pulled it together in five minutes. And I'm afraid that there's a lot of that going on.

JW: A lot of what?

JT: A dependence on this, "We'll fix it in the mix. Let's just get strong signals now. We'll mix it later. Blah blah." I mean, Jesus, it's sitting there, it would be nice if they'd just dial it in, like you would a radio. Listen to it and go, "Yeah, this is good." There's a guy downtown, uh, actually I knew him in the old days-a very good guitar player…

JW: Dave Raynor?

JT: Yes. He can do a mix in a heartbeat and be better than these hairball mixes that take six and eight hours for a song. I mean he can get it down and you go. And I think with the studio control, the control freaks come out and they want to get everything in its place, everything perfect, and that's when we get on the slippery slope. You don't need to worry about it being perfect. It's the feel. How does it feel? And how is the overall sound? It's still frustrating to me. I'm thinking now, what's really cool, is just putting it right down. I like this album I did with Jessica Williams called, "Jessica plays the Blues" recorded down at White Horse in Portland. We got a good night time rate and we went in and I loved the way Jessica moved along. Oh, man. She says to me-we were all set up and it was direct to two track, no screwing around, direct to two track, no overdubbing, nothin'-and she says, "Jay, what key do you like to play blues in?" I thought for a minute and said, "B flat, I guess." She goes, "O.K. One (snap), two (snap), one snap three four…" We're starting to play. We got into it about four measures, and it was perfect because there was nothing preplanned. And I thought, "Oh God." I hate that, when it's going down where it really sounds good, and you know that the engineer doesn't have anything on, because all your best stuff will go out. So she stops it by the sixth bar. We're stopped and she says to the engineer, "Are you rollin'?" And he says, "Uh, bub b b b, no, no, I'm ub b b b…" He's nervous. She says, "Get it rollin'…role tape." She's puttin' it on this guy to reel it in, now, 'cause we're ready to go. So, he reeled it in and we played that. We got done with the piece and she hesitated for a few moments and said, "That was good. Next." We went on to the next one, and boom, boom, boom-that's the way that session went. I thought, "That's good." And it sounded fine.

JW: I really enjoy the CD you just finished with your quartet entitled, "Live at Tula's." What made you decide to record live?

JT: Well, several reasons. When I play live, often times I play with a little more excitement than I do in a studio-it's more sustainable, the songs are longer, there's more improvisation, it's looser-there are a lot of things about a live recording that are different. I liked the way that band sounded and I just wanted to get a live recording. Plus, I didn't have all the options of going over it and over it and over it. In fact, I've hardly even heard it-that's the way I like it. I'm not going to put it on, but I'll hear it in the car or down at Mac's [Tula's owner] and think, "That sounds ok." And I like that. Like Stan Getz, he never listened to his own recordings. He came from a different era, he was successful, and he didn't have to produce his own stuff. He'd go in to play and he was done. He was into more important things in life, like getting a good meal and walking the dog.