The Whiffenpoof Songbook project: Whodunnit?

To bring you up to date and give the executive summary: we have engraved hundreds of arrangements using Finale to preserve and protect the Whiff's hundred year old tradition. I have engraved something like 70 arrangements from all over the 20th Century.

Many of the originals were in a poor state, copied over by hand several times, and then copied by xerox many times over. By and large, the music was readable but there were times when you really had to squint. Then, many oddities could only be revealed by playback and still more errata found only by superb editing by our music leader, who now sits at piano and plays through every engraving weeding out glosses applied by copyists, errors applied by the engraver and truing up harmonics to match early recordings.

A Musical Whodunnit?

One very interesting problem that came up several times was that of attribution. Sometimes the songs themselves have unknown origins. They may have been Tin Pan Alley songs whose copyrights have lapsed and no information exists about them at ASCAP or Harry Fox. Some of these may have been composed by undergrads, and no one took credit. Some of the arrangers names got lost over the years when manuscripts were copied. These mysteries have proven difficult to solve, especially when songs go back more than 50 years and few folks are around to remember.

One piece I engraved was "Slide Trombone". Whiff records have the composer as Alstyne and the lyricist as Williams. You will not find this song anywhere on ASCAP or Harry Fox, nor will you find the lyrics posted anywhere. The Internet does not know this song exists! For the arranger, Whiff records show "WBB", which is an abbreviation for "Whiffenpoof Blue Book". It's in the book. Yes, there was an actual "Blue Book" assembled at some point which few people have ever seen and probably no one is allowed to touch. Maybe it's in Salt Lake City and heavily guarded! Anyway, it's in that book and no one knows who arranged it. "WBB" is short for "we don't know".

The Whiff singing society sang, collected songs, stuck them in folders, passed them along and didn't always care very much about history and keeping records. Arrangers noted their work often by just putting their initials on the page. Three letters, nothing more. So now on their 100th anniversary, folks come along to document what this fun-loving bunch of guys did, and knowing stuff like who arranged what is suddenly very important.

The case of (That Slippery) Slide Trombone

So here's my story about Slide Trombone that actually leads to knowing something more about this piece than has been known for probably the last 50 years.

While engraving the SOB songbook, which I noted earlier in this blog included a bunch of songs "stolen" at some point from the Bakers Dozen, there were a number very old manuscripts in a hand that was, well "scary". I had seen these charts years ago when as Pitchpipe, I had the actual SOB songbook in 1971 and 1972. A set of songs including "Slow Motion Time", "Jungle Town", "Deh Wind Blow Ober Mah Shoulder", "George Jones" and "Slide Trombone". I remember the handwriting of these charts vividly, since they gave me a shiver when I looked them over in 1971. Several of these songs ended up in the Yale Songbook, also known as "Songs of Yale".

That songbook as we know it today was assembled by the great Marshall Bartholomew in 1953 but had had many editions published. The first copyright was 1903 and there were copyrights in 1906, 1918, 1934 and 1953. Songs in the 1953 edition had been passed on for many years without attribution. I have some of those in the "Songs of Yale" assembled by C. S. Elliot published in 1870, including earlier versions of songs you can see in the 1953 edition. The songs apparently had a life of their own; they grew, got embellished, updated and probably were just sung in the wider College community in the "oral tradition".

In any case, wondering who arranged the Slippery slide Trombone, I took a look at the ancient manuscript for Slide Trombone that is in the SOB archive. It's clearly very old, and it is sitting among what appear to be a group of songs that were floating around the singing community described above, some of which became part of the Whiffenpoof "Blue Book" and some of which were published in Bartholomew's 1953 edition of "songs of Yale". It's not exactly note for note the same as the one in the "WBB", but it's clearly an ancestor, and a very close one. In a court case on plagiarism, this manuscript would convict.

And this copy has something on it. It's an inscription, mostly unreadable, saying something like "Old song- freely cooked up...", then some unintelligible stuff, and then "by R. F. L.". Like I said before: three letters, nothing more. I am not sure what we really have here, but when I look into the Whiffenpoof records, I find only one singer in the 100 year history of the group with those initials. He is Robert Frederick "Missing" Link who sang 2nd bass with the Whiffs in 1942. The stars are aligning. Did he arrange it? Well, maybe he did or he knows who did, or maybe he was just the guy who transcribed what was being sung around campus. The search for truth and the meaning of life goes on....

More next time on some other finds.

Bob

Blue of a Kind Recording Update

The guys showed up ready to play for the next session. Compared to the second session which produced only 2 keepers, the third session produced 5. For a couple hours of hard work, standing around microphones and trying it again and again, you have to have something to show for the effort.

Speaking from the point of view of music director, sometimes you just gotta apply some tough love! Members of the ensemble have to take responsibility for their music. Too many singers are along for the ride and are pushed and pulled by whatever happens in the next moment. Your ensemble will not rise to the top if your singers don't do their homework.

The list of keepers is lengthening and the dream is in sight. Now as we complete this aspect of the project, we have to begin thinking about all the other assets we need to develop - the CD cover, liner notes, photos and etc. There is still a bit of work ahead! Luckily, we have a great artist and designer in the group who has experience doing CD cover artwork.

Bob

Recording "Blue of a Kind"

I've taken Blue of a Kind into the studio to make our first CD. We've had 2 sessions so far at Chillhouse Studios. It's a marvelous experience working in the studio, one you'll never forget. Working with Eric at Chillhouse is really good because he's got such a great ear. He can mike the group in a way that you can analyze problems and make corrections, and he knows when a take basically works. With a couple of active ribbon mikes at hand, some great condensers and the iso booth, you can really rock.

What have we found out in the process? More than we want to know. We can sing in front of an audience, totally knock them out and give a full hour's entertainment before we wilt, but underneath there are guys improvising, slugging along and basically having a good time but they aren't drinking the same Koolaide the rest of us are. They are showing up for the big game with their shoes untied.

I stacked up songs for the first session that I thought we could nail pretty easily. The first session was quite successful. For the second session, I mixed comfort with some stretch, since I thought the guys would be better adjusted and would show "up ready to play", so we could cut some butter.

Let me say this: we're a medium-sized ensemble. There's room to hide.

It turns out maybe one sixth or one eighth of the group doesn't know their stuff, and now they are getting caught by their fellow singers. What seems to work in concert isn't cutting it when the harsher light of the studio is shone upon them. I'm not talking about the occasional flub - some guys are on a map all their own.

They fall into 2 basic categories. First, the guy has basically learned everything but is occasionally singing a line that is interesting but "off book". Maybe it's one individual in one song and another guy in another song. It might pull off the other singers, depending on the complexity of the song and whether they are near enough to hear. It creates muddiness and noise, but it isn't a total mess because it's so sporadic.

Second category: the guy just has not learned his stuff and is singing pretty much whatever comes to mind, being pushed and pulled freely by whatever else is going on around him, touching here and there on the vocal line he is supposed to present.

The first category is more correctable, and probably does less overall harm since the deviations are musical, creative and episodic. The second category is just like the plague and sucks life out of every performance. It creates an undercurrent of noise that permeates every piece. You can't put a finger on it; it's just always there muddying things up, taking the edge off every effect the arranger intended or what the director is going for. Combine the two, and a very small fraction of the group is heading you directly towards your next "train wreck".

What to do? We're a volunteer group, a bunch of guys who do this for fun. So I repeat, what to do? We are achieving our goals in the field and we want to make a CD to sell that represents us at our finest. So?

It's tough. I have decided to serve everyone notice. They have 7 days to polish 4-5 pieces they should already know by rote. Come the next session, if their compadres don't think they have a song down pretty much solid on the first take, they will ask them to stand down and try on the next song. Maybe sitting in the control room with their songbook open will help. It's ugly, but it might work. Last week we recorded 5 songs and produced maybe two keepers. The glass may be almost half full, but it's no good. Next week, we have to do better. The guys have to show up "mentally hot".

Look forward to a really great CD from these guys. I know they have it in them and Eric will definitely help us bring it out.

Bob

The O's and B's Songbook Restoration Project

Recently I sent off dozens of songs for proofing and vetting to Baker's Dozen arrangers from their founding years. How exciting to begin getting responses from these guys! Lewis Girdler gave me a complete set of corrections. The man remembered every note of every song he arranged more than 50 years ago. Wow!

Dick Peaslee wrote me back and said he's working on it but he's a little backed up with current work. Why? Well, he's a major composer with a full plate. Check him out at http://www.dickpeaslee.com. Herb Payson wrote me that he's on the case, still plays jazz piano every day and fondly remembers his BD days. Pete Sipple is floored to see his work from 50 years ago and is working his way through it all.

What a thrill!! I could not locate some of the BD founders. I tried every means I could, and all I can say is that time may have taken its' toll. I am still trying to contact a few guys. We'll see where it leads.

Meanwhile, I am still engraving the O's and B's music and trying to turn over a few rocks to see what we can find. The Internet is a major asset finding early recordings of these tunes so I can piece together melodies from recordings these arrangers probably listened to. How does a song go? Well, this is how Doris Day sang it....

I've made contact with some Spizzwinks(?) about working through their songbook and I hope to hear more from them. Then there's the Alley Cats and the Duke's Men. Sadly, the Bachelors and the Jesters are gone.

Why can't the best of this music be revived, not as it was done in the past, but interpreted for the modern ear? Some of these songs have been revived by directors who knew how to treat the music for the modern audience. The result has always been stunning. I want to hear this music sung again in the new way, with impeccable voices and creative direction. The best of the best from 1940-1970 in the hands of a great artist.

Would it sum things up? Connect old and new? Create new bonds between young and old? Re-utter the core 20th century music we all love in a powerful way? I want to know.

Bob

Restoring the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus songbook

Back in 1972, I passed the Songbook of the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus to my successor. Said songbook was never seen again. Thirty-four years of music was lost in one fell swoop. Luckily, the group survived based on the music in members' personal songbooks. Also thanks to oral tradition and to a newbie who re-enscribed everything into a proper, new songbook.

Nonetheless, a TON of stuff was lost and some of it will probably never be recovered.

Over the last 35 years, the SOB alums have endeavored to recover the archives from members songbooks salted away in attics. The alums managed to recover several hundred songs and scanned them into the "archives". I've been engraving Whiffenpoof music the over the last year, and in my downtime, I dug into these archives. One of the pieces I was looking for in particular was "Lazy Bones", a Hoagy Carmichael tune I had sung with the group in 1970. It was there, but it was not the arrangement I remembered. This bothered me a little, but I guessed that maybe it had been rearranged and the more recent version was missing.

Oh, what a wealth of forgotten music I found! Many of the arrangers' names were familiar to me from engraving the Whiff's music. I began to troll through the archives by name and finding connections between arrangers until I found a group of musicians whose work clearly formed the core of the founding music from the early 40's and led right into the 50's and early 60's. None of this music had been sung for many years and some of it was quite extraordinary.

Many tunes were xeroxes of xeroxes and were severely compromised. I spent hours over many pages, with a magnifying glass and bright sunlight, looking for a pixel here or a blotch there, trying to interpret what the arranger was telling me and what the ravages of time had stolen from his expression. At some level of generations, xerox copies of sharps turn into something that looks like a star exploding. At the next generation or so, they turn into a few specs that might be a sharp, a flat, a natural or just a singers' pencil mark. Things break down.

As I engraved the music and listened to it on playback, it was as if I was passing through a time portal. These tunes came back to life to me as if from the dead. I could hardly wait to engrave the next tune to hear how some of these arrangers would interpret songs from Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, Edith Piaf, Lennon & McCartney and so on. These were songs that defined the 20th Century, and these arrangements were by music majors aiming to become Whiffenpoofs. The music was stunning, and almost all of it had not been heard for 40 years. It was lying in forgotten archives and barely readable.

Then I began tracing the history, nailing down the names and dates, and trying to contact the arrangers to proof and vet my work. And I learned something I did not want to know. A large portion of this music was not ours. It belonged to a competitor.

I wrote to some of the arrangers, and they told me they had not been in the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus, but rather in the Baker's Dozen. The S.O.B.'s had been founded in 1938 and the Baker's Dozen in 1947. Youngsters!!

Youngsters they may be, but the music is incredible. I had sung many arrangements from guys in this group in my tour as a Whiffenpoof. Some of their music is still sung by the Whiffs to this day. Lew Girdler, Dick Gregory, Herb Payson, Dick Peaslee, Pete Sipple: OMG these were the arrangers who defined a cappella singing at Yale!

How did this music get into the SOB archives? I have no idea. I distinctly remember seeing some of these pieces in the SOB songbook in 1971, in particular "Vermilion Hair" and "One Meat Ball". Years later they were collected from another member's songbook from the 60's, backing up my contention. My conclusion is they were stolen at some point, probably by a college roommate. I doubt the S.O.B.'s ever performed the stolen music, but apparently they did pass it on.

What to do now? I keep engraving and writing to the arrangers. This music is too good to let die. What is the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus missing? Well, about 98% of their music from 1938 - 1960. We will keep digging and hopefully finding.....

Bob

Who is BellaMafia?

Who is BellaMafia?

Pretty Organized Crime is one answer. BellaMafia is a women's a cappella group from Bowdoin College in Brunswick Maine. The founding members are still in the group and the repertoire has been laboriously built over the past 2 years by some very talented musicians. If you haven't heard of this group yet, you will soon. They lay down some very well crafted tunes and the group is chock full of some impressive vocalists.

Eric and I recorded them on campus a couple weeks ago. They had reserved a space for us to work in, because they could not all make the trek to Boston to Chillhouse Studios. Actually, they had reserved two spaces and we scoped them out. We went with the Chapel, because the acoustics were wonderful for the singers, and the natural reverb was just about dead solid perfect.

In the weeks before we made the trip, BellaMafia had done their homework. As Eric set up the hardware in the Chapel I got to hear them warm up. They struck me like athletes ready to run the race and break a course record. They were just ready to go!

Over the next couple days, these beauties put in two 7 hour sessions to record their complete repertoire - 2 years of work they'd never sung all at once before. Up until this point, they had worked up 2-3 numbers at a time for a cappella festivals and competitions, but never performed a whole show themselves. When you're just getting started, this is the way it works. It's amazing the courage and fortitude it takes to bootstrap a full-fledged group. And these women have to make their grades, too! Bowdoin is a serious place.

For two days, we worked laying down the background singing with the vocal percusssion. Each song took about 30 minutes, what with several takes, monitoring the takes, making adjustments and trying to get the best overall performance. Every song got the right amount of attention, to good effect. Without the soloists, the architecture of the song was not always clear, so a whiteboard was sometimes used to sketch out the lyrical roadmap. A couple of times, a laptop on a stool with lyrics downloaded fresh off the 'Net and pasted into MS Word with a large font size was used. This could be scrolled as the song was sung by the woman who was perc'ing. Now that's multi-tasking!

Solo callbacks ended each day. Well, let's say the second shift began with solo callbacks. Every song had at least one solo and many had several solos and duets, some also had rap parts. There was serious work to do. Tirelessly, Eric worked with each singer helping them get their best performance without pushing them to exhaustion.

Two long days of work, all while preparing for final exams. Eric and I packed up the gear late on Sunday, after backing up the whole thing to external hard disk. The project can't help but be a success based on what we heard - mixing and mastering will definitely take it to the next level. Once the product is complete, if BellaMafia makes some samples available, I'll put some pointers to where you can have a listen.

One more thing I'll say about this group of women. Like all the groups I've met, they are diverse personalities, but closely bonded through the joy of singing together. They are a tribe. Something else about them I found remarkable and I mentioned it to Eric while driving back to Boston. Fourteen plus hours of hard work, lots of boredom and frustration, criticism from each other, from their leaders, from me and from Eric and we heard not even one snappy remark. Just lots of good hard work, laughs and a few catnaps in the pews.

Who is BellaMafia? They're a bunch of amazing young women. Once their CD is ready, you'll find out the rest of the answer.

Bob

Visit us at http://www.acappellanation.com

Finishing the Whiffenpoof Audio Restoration project

Well, the audio restoration project is completed. The Whiffenpoofs from 1973 wanted to create a CD to give to class members returning for a reunion. The group had long since lost the master tapes. Presumably, these were left on file at the studio in Wallingford, CT. Eventually, the studio figured they wouldn't hear from these guys and disposed of the archives. What was left to work from was a 33 1/3 LP record that had never been played. That seemed rather fortunate. How many people have a record they never played?

The original transfer took a little doing to get set up properly. There was some excess noise on side 1 on the left channel to worry about. This noise did not come from wear and tear, but rather from the original stamping process. After trying a couple of configurations, Eric found a way to record the LP that reduced the noise significantly and side 1 recorded very nicely.

As side 2 was transfering, we could hear a lot more noise over the monitors, and my heart began to sink. The layout of music for the 2 sides of the vinyl had put a lot of songs on the second side, and many of these songs carried more density of information overall then the songs on side 1. The result? A lot of data packed into tightly packed grooves. Worse still, the stamping process had done worse on this side, and there was a lot more noise in the left channel. The further we got into the transfer, the more the sound degraded. It was not awful, but it was far less optimal than we'd anticipated starting with a clean piece of virgin vinyl.

Clearly what we had was good enough for the singing group members to have as a memento, and was probably better than their well-worn copies from 1973. But to produce something of quality for the reunion class gift, we knew we had to go to the next level. We discussed with the University and got approval to remaster the audio.

Eric did some research, discussed the problem with other experts at the college where he teaches and located some fabulous software for restoring from vinyl. We took the raw transfer back into the studio, and tuned parameters on some of the most delicate songs to remove pops, hiss and crackle. The results were astounding! It was like sheer magic. This software could identify the chaff, remove it and put these more delicate songs back to a state so close to pristine, it was jaw-dropping. We ran the filters over the entire raw data and thought we were finished.

Then we spot-checked across the entire result. While the parameters we selected had worked like a dream on those delicate songs, the dense, rumbling pieces from side 2 where the grooves were jammed so tightly were not pretty. Although they were hiss, pop and crackle free, they were now distorted. Terms like "wow" and "flutter" come to mind. We found these pieces required special attention, a completely different set of parameters and some measure of compromise to find the right level where noise could be reduced measurably without distorting the vocal performance. We reduced thresholds on the filters by 50% and then another 50% and made several more passes over the data, giving us 4 versions the entire stream from which to select the best starting point for each song.

Then Eric worked by with each piece to fine-tune the compression and a light EQ, as well as removing some noises by hand to achieve a result that was unimaginable after the initial transfer. The master has been sent off for production and the result should be something worth adding to a collection of college a cappella recordings. The reunion group should be very happy, and we came in right on budget!

I hope to talk more about getting the artwork together as well as acquiring all the mechanical licenses, so we're nice and legal. I even got to speak with one of the composers, Fred Hellerman on the phone in the process! How cool is that?

~Bob