Album Notes

This CD started with a very simple format. Claudette sitting at her piano in our front room playing piano and singing some of her favorite songs as she usually does a couple nights a week. Very informal and uncomplicated. We could do the recording right here at home. I would just run a couple mic cables into the front room from the professional recording equipment we have in another room and it would be done, right? Not quite.
First being used to the wonderful piano accompaniment of Mardi Gras Band's Tom Shove, Claudette didn't like what she was playing for herself, so we brought Tom in to play piano. End of problem, right? Again, not quite.
When we sent the first few cuts of what we had recorded to Mardi Gras' trombone player, Brad Hammett, who owns a professional recording studio, "The Soundworks"" 50 miles from Sacramento in Lake of The Pine, CA to see if he could master the CD when we finished it, he said, "No, the piano doesn't sound right." Even with Tom playing piano it wasn't working. His suggestions was for all of us to come up to his studio, use his keyboard and equipment and start all over up there, which we agreed to do.
A couple of weeks later, we had no more than gotten started on our first recording session when Mardi Gras' bass player, Mickey Bennett, having heard what we were up to, showed up with his bass insisting that it wouldn't sound right without a bass. We had to agree so he was added to the mix.
In a matter of three or four more recording sessions we had recorded the 12 songs on the album, it taking that much time because, never having played those particular songs together in Claudette's keys, we had to make up the arrangements as we went along. When we sat down to listen to what we had recorded, it didn't take more than two tunes to realize that something was badly missing. That's right, drums.
Now we have an almost completed album and we have to find a drummer versatile enough to put drum tracks on top of 12 already recorded vocal, piano and bass tracks. That may sound simple, but it's not. No matter how good the musicians are, recordings seldom end up at the exact same tempo they start. Even when they do, there are tempo variations throughout that a drummer would have to accomodate to make it sound as though he had been there from the beginning. Fortunately we knew such a drummer.
John Armato had recently arrived in Sacramento from New York City and we were lucky enough to have had him with us, the Mardi Gras Band, for the 2009 Sacramento Jazz Festival where he had done a great job reading through charts he had never seen before. We were confident that he could make it sound right.
I mailed him MP3 tracks of what we had recorded and we set a date for the final recording session.
On the big day, John sat at his drums in the studio, headphones on and music that I had put together for him on a stand in front of him, the rest of us, also with headphones sitting around, waiting to see how it would go. It went beautifully. John had done his homework and in less that two hours the album was completed as far as the tracks were concerned.
All there was left to do was for Brad, as the mixing engineer, to put it into its final form and EQ it, which he did within a few days.
And here it is, after several hundred miles of driving back and forth between our home in Sacramento and Lake of the Pines. Claudette sitting her front room playing piano, on one song anyway, "Over the Rainbow", and singing for you.
Enjoy,
Dick Johnson