Owl Studios Blog

ABACUS by Frank Glover is going to knock the socks right off of anybody that listens to this amazing product! Frank Glover is easily the best jazz clarinet player around and possibly the best jazz saxophone player too. His writing takes jazz and classical music onto a new level and into a new dimension. Instead of me blogging about it, read what Frank Glover has sent to us below!!

 

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I think it's probably impossible to make a fine record of any kind without fine players

and I was extremely fortunate to have the generosity of many excellent musicians for "Abacus". Before I talk about the rhythm section, there are a few musicians on the recording who deserve to be mentioned as they will probably not get mentioned anywhere else, and since the attention will most likely be focused on the soloists, I would like to make special mention of them because their expertise was crucial in the final sound of this concerto for orchestra. While this piece was written entirely on pencil and paper, it takes a small army of dedicated people to realize the finished recording, so there are also many people who are not instrumentalists, who worked with me personally, far beyond what they were given in compensation.

As you might imagine, the score to "Abacus" is quite large, and my original pencil scores are completely destroyed with changes, notes, and rings from coffee cups. Mike Stricklin, who plays tenor saxophone, clarinet and flute, copied all the music tirelessly. I owe him a tremendous debt. The most prominent non-soloistic sound on "Abacus" is the marimba.

Jeff Nearpass got the music from me long before the sessions, and played the part literally perfectly. It is a difficult arpeggiated part that goes on forever, and Jeff played it with a beautiful sense of time and nuance. Jeff also plays the timpani part on "Modern Times" Tom Harvey did a lovely job with the vibraphone part and there are other more deceptively difficult phrases that were handled perfectly...the english horn solo in "Lighthouse" is impossibly low, and Greg Imboden played it with perfect intonation which is extremely demanding considering all the different instruments the doublers were required to play. I believe we had 5 doublers in the saxophone section playing 19 different instruments. They were required to switch within a very few measures and play a "cold" instrument perfectly in tune. It is a daunting task and Jim Farrelly, Tom Meyer, and Mark Ortwein rounded out the saxophone section playing their parts wonderfully.

One of the tendencies I have in composition is to write half steps in my chords. This is fine if you have a week to rehearse the orchestra but we had one quick run through, and then the light was on. It is especially difficult for the string section and I was fortunate to have Dean Franke as concertmaster. We had small problems that he fixed quickly and with the charm that only Dean has. At the end of "Lighthouse" is a shining 10 note chord that would not be very shining if it weren't for Dean. 

One must understand that this orchestra had to record the entire record without the melody. I was conducting and fixing minor things, so the orchestra had no relationship between the note they were playing and the melody. They had no idea how their parts fit into the final sound. When you're sitting there for 8 hours and you can't tell how the hell anything fits together it can be quite frustrating, and although I have worked with all of these musicians in the studio for many years, they were especially generous to me by trusting their parts and doing their best to blend the sounds. I hope they are happy with the final mix. My good friend Jared Rodin, who also plays the bass trombone part, worked with me to get the personnel we thought would work together best. Without his help I would have been lost from the start.

For the amount of time he spent, the entire budget for this record could have reasonably been given to my recording and mixing engineer, John Bolt. On the most difficult project of his career, he worked tirelessly researching microphones, studying software, working with me to get perfect the textures of the orchestra, and combining it all into a flawless mix that rivals any orchestral record I have ever heard. From the pureness of "Ballerina" to my wacked out soprano solo on "Modern Times", John has taken tremendous changes in volume and color, and put them into a concerto that flows from intimate string sonorities to triple forte orchestral chords that nearly blow holes in your woofers.

A man named Al Hall made all of this possible. I hope, when everything is done, and all the critics have had their say, that we will make him proud to have "Abacus" on his OWL studios label.