Fred Seibert's Blog

Hanna-Barbera Pic-a-Nic Box

Anyone who knows me is aware of my music habit, and close readers of this blog will pick up on my affection for cartoon music in particular.

So it was extremely gratifying when my friend, Rhino Records founder Richard Foos, agreed to indulge me in the 1990’s with a (now out-of-print) four CD boxed set of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons themes, underscores, sound effects, and other audio ephemera and artifacts of our historic studio. It was compiled and produced with passion and knowledge by cartoon writer/producer Earl Kress.

I’ve posted before about my worship and respect for the under appreciated HB music director and composer Hoyt Curtin but I’ve finally gotten around to scanning the great booklet Earl put together for the set. It not only includes a listing of all the sound in the box, but has great essays by Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, David Burd, Bill Burnett, and Barry Hansen (Dr. Demento). Plus Marty Pekar conducted an interview about the studio’s unique sound effects library with Joe, Bill, Greg Watson, and Pat Foley. (As we get around to it, you can look at separate transcripts of the essays here.)

For a quick preview, here’s a Quick Draw McGraw track from the box set, composed, arranged and conducted by Hoyt:

Hoyt Curtain & The Hanna-Barbera Studio Big Band >Quick Draw McGraw (Underscore & Syndicated End Titles)

Last week was a Cartoon Music Week over on my music blog. I tried to survey a bunch of approaches to the classic styles; maybe someday soon I’ll try a more contemporary take. Given your predilections I figure you might like it.

As I was writing about my early experiences in the 1970s New York jazz scene yesterday, our friend Andy Schwartz was emailing me about his pieces about one of the great city music clubs, Tin Palace. Check them out in the online music mag Perfect Sound Forever.

  
Photograph of Michael Mantler by Tod Papageorge, 1968

I’m luckier than most. My life’s been filled with a lot of folks who’ve shown me the way. Parents, teachers, friends, bosses. Most of them would be horrified to be identified as my “mentor,” but that’s just what they are. An advisor, a counselor, who helped shape my world view.

Composer Michael Mantler was one of them. He was first hand proof that talent, planning, vision, drive, hard work, and sheer force of will could combine to accomplish dreams beyond anyone’s expectations. He didn’t have any particular interest, I think, in showing me much of anything really, but he was an incredible role model, trying to keep his family’s heads above water, struggling against all odds to be viable fringe artists in a highly commercial world. It was a time in my life that would never be repeated, and one that made a huge difference to me.

Mike would probably recoil at the whole idea of mentorship –by now, we’re probably more like friends or something– but I don’t know what else to call it. He was already a young legend in avant-garde jazz  when, as a naive 18 year old, I crashed my first professional recording session he was producing, his then wife Carla Bley’s “Escalator Over the Hill,” He patiently figured I was a friend of one of the superstar orchestra’s if he even noticed my presence. I went on to play their records on college radio, and then he  and Carla trusted me right out of school to work at their innovative artist record distribution service (itself an outgrowth of their incredible, idealistic collective, the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, JCOA). I wasn’t too impressed with the job I did, but a few years later Mike asked me to be the sound man and assistant roadie on Carla’s first big band tours. It was an unforgetable experience not only for the music, but for the pride with which Mike managed the unruly, artistic bunch they’d gathered. I repayed them after a year by ducking out days before our first European tour (a real loss on my part), but it didn’t stop us from staying friendly for the 30 years since.

Thanks Mike, you made a real difference in my struggle to become a professional adult.
……

It wouldn’t be right to talk about Mike without mentioning some of his stunning work. His music isn’t for everyone (on his website he quotes one reviewer saying “‘Silence‘ is possibly the least listenable record I have ever heard”) and requires a dedicated listener, but the rewards are great. Aside from his playing and composing, Mike was no slouch as a producer either. He always knew to not only get the very best musicians, but that it didn’t hurt if they had name value for sales (check out Robert Wyatt, Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Jack DeJohnette, Pharoh Sanders, Cecil Taylor, and Don Preston, among many others). A few of my favorites:

And here’s one of my favorite of Mike’s recordings, featuring a jazz avant-garde superstar orchestra, from the 1968 “The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra“:

The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra > Preview
(Composed & conducted by Michael Mantler; Soloist: Pharoah Sanders)

It’s Ballads Week! over at Kathleen Loves Music!

I’ve been having such a ball since I moved my music blog over to tumblr (it’s so much easier) that I’ve actually started programming the thing. Whether it’s the Tribute to Isaac Hayes the week he passed away,  or the five versions I posted of James Brown’s funk innovation “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag,” I’m finding it a hoot to share the music I like with the tumblr community in addition to my friend Kathleen, whom I set the site up for in the beginning.

Coming up? So far I’m planning theme weeks about (of course) Cartoon Music, Modern Blues, the Nat “King” Cole Trio, One Hit Wonders of the 60s, and White Blues. Any thoughts, lemme know.

Jerry Wexler recording with Aretha Franklin, circa early 1970s

It might seem odd to remember a great record producer on a cartoon blog, but it’s probably just as odd to take cartoon producing lessons from a great rhythm & blues producer (the producer who coined the term ‘rhythm and blues’, not so incidentally), like I sort of did. But when I was coming up there was no place to learn to be a producer (if it is indeed possible to learn such a thing) so I took my inspiration from the great record men I could read about. Like Jerry Wexler.

Ironically, I’d started re-reading Jerry’s autobiography just this week when I got word he’d passed away yesterday in Florida.

Jerry is my number one producer hero, which is saying something considering my dozen other favorites including the likes George Martin or Berry Gordy or Quincy Jones. The thing I most admired most about him was the finesse to allow musicians to play exactly how they wanted to play, but somehow coax mega hits out of them at the same time. A rare, sometimes, seemingly unique ability.

Sure, the music made my antennae go up (Aretha, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Bob Dylan, Dusty Springfield, the list is almost incalculable), his company too (he was a partner in the great Atlantic Records), and the fact he was a Manhattan-ite in love with Black music. I’ve heard he could be an irracible jerk (he who casts the first stone….). But, unlike a lot of the other great producers who were often highly trained arrangers or musicians or engineers themselves, Jerry seemed that he was just a fan first and foremost (I say “seemed” because he was a highly skilled writer and journalist before joining Atlantic in his 30’s).

Jerry just loved music. He married his fandom and knowledge to his impeccable instincts for talent. (He convinced Carole King and Gerry Goffin to write “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” after musing about John Henry’s term “natural man” and shouting out to them on a New York street to write a song with that title. He hummed a favorite country song to Patti Page and she sold millions on “The Tennesee Waltz”).

You can read more and better about Jerry Wexler in thousands of places. Do it, you’ll enjoy yourself. But, in the meantime, I realized that without thinking about it over at my music blog I’ve posted five tracks that Jerry produced or caused to be produced in the last few weeks alone. They’re the best way to hear what I’m talking about. Jerry Wexler made us all a lot richer.

Aretha Franklin > Rock Steady

King Curtis > Hold On, I’m Comin’

Carla Thomas > B-A-B-Y

Sam & Dave > I Thank You

Otis Redding > (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

Mailed out the week of July 7, 2008.
…..
Frederator Postcards Series 1, 1998
Frederator Postcards Series 2, 1999
Frederator Postcards Series 3, 2000
Frederator Postcards Series 4, 2003
Frederator Postcards Series 5, 2004-2005
Frederator Postcards Series 6, 2007-2008

(via i heart comics)

Most of the time I’m not a first mover. Early, sure (blogging, Channel Frederator, VOD Cars), rarely first. But with my music jones I’ve tried to be on top of most everything and often just wanted to kill myself. Over the years, I’ve been a musician, a record producer, a music television producer and most of all a stone music fan. Pop, rock, jazz, R&B, hip-hop, you name it, I’m there. So, the digital revolution has given me a wonder of hopes and frustrations.

I’ve used ‘em all –the original Napster, Winamp, MusicMatch, the HangGo, the Airport Express, heck I’ve even ran SonicNet Radio for a while– and eventually just chocked on the exasperation. The inventors have caught up with my needs –selection, convenience, and (relative) quality for a reasonable price– and though I’m a little behind the true hipsters, I’m finally at (almost) fan nirvana.

Sonos was the first level of enlightenment [Read more…]

This post has absolutely nothing to do with animation.

I’ve been cleaning out my drawers lately which caused me to scan some of my stuff and throw it on my Flickr page. Some of it’ll eventually get linked to on my old branding agency archive, but who knows about the rest.

The picture above is from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. It’s from a random collection of photographs I found in a box at a junk shop specializing in then-uncool mid-century furniture. I couldn’t resist the hundreds of vintage prints of these amazing deco buildlings I’d really only seen in amazing stylized illustrations from the fair. I had no idea what I was going to do with the snaps –hell, I still don’t know what I’m going to do with them– but they were great just to have.

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Mosaic Records Brochure No. 4

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Catalogs Consumer catalog 1984

In the late 70s I was producing jazz records and became friendly with Michael Cuscuna, soon to become one of the medium’s most revered producers and the leading reissue producer in history. In the early 80s he and BlueNote executive Charlie Lourie started the pioneering Mosaic Records as the first company specializing in boxed set reissues of classic performances, available only by mail order. Michael and I became reacquainted when I ordered their first set (The Complete BlueNote Recordings of Thelonious Monk) and he asked me to get involved with helping them out of the hole. It turned out their ’sure thing’ idea wasn’t having many takers and they were worried about shutting down. My partner Alan Goodman and I turned them down two years in a row with a lot of unsolitcited advice about what they could do better –we were broke and our company was barely alive itself– even if we were talking through our hats. Everything we knew about direct mail cataloging was from being mail order customers ourselves and from a direct mail how-to book I’d read the first chapter of. We loved Michael and Charlie, and we admired what they were trying to accomplish at Mosaic, but we were just too low on bandwidth.

Three years in our company was doing a little better and Mosaic was doing a lot worse; Michael and Charlie successfully prevailed on us to finally help. We knew no more, but full of the arrogance of youth we lugged out Alan’s first generation portable computer and invented the first Mosaic 12-page brochure on our summer picnic table. Alan wrote every word (I supervised “strategy” — what else is new?), our friends Tom Corey and Scott Nash designed the thing, Jessica Wolf supervised the production and we mailed out the first Mosaic catalog ever in the summer of 1986.

We waited for the order phones to ring, and lo and behold, in the first three weeks Mosaic’s business had increased 10 fold. They were in business forever. Alan’s still writing the brochures, I’m still getting the free box sets and lobbing in ideas from the side. What a world we live in. I’ve never been prouder of any project I’ve worked on in my life.

Do you like jazz? Order one of the Mosaic sets. They are still the standard by which all others are judged.