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How Many Takes Does It Need?

marlbankUpdated 20 August 20263 Mins read

Imagine the scene.

Less a question of ‘how long has this been going on’ more how long is a piece of string, anyway? But stay with the thought. Long, long ago longer even than that terrifyingly underinformed ridiculously longer attention span time that lasted, oops giving the game away, millennia and before – in 2018: oh happy day! – when TikTok first really took off, it is late autumn, 1960.

Greek Street spot the Louche – it’s no longer there – photo: marlbank

By then Hank Mobley has already laid down Soul Station, an acknowledged hard-bop classic that inspires musicians today like Alec Harper for instance in recent years down the Louche bar, but the “creative furnace” to use a slightly cringey but useful metaphor is still hot. Producer Alfred Lion gets the tenor saxophonist back into Rudy Van Gelder’s studio just nine months later to record again.

For Roll Call, Mobley assembled a formidable Blue Note line-up: Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Art Blakey on drums, with the 22-year-old Freddie Hubbard completing the front line on trumpet. The album was recorded at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, on 13 November.

At the heart of the original LP is ‘Take Your Pick’, a playful, hard-swinging blues that illustrates why Mobley was dubbed the ‘middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone’.

It remains a good example of the classic Blue Note sound.

Going back to the Mobley at the beginning six titles were recorded for Roll Call, and the released sessionography identifies just one alternate take: ‘A Baptist Beat’.

‘A Baptist Beat’: the album master is take 29 and runs for about 8:54. An alternate take, take 31, runs for 9:42 and was subsequently issued as a bonus track on the 1987 CD reissue.
‘Take Your Pick’, ‘The Breakdown’, ‘My Groove Your Move’, ‘Roll Call’ and ‘The More I See You’: the session documentation lists these as the issued masters, with no other released alternate takes from the session identified in the discographies.

So, for all the mythology surrounding jazz recording sessions, Roll Call is an interesting example of an album that was, by this evidence, largely captured without a huge pile of alternate performances.

Sometimes musicians say in interviews that everything was a first take. It is a kind of joke. It sounds good. It is sometimes true.

You’d need a monstrous ego to think every take you do, every time, is perfect.

Scholars of jazz love to study all the takes that weren’t issued at the time. Sometimes, particularly if someone is very famous, these appear after their death – or even before. They give an insight into the recording process and show that even the greatest have feet of clay.

Imagine yourself as a producer

Imagine yourself, dear reader, as a producer working with an artist.

Would you insist they keep doing new takes of the material because there is a tiny thing wrong with it?

Would you embrace the spirit of the performance and not worry too much about the mistakes, then iron things out in post-production?

There are so many choices.

Jazz musicians typically don’t spend weeks or months in the studio in the way that some pop musicians do. They usually get an album done in a day, two days or three.

Ideally, I think they need to have been together for a while, touring the material, even if it is only for a few dates. End the tour, take a day off to sober up, detox and chill, rehearse for a day and then record for a day.

I think they should play together in the same studio, ideally, so they can all see each other. Sometimes that isn’t easy.

I’m not a fan of spoken word on albums, but a couple of vocals can work when added in. It doesn’t need a cast of thousands.

Do a maximum of two or three takes of the material. No more. But have plenty of things to play.

Aim for 10 tracks but have a dozen numbers. Let everyone write the tunes and put in a couple of standards. Allow people to improvise for a certain number of bars if that is what they want to.

If they just want to play the tunes, then fine. Leave it at that.

Perhaps the point isn’t to make the perfect take because perfection is subjective. A promotion of warts and all wards off fakery and manipulation.