Teo Macero – Mixing and Editing

With Miles Davis, everything was done with a razor blade.  We were…

Interviewer: You were doing that?

No, no. Not me.  I stayed clear of cutting the tape in those days.  I don’t think I was nervous but that was not my job.  The engineering department was a very strong union and they didn’t want anybody to touch the tapes, touch the equipment.  But when I was in there with the engineer by myself I would be able to manipulate the board because there were a lot of things that we were doing that you had to have two people and you couldn’t tell another engineer, you know, here, you know, do it here.  I had to be spontaneous and you had to know what the hell you were doing.

In A Silent Way there must have been hundreds of edits.  Hundreds.  Because I would make a little loop.  If you listen to it very carefully, In A Silent Way, you’ll hear the repeats.  But I would not do it the way it was, you know, coming up.  I mean, I would move the things around to such a degree you wouldn’t know it.  It’s like surgery, you take out the heart and instead of putting the heart back in the right place you put it maybe where the liver was and the liver where the heart was.  Laughs.  Anyway, it was a lot of fun.  It was very creative for me because I had carte blanche to do with whatever I wanted to do with Miles’ tapes.  And then later on he would criticize me for this or for that and that’s because he became, you know, too much on drugs, too much on… but the edits, we did this with a lot of the artists.

I mean, even with Charlie Mingus, there would be a lot of edits!  If there was something that he didn’t like, like a solo, he said, “Take it out.”  I says, “Yeah, I’m planning to do that.  The trumpet solo, there’s about eight bars or maybe sixteen bars that’s good but the rest of it is all crap.  Now if you want to leave the crap in there, I’ll be glad to do it.”  Excuse me. 

And with Miles it was the same way.  I says, “The guitar solo goes on for I don’t know how many chouses.”  I says, “You really can’t do that, you know, because there’s nothing emotionally coming out.  There’s just a lot of notes with the saxophone.”  And I know that later on the guy used to call me and say, “Hey Teo, what the hell are you doing.  Goddamn it, you took out my solo!”  I said, “I’ll do it again if I have to.”  And if you listen to Miles’ records, who do you hear?  Miles.  Miles is predominant throughout every record except where I tried to setup a sequence like we did with Jack Johnson.  But that was for the movie and when you setup a sequence like that you… because Miles used to, I think he learned a lot of things that he did later in concerts from the way we setup things.  Cause if you notice, I don’t know if you guys ever watched Miles in concert but he would setup somebody, you know, in the rhythm section and they would come and play on it.  And I used to do this all the time with Miles to try to get a feeling.  So when he did come in it would be so great and so emotional that you just had to like it.  And he enjoyed that. 

And then we had a lot of special equipment that I had CBS invent for me.  I would say, “Look it, I have a crazy idea in my head.  I want to be able to change the pitch, change the speed.”  They said, “Teo, we can’t do that. We hear they’re working on that in Europe.”  And I said, “But I want to move that beat, just off, so that if we slow it down just a little bit it will put it into the right, as the guys now say, pocket.  That was a lot of favorite expressions of these guys, put it in the pocket.  So, what I would do, I would put some tape around the cap stand and slow it down just enough to give it a better groove.  Or, if I didn’t like what he was doing, on a couple of records, I’d take the trumpet out completely.  I’d go in the vault and I’d find little pieces here and there and I’d cut it, splice it, and make a little loop and I would lay it right back into the track.  Now, I did this so frequently with Miles that it was like second nature for me because I didn’t have to worry about anything because I knew that there was one record that we did with, Kind of Blue.  You’re all familiar with that.  Well, that record came out and was a huge success.  Much later, maybe about ten years later somebody said, one of the trumpet players who happened to come to the studio said, “I can’t play with this thing because it’s just off pitch.”  “Aw,” I said, “Really?”  Laughs. 

They made such a big issue out of it, I said, “Look it, what they hell do I care?  I couldn’t care less!”  I said, “If Gil Evans, who is the daddy of them all.  And Miles, who made it, and a few of the musicians and myself, we like it.  Then it must be right.”  He said, “But you know, the tape is regular speed.”  I said, “Look it, I have no control about that.”  They said, “Well we’re going to change it.” And they changed it. 

Now, if you listen to the new one, you’ll find out that the groove is not exactly right.  And I would do that.  I would try everything in heaven and on god’s green earth to change things when I thought something was wrong.  I was trying to invent all kinds of gimmicks to make these things work.  Now, toward the end there, I came up with an idea to take the original two track tape.  Now, if you take the two track tape and I say, “You put, you mult it.”  In other words, you take the two, you make it into four.  Now, if you take the four tracks, you can equalize the original two tracks.  You can take out some of the bass, and this is what I did.  I took out some of the bass and maybe added some treble to it.  And then maybe what I did, I took the two tracks, the extra two tracks and I laid them in over the original.  Now, with the gain you could move these two up or these two up.  So when you hear Miles, what do you hear?  Miles is right in your face.  In those days we had trouble with Miles’ trumpet.  As soon as we had to invent the clipper because the grooves would cut into one another.  Now, if you do it my way, without destroying the stereo and adding the other two tracks, you come up with a totally different concept and it comes right at you.  And I’ve done this time and time again.  And it really works like a charm.

Some producers say that you’re not doing it right.  I said, “I did a record with Wallace Rooney and the record company decided that they didn’t like it.  I told them to go to hell.  And what they did, they took this out and went back to the original mix and it doesn’t sound anything like the final mix that I gave them.  I said, “Look it, it’s your record, you’re paying for it, do whatever the hell you want to do.”  And ask Wallace Rooney because Wallace, even to today he says, “Yes, they screwed it up.”  But this is a way of mixing a two track, so I took a lot of two tracks even today and I do this, use this system and it comes right at you.  And adds such a wonderful feeling and you get the feeling of the stereo.  

And then I said to the guys, “I want to move everything around.  I’ve got a four track here with Miles and it’s driving me crazy because I’ve got Miles and bass on one track, the piano on one, and drums on another.  I said, “I want to be able to make the drums sound like eight tracks.”  Well with in two or three days, I still have the equipment by the way.  You plug this system in and it takes the drums and it sounds like Tony Williams has got eight hands.  (Makes drum sounds with his mouth.)  And it goes from side to side and you think you’re hearing it in stereo!

Now, if you want an example of this, it was in the record I did, it was called Big Fun.  The kids were on the cover, they were on a fire hydrant or whatever.  And it really worked like a charm.  I mean, this piece of equipment.  And I just did it again on this Larry Corleone record.  Did you ever hear that record?  Well, if you hear it, you’ll hear all kinds of things happening.  And you’d say, “Well what the hell is all of that going on?”  I took the two tracks and I added a couple other gizmos.  I had one of them over there and a couple of them in the studio, reverb machines.  And I put them on the side.  I put them in echo and I’d do all kinds of things with them.  And that what I used to do with Miles, put a lot of the stuff in all these things and put them in echo and it sounds… what the hell?  How do you do that?  Laughs.  I did that on all of those records.  

That’s why today, I know they went back and they tried to remix some of them and they said some of them are impossible to do.  We’re going with the original mix.  Now, the original mix of Jack Johnson for instance, they couldn’t touch it because I did a lot of different things.  Each time I made a record I would try something different.  Well, we did the Jack Johnson record which was a motion picture, Miles came to me and he said, “I gotta go to California tomorrow.”  I said, “Well, good.  Have a good time.”  He said, “No, but I’ve got a picture to do.”  I said, “A picture?”  He said, “Yeah, a p-p-p-p-p-picture.  I got three thousand bucks.”  He says, “I’ll give you fifteen hundred.”  I said, “You’ve got a deal.” Laughs.

So I put together the Jack Johnson thing and there’s one track in there that I had made earlier of Miles at the end of one of my sessions.  Oh, I think it was one of my sessions with him  I said, “Look it, you son of a bitch.”  I said, “Look it, I’m doing a television show.  Play this.”  He grabs the goddamn music out of my hand, goes outside the control booth into the studio.  I said, “Put the machines on.”  He makes one take.  Claps.  I said, “That’s it!”  And it’s the greatest track in the world.  I tell you, you hear it and you want to fall in love with it because I’ve done all sorts of mysteriouso things with it.  And we were doing a move later on of some of this material and what I did, I made all of thirty, a sixty minute film of all the music from Jack Johnson, Bitches Brew, and some of the others.  And I put them with the London Philharmonic.  And he said, “How the hell are you going to put all of this stuff with the London Philharmonic?”     

And I said, “Look it, I have an idea.  I hear it in my head.  I know that these tracks will work.  I’ve got some additional tracks that were done at the end of one of Miles’ sessions with a guitar player and I can put all of this stuff together.”  And I did.  I’ve got a record of it.  It’s called The Boxen Symphony.  And then I had a piece of Duke Ellington which I wrote for Duke.  And at the one of the sessions, Duke said, “The band is yours.  Go in there and record the piece.”  So I did.  It was one of the sessions.  I went in the studio and I conducted.  There’s only a thirty second segment because it was for a special event.  But it sounds like it’s part of the motion picture.  Miles starts playing and it’s all sort of diverse and repeats and all of the sudden you hear this big orchestra of Duke Ellington with the saxophones and it’s like Duke coming on stage or Miles coming on stage.  And I’ve got a record of all of this because it’s kind of interesting.  And we put it all together and throughout the whole piece I rearranged everything and made it into a Boxen Symphony.  And at the end of the Boxen Symphony I put him with a track that I recorded with the London Philharmonic.  And I used the original track that I made with him for a television show in that record and at the end.  And it’s really quite amazing. 

Now, with Miles’ stuff, people probably don’t realize that you could take his things out of context and put them over here, or over here, whatever.  Because the way he played and the harmonic changes that he made, it was almost like sixteenth century counterpoint.  Now I was an expert in that at Julliard.  Of course I did more sixteenth, seventeenth counterpoint and I was able to know when I hear it.  If you listen to Miles’ you’ll hear, sings like Miles plays, and you can take that out of context and throw it in.  And there were a number of time when Miles couldn’t play because he was heavy on drugs and I felt sorry for him and I said, “Look it, Jesus Christ, you sonuvabitch.  If you were my brother I would take a baseball bat to you and beat you over the goddamn head with it.  Stop this nonsense.”  “Ahhhhh….”  I says, “Yeah… ahhhhhhhhhh…”  I says, “You wanna kill yourself, go ahead.”  And sure enough, with other things, he had trouble.  But, his music gravitates to such a degree that nobody ever talks about it.  And in my book, I’m going to talk about this.  Now, this is a big part of Miles Davis’ legend.  Because his stuff is so, I wouldn’t say romantic, but it was so unusual that you could just take it out and move it around.  You could cut a piece of it.  And there were times where he couldn’t play.  And I said, “Look it, just give me a couple of notes.  Anything!” And he’d go out there and, “(splat…)” play a couple of notes.  I’d slow the machine down and he’d play a couple of notes, we’d play it back up and it’d “(beep… Beep!  Laughs.  Ba-da-boo.  Laughs.)  And just lay it right in.  I said, “I don’t need much.”  And there was one record where I did that.  You know, I didn’t want to see him die because I was responsible for making all of his records.  I got him his million dollar deal, you know.  And then he blew it.