Virtuoso of the Vaults

The floor in Studio C in the basement of Hollywood’s historic Capitol Records tower is cluttered with crates, each filled with recording tape boxes and their precious rounds of Mylar-preserved history pulled from the archives of Blue Note Records. These original master tapes, preserving sessions from many of the great names in the history of jazz, sport handwritten labels that give only hints of what’s inside: “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” “Live in London” or simply “Ervin.”

In the middle of it all one night earlier this month sits Bob Belden, pulling out one tape after another, scrutinizing the contents of each, carefully laying some aside for future use. Belden is working on a reissue project; his job--as producer--is to patch together an album that will satisfy fans of Buddy Rich while introducing a new audience to the drummer’s late ‘60s work.

It’s a tedious process but it’s nothing new to Belden, who is emerging as one of the central figures in the lucrative reissue revival. His visibility as a producer will increase substantially with the release in early September of “Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings,” the long-awaited, often postponed six-CD collection that includes two previously unreleased sessions as well as rehearsals and alternate takes.

The 39-year-old Belden, who’s been obsessed with jazz since his college days, is well suited for this sonic archeology. His vast knowledge of recorded jazz history and artists is put to good use as he prepares reissues and suggests future re-releases for several labels. His knowledge of the recording process gives him hands-on abilities in the studio, taking him beyond the role of mere consultant.

Since the advent of the compact disc in the mid-’80s, jazz labels have been mining their vaults for out-of-print albums, forgotten sessions and dates that for one reason or another have never seen the light of day. Properly chosen and prepared, reissues can be profitable for labels already in possession of the master tapes from a session whose recording expenses were covered long ago.

“Not every reissue makes money,” says Tom Evered, vice president of marketing at Blue Note. “But because of their longevity, most do over a period of time.”

But the reissue process isn’t always easy. In the case of the Buddy Rich project, Belden started his work in Dominguez Hills with a search through Blue Note’s temperature- and humidity-controlled vaults. He was looking for tapes of Rich’s original Pacific Jazz recording sessions.

Once they were found, they were inspected for damage and played to determine sound quality. Masters whose sounds have faded badly are baked at 350 degrees, which re-adheres the magnetic information to the tape for a few precious minutes, enough time for a copy to be made. Luckily, no baking was required on the Rich masters.

Belden works with a fan’s enthusiasm as he selects tracks to be included from the half a dozen masters, culling out false starts and bad takes as he and the recording engineer rerecord the music onto new tapes.

When one tune on these masters ends abruptly, Belden runs the song again, this time fading the sound gradually to avoid the abrupt close. Through careful comparison, Belden realizes that some of the Rich takes were not made live as the tape labels indicate but were instead done in the studio. He checks his notes to find out when the songs were recorded.

Finally, everything to be included on the Rich reissue has been recorded onto new masters. Each is carefully labeled. In a few months, CDs will be pressed from the tapes and packaged. Rich’s “Time Capsules” will finally be ready to hit the stores.

Reissues are only one side of Belden’s music career. Trained as a saxophonist, he’s also a respected arranger-composer who has penned charts for a host of jazz projects, including Herbie Hancock’s latest album, “The New Standard,” and Joe Henderson’s forthcoming big-band album set for October release on Verve, “Shade of Jade.”

Then there’s his role as producer and/or arranger for a number of emerging musicians, trumpeters Marcus Printup and Tim Hagans, pianists Renee Rosnes and Joey Calderazzo among them.

In addition, Belden has produced a number of eclectic recordings under his own name, most recently “Shades of Blue,” an album that features tunes off historic Blue Note label releases reinterpreted by the likes of singer Cassandra Wilson, guitarist John Scofield, pianist Jacky Terrasson and others. Belden’s own band is heard playing a rendition of pianist Andrew Hill’s classic “Siete Ocho.” With a trio of synthesizers backing trumpet, saxophone and English horn, it’s the most adventurous piece on the album.

“Bob is comfortable in a lot of areas,” says respected producer and Mosaic Records founder Michael Cuscuna, who brought Belden into both the Blue Note and Columbia reissue programs. “Arranging, writing, production. He has an engineer’s understanding of the recording process. And he’s led great bands himself that have often been overlooked in the last few years. He’s got all the bases covered.”

All this activity makes Belden currently one of the jazz world’s most influential members, an energetic utility player who not only helps shape reissue programs at two major labels but whose writing and recording is having a major impact on jazz in the ‘90s.

The Davis-Evans reissue, which is due in stores Sept. 3, sheds light on Belden’s own sense of jazz and composition. He’s a confessed Davis fanatic whose Upper West Side Manhattan apartment is stuffed with Davis memorabilia, albums and bootleg tapes.

Belden produced the part of the collection dating from 1962 on, beginning with the groundbreaking “Quiet Nights” album and including unissued material recorded as late as 1968 (producer Phil Schaap handled the earlier material: “Sketches of Spain,” “Miles Ahead” and “Porgy and Bess”). (Mosaic Records will simultaneously release the work on vinyl.)

His own writing mirrors Evans’ compositional sense more than any other influence.

“I steal from Gil quite often,” he confesses. “I like to use that spread of instruments like Gil did, from the flute to bass trombone, and spread the sound out over the whole range, from the high end to low. That’s an idea that Gil got from Duke Ellington.”

Belden says the genius of the Davis-Evans collaboration resulted from the way Evans employed his band in backing the trumpeter. “There are two schools of thought on [the role of the orchestra],” he explains. “There’s the Ellington school, in which the orchestra is the solo instrument. And then there’s what Louis Armstrong’s bands did, where the virtuoso-soloist is the focus and the sound is created around him, and everything is designed to propel that sound into some kind of meaningful expression.

“[The latter] is my philosophy and that’s what Gil did. The soloist is the most important thing, not the arrangement. The arrangement is the contribution of the invisible hero. Gil needed a voice to project, and he found that voice in Miles. He could shape anything to work with it. That’s why Miles and Armstrong were both successful. They had their own voice.”

Belden, who confesses to being a “band nerd” during his high school days in Goose Creek, S.C., began developing his musical voice after enrolling in the composition program at North Texas State University when he was 16 years old.

Naive about jazz when he started college, he was quickly exposed to the music through fellow students. “We got heavily into Miles, [John] Coltrane and the Blue Note stuff, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and all. I bought up every album I could find. Miles was the most important. I knew that was the sound for me.”

After graduating from North Texas State in 1978, Belden took his saxophones and went to Lake Tahoe, Nev., where he backed a burlesque show at a local casino. He was quickly picked up by Woody Herman and traveled with the band for a year before moving to New York, where he began to generate his own work, writing conducting sessions and leading his own, free-thinking groups. Sheer persistence and his obsessive ways got him into reissue production. He started pestering people at the Columbia offices, pointing out mistakes in their reissues and otherwise criticizing their releases while urging them to release unissued recordings that he suspected might be hidden away in their vaults.

Cuscuna met Belden shortly after he was given permission to get into the Blue Note library. “Bob is a big Blue Note junkie and when he heard I was going into their vaults he just hunted me down.”

Since that meeting, Belden has produced a host of reissues from Blue Note, most notably the two-album collection of trumpeter Lee Morgan titled “Lee Morgan Live at the Lighthouse.”

On the Columbia side, Belden is heavily involved in the planned series of eight box sets reflecting the complete Miles Davis studio recordings, of which the Davis-Evans collection is the first installment. Belden will produce the release of everything of value he can dig from the vaults recorded after the landmark 1959 “Kind of Blue” recording. He’s also working on a four-CD set of Weather Report recordings, including one CD of never-issued material.

As well as shaping his sound, Davis’ legacy has influenced Belden in the way he approaches the music business. “I think Miles was always headed towards being his own producer, taking control of his own music. That way you don’t have some money manager controlling what you play.”

Belden has already reached that plateau reflected by the diversity of his own projects. His albums include arrangements of the music of Sting (“Straight to My Heart”) and Prince (“When Doves Cry”), both of which, as with “Shades Of Blue,” include a host of Blue Note roster artists. He’s also done projects for the Sunnyside label.

But his most important work might be that of shaping the sound of other musicians. One cold Friday in January, Belden could be found inside Brooklyn’s Systems Two recording studio conducting an ensemble of flute, fluegelhorn, tenor sax, French horn and bass trombone in an arrangement he’s done for pianist Joey Calderazzo’s most recent recording (“Secrets” on Audioquest Music).

There’s something lifeless in the harmonic blend, and Belden collects the sheet music and begins scribbling furiously atop a speaker casing. On the next go-round, the sound has a distinct, unsettled color as the section members clash, then meld with each other. The sound is reminiscent of Herbie Hancock’s 1968 release “Speak Like a Child,” written at a time when Hancock was studying harmony with Evans.

“It’s that process of tension and relief that Gil used so well,” Belden explains. “Musicians go through epic struggles in their solos, through valleys and over peaks, to say something meaningful. And it’s always a question of where should the accompaniment go while the soloist is going through this process. It’s the same thing: Go for that tension and release.

“Gil would write the nonessential tone, something to sound against the melody, and place it in a rhythmic way, on a strong beat, first creating tension, then dissolving it in a harmonious way.”

Belden uses that technique, not only on his own recordings, but in arrangements for everyone from Hancock to Richie Cole. For Hancock’s “The New Standard,” he penned brass and string sections for such tunes as Peter Gabriel’s “Mercy Street” and the Lennon-McCartney tune “Norwegian Wood.”

Though Belden often uses pop music as a springboard in his recordings (a collection of Lennon-McCartney tunes dubbed “Strawberry Fields” is set for release later this year), he doesn’t feel that he’s selling out to commercial interests.

“These are tunes that don’t have jazz fingerprints all over them yet. My job is to personalize them, to make room for soloist to put their own stamp on them.”

Cuscuna agrees that Belden is able to refashion this kind of music in his own image. “I love Bob’s music. It’s very eclectic. Anybody who gets Holly Cole to sing Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ with a country-western flavor and can make it work deserves a lot of credit.”