Heart Songs

Solid gold: Tony Bennett gets royal treatment on new ultradisc reissue.

Trio of country, rap, and lounge classics

Chris Wall Tainted Angel Cold Spring Records

IT’S ONLY FEBRUARY, but Chris Wall’s Tainted Angel is already making a strong pitch for country album of the year. Austin-based Wall may not be a mainstream radio star, but he is no stranger to masterpieces. After scoring a major songwriting hit with the uncharacteristically whimsical “Trashy Women” (as recorded by Confederate Railroad), he used his royalties to establish Cold Spring Records and recorded 1994’s Cowboy Nation, an astonishingly creative tapestry of hardcore honky-tonk. Now, after a four-year studio hiatus, Wall returns with an entirely different, but similarly potent, collection. Gone is the polished production of Cowboy Nation, replaced with a stripped-down sound that is perfectly calibrated to the album’s collective mood. But one thing remains unchanged: Wall’s subliminal intellectualism. No, we’re not talking the sort of self-conscious smarts brokered by tea-drinking folksters, but rather a sort of easygoing highway literacy that deciphers truth in whiskey shots and broken hearts. For instance, the fiddle-saturated “Big Blue Teardrops” is a gorgeously crafted swing number that explores the lighter side of regret, while Wall’s hardboiled baritone roams the atmospheric parallels between taverns and churches on “God’s Own Jukebox.” And “Dylan Montana’s Last Ride” is simply one of the most moving country tunes ever recorded. Pack this album on your next road trip: wherever you’re headed, it’ll get you there faster. Chris Weir

The RZA As Bobby Digital Gee Street

MASTER P and Puff Daddy have been reigning over hip-hop’s recent chart successes, but a more iconoclastic and influential wellspring has been the Wu-Tang Clan. From their two classic group efforts (1993’s Enter the Wu-Tang and 1997’s Wu-Tang Forever) to consistently strong solo works by rappers like Raekwon and Method Man, the group has set the high standard for MC skills and has shaken hip-hop with a dry, haunting minimalism. The sonic mastermind behind Wu-Tang Productions is the group member known as the RZA, and he’s finally released his own solo work after producing an endless stream of Wu-Tang spinoffs. Packaging himself as a high-tech blaxploitation hero on As Bobby Digital, the RZA finds more dramatic humor but less desperate focus than usual. Not a great rapper himself, he rallies fine guest support from around the Wu-Tang camp, and though he uses other producers, the sound is all his–eerie loops of stark piano riffs, rough vocal tracks, sparse beats, and the displacement of even sparser samples. Behind his comic-book Bobby Digital character, the RZA has a disc that’s compellingly uneasy–the sounds that lurch and the songs that fade abruptly make it clear that this ain’t no disco. Karl Byrn

Tony Bennett with Count Basie & His Orchestra In Person! Sony/Mobile Fidelity

FORGET ALL THOSE shabby-chopped, pink martini-swilling swing posers. Before he became an unlikely unplugged MTV icon, America’s quintessential lounge singer teamed up with the Kansas City swing king at Latin Casino in Philadelphia for a classic 1958 dinner-club set. On a newly released reissue, Sebastopol-based audiophile company Mobile Fidelity gives this dynamic live concert recording the 24-kt-gold ultradisc treatment. And once the annoying crowd noises die down, you’re left with a sonically superior chronicle of Bennett, with his captivating bel canto, at his peak. Bennett’s belting vocal on “Without a Song,” from the musical Great Day!, will blow you away. But his haunting reading of the Ellington chestnut “Solitude” is the icing on the cake. And you can bet he silences the noisy drunks at the front tables. Ah, Tony! Greg Cahill

From the February 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Dream Maker

Music man: For more than two decades, Prairie Sun owner Mark Rennick has attracted world-class musicians to his Cotati recording studio.

Prairie Sun Recording Studio chief Mark Rennick is a musician’s best friend

By Charles McDermid

I’LL TELL YOU TWO THINGS,” says recording studio owner Mark Rennick, who is known almost exclusively by his nickname, Mooka. “First, the best thing about what I do is the cool people I meet. The second thing is that I call everybody Bubba.”

Fair warning for an interview session that proves to be an exercise in loquacity. Touring Rennick’s sprawling Prairie Sun Recording Studio compound for even a brief stretch finds the 46-year-old displaying the range of interests required of an owner, manager, engineer, producer, and, most important, musician. One moment Rennick is addressing the pros and cons of digital recording equipment, the next he’s picking up a nearby stand-up bass and plucking the strings reflectively.

“I want to be an artist. Period,” says Rennick, who in his limited spare time performs in a politically charged spoken-word ensemble, the Abolitionists, and plays bass in the local Kay Irvine Band. “The recording-studio business is really just a means to an end. I run an artist’s colony that sometimes I’m forced to approach as a business.”

As such, Rennick and his wife, Cherrie, are immersed in the innumerable responsibilities inherent in running an operation that is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

“If people want to record, we have to be there. It doesn’t matter if it’s 2 in the morning on Christmas Eve, we’ll have an engineer in there,” says Rennick, whose workday starts at 7 a.m. and invariably ends between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. “We have to cram sometimes, so it can be high pressure. People snap and lose it all the time.”

“It’s a competitive business, and with the trend today of buying equipment and doing it at home, a studio must have its own niche.”

THE ROAR OF A CHAIN SAW marked the genesis of Prairie Sun, founded in 1978 when Rennick bored a tremendous hole through the living room wall of his rental house in Cotati. “We needed a control-room window,” recalls Rennick, who at the time was studying East Indian music at Sonoma State.

From that spontaneous beginning, Prairie Sun has evolved into one of Sonoma County’s best-kept cultural secrets, a place where art and science meet. Along with thousands of other musicians, Van Morrison, Primus, Faith No More, the Melvins, and surf music creator Dick Dale all have recorded at Prairie Sun or used its post-production facilities. Producer and engineer Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies, Led Zeppelin) does work at PSR, as does Sonoma County artist Tom Waits, whose Bone Machine CD, winner of the 1992 Grammy for Best Alternative release, was co-produced by Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, entirely at Prairie Sun.

In an industry overrun with power lunches, cell-phone palaver, and high-tech sterility, Rennick has managed to maintain a “middle-class, mom-and-pop honesty.” Perhaps because of this, Prairie Sun, named for the Prairie Grass Restoration Project in Rennick’s native Illinois, has accomplished the difficult task of appealing to local bands with small budgets and little experience while garnering established national acts via industry word-of-mouth.

Down ‘n’ dirty in the cottage recording industry

The studio is known as a residential recording facility with a technical bent toward vintage analog-recording equipment as well as state-of-the-art digital technology. “We have a strong blend of old and new. We emphasize unique acoustical environments,” says Rennick.

Take it as a testament to the rolling hills of the west county that a further aspect of Prairie Sun’s niche is location. “It’s a real gem,” says Jeff Sloan, a former studio manager at Prairie Sun for seven years who recently oversaw all production for Waits’ newly completed album set for release this spring on Epitaph Records. “Sonoma County has a lot of little places like that tucked away. [But] it’s a real music retreat–no phone calls or worry about where you’re staying, and you’re 10 feet from the studio.”

IN 1981, after being “encouraged” to relocate by beleaguered neighbors in Cotati, Rennick teamed with Clifton Buck-Kaufman, an art collector and co-founder of the annual Cotati Accordion Festival, and moved Prairie Sun to an old 12-acre chicken ranch just off west Highway 116.

Over the last two decades the sprawling compound where Buck-Kaufman’s family had lived for more than 75 years has evolved into “a full turnkey, multifaceted recording facility.” But the bucolic exterior hardly suggests the high-tech setup within. Cows and horses plod about aimlessly. The grounds, which hold a commanding view of the windswept and cypress-encrusted countryside, are most notable for a pen of Shetland ponies, an enormous garden, and a well-used basketball hoop. The personality of the place could not be more laid-back.

Alongside the half-dozen converted barns, sheds, and cottages that accommodate record-making are three guest houses where musicians often make extended stays with family or entourage.

“A ‘turnkey’ studio means you can do a full-tilt project there,” Sloan says. “You can complete the whole process in one location.”

Briefly, the steps involved in recording begin with rehearsal and pre-production, move to tracking and overdubbing, and end with mixing and mastering. Prairie Sun has three actual studios, each suited for specific needs.

Studio A is the primary mixing room, containing a 48-track mixing board and an overdubbing isolation booth. Studio B is the main tracking, or recording, room: “It’s acousticized and has no parallel walls to eliminate sound trapping,” Sloan explains.

Studio X and the live areas are down in the old cement hatchery rooms, one of which, now called the Waiting Room, is Tom Waits’ preferred acoustic environment.

“[Waits] gravitated toward these ‘echo’ rooms and created the ‘Bone Machine’ aural landscape,” Rennick says.

On this day, occupying a full corner of the cavernous main room of Studio X is an enormous pile of exotic instruments used by Waits while recently recording his yet-to-be-titled new album. The array runs the gamut from the gauche to the ramshackle, the most identifiable objects being huge, old wooden drums, antique carnival pianos, guitars of all shapes and sizes, and a heap of rusty yard tools.

“What we like about Tom is that he is a musicologist. And he has a tremendous ear,” Rennick says. “His talent is a national treasure.”

But in addition to the big names that frequent Prairie Sun, notable local bands such as the Sorentinos, Tarnation, Bracket, Dixie Star, Jumbo, Woodbine, Skatz 007, and even local R&B legend Johnny Otis also have recorded at the Cotati studio.

“If somebody works his day job and has a part-time job, saves every penny that he’s got to come to my studio, I must be as responsible to him as I would want someone to be for me,” Rennick says. “I have the ultimate respect for any artist willing to work on realizing his dreams.”

From the February 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Tuva Time

The Wild East: Kongar-ool Ondar lands major label deal.

Music of Central Asia piques Western ears

By Greg Cahill

CALL IT AN EPIPHANY. Looking for a way to keep his mind off his wife’s debilitating illness, Paul Pena in 1984 turned to searching short-wave radio broadcasts for foreign-language lessons. “Rather than crawl into a bottle for the rest of my life, I wanted something to occupy my mind,” says Pena, noting that his wife’s long illness and subsequent death had left him severely depressed. One night he encountered eerie, oscillating whistles that immediately caught his ear. “At first, I thought the radio’s diode had blown out,” says Pena, a blind bluesman who penned the 1977 Steve Miller hit “Jet Airliner,” “but then I realized there was a discernible melody. So I listened some more and discovered it was Radio Moscow and the sound was a guy singing two notes at once.

“Oh, man, all my training told me that was impossible, but I became determined to learn it!”

It took years to track down (the announcer had given the wrong pronunciation of the singer’s origin), but Pena eventually traced the strange sounds he heard that night to a polyphonic throat-singer from the isolated Republic of Tuva in Central Asia.

And, most remarkably, he even mastered the difficult technique.

The rest is history, thanks to a recent film documentary by Roko Belic. His Genghis Blues–which premiered last fall at the Mill Valley Film Festival–chronicles the amazing journey that in 1995 took Pena from urban San Francisco to a remote region of the Asian continent, where he became the first Westerner to participate in a rigorous throat-singing symposium.

The documentary is one a several recent projects to put the remote Central Asian republic in the spotlight. Once all but forgotten, the Tuvans–including Huun-Huur-Tu, a group of Tuvan throat-singers who will perform Feb. 16 at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts–rode into town on the hems of the Gyuto Monks of Tibet. Those purveyors of guttural polytonal chanting were “discovered” in the mid-’60s by Huston Smith, UC Berkeley professor of comparative religion, during a trip to Nepal. The monks’ art–the ability of one person to sing multinote chords–was considered a physical impossibility by Westerners.

THE MONKS ARRIVED in the States through the back door, so to speak, when Windham Hill Records founder Will Ackerman recorded them in the mid-’80’s. The monks, in turn, found a receptive audience among fans of New Age music in the then-emerging world music scene.

But neighboring Tuva–a simple horse culture on the Asian steppes that was the home of Genghis Khan and was under iron-fisted Soviet rule since Joseph Stalin’s 1936 invasion–remained shrouded in mystery and closed to travelers. In 1990, the Smithsonian Institution through its newly acquired Folkways Records subsidiary released Tuva: Voices from the Center of Asia, a collection of short tracks–including a 15-second imitation of a reindeer–demonstrating various Tuvan throat-singing techniques, but offering few full songs. However, these haunting sounds got a further boost in 1994 when PBS-TV’s Nova science series profiled Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who had developed a fascination with Tuva. Feynman’s plans to travel there were cut short by his 1988 death. Ironically, permission to travel to Tuva arrived at his home just weeks after the physicist’s funeral.

Still, even in death Feynman introduced millions of TV viewers to polyphonic singing. By 1992, Tuva became a free nation of 300,000, mostly practicing Buddhists with a strong shamanic orientation. In 1994, a group of Tuvan throat-singers–led by the legendary Kongar-ool Ondar–journeyed to San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor, where they met Paul Pena and later invited him to their homeland.

At that point, things began moving fast–at least in terms of Tuvan musical history. Huun-Huur-Tu followed in Ondar’s footsteps with a series of Bay Area appearances. In 1996, the New Jersey-based Ellipsis Arts label released the definitive Deep in the Heart of Tuva: Cowboy Music from the Wild East, a single-CD and book set that included tracks from a variety of Tuvan throat-singers–including Ondar, Pena, and Huun-Huur-Tu–and a full-color booklet that traces the history of this faraway land and even offers recipes for the native blood sausage.

That was followed by Huun-Huur-Tu’s 1997 release If I’d Been Born an Eagle (Shanachie), a blend of Tuvan throat singing and haunting Russian melodies.

This year already has seen a double whammy. Tuva, Among the Spirits: Sound, Music, and Nature in Sakha and Tuva (Smithsonian Folkways) offers unprecedented field recordings of songs and nature sounds from the southern Siberian region that serves as a musical wellspring for Tuva. And Ondar gets the glittering Hollywood treatment on the newly released Back Tuva Future: The Adventure Continues (Warner Bros.), a collection of remixes that teams Ondar with the likes of country stars Willie Nelson and Randy Scruggs (a couple of tracks even feature samples of Richard Feynman), all cloaked in beat-heavy techno arrangements tailor-made for the rave dance set.

The strange thing is, it worksÑthough world music purists may want to run for cover.

Meanwhile, with Genghis Blues playing the film festival circuit nationwide and destined for home video release, expect the Tuvan cultural expedition to the West to thrive. Indeed, Pena believes that Genghis Blues and the recent CD releases could open a whole new world for Western audiences. “I think this is an important musical technology that for the most part we haven’t been made aware of,” he says. “I’d like to see someone who is well known use it to make more people aware of it.

“For all intents and purposes, this is a wholly new instrument. I’d like to see it develop.”

Huun-Huur-Tu, the throat-singers of Tuva, perform Tuesday, Feb. 16, at 8 p.m. at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. Tickets are $15 adult/ $10 students. 546-3600.

From the February 11-17, 1999 issue of Metro.

© Metro Publishing Inc.