Tucker Martine is one of the most prominent record producers in the Northwest.
He’s worked with scores of indie bands and singer-songwriters, from the Decemberists and My Morning Jacket to Laura Veirs and Neko Case. In 2010, "Paste Magazine" even named him one of the "10 Best Producers of the Decade," alongside the likes of Rick Rubin and Danger Mouse.
Yet when we started talking with this week's guest curator, Matt Fleeger, about interesting folks working in Portland’s jazz scene, Martine was one of the first names that came up.
We knew Martine had worked on several records with guitarist Bill Frisell. Matt turned us on to the records Martine and Frisell made with drummer Matt Chamberlain and co-producer Lee Townshend under the name Floratone. The two albums were sort of a construction project, with the musicians lobbing jam sessions at Martine and Townshend. The producers would then collage the raw files into coherent songs. They're a fascinating mix of jazz, dub, reggae, avant-garde and other sounds, and the first album, "Floratone," won Tucker a Grammy-nomination for "best engineered album."
Take a listen to the interview for a sonic voyage. Here are some of the highlights:
On the jazz records that made an impression early on
"Somehow I ended up with a cassette of John Coltrane's "Live and the Village Vanguard." I had just never heard anything like it. it was incredibly inspiring, and as an aspiring drummer, it was very deflating! [Like it make you want to hang up your sticks?] Absolutely!"
On the sonic qualities of jazz records
"I think a lot of the early jazz records — and even modern jazz records — are [made] from a very documentarian standpoint. I've loved making records that way, and I've also loved going to the extremes — depending on technology and doing things that are not at all what happened: putting microphones in strange places that make the instruments sound not very natural. Sometimes it can be really exciting. But I love the combination of something beautiful and natural sounding with something kind of dirty and manipulated and inorganic."
On making records with Bill Frisell
"Bill has been an incredible influence on me. For years before I ever got to work with Bill Frisell, I would try putting these three mice on the guitar amp, or these two mice on the guitar. 'Maybe it's a different mic!' or "Maybe I need this different microphone pre-amp!' Just always trying so hard to get great sound from an electric guitar. Always struggling, thinking there was some magic box or trice of the trade I wasn't in on. Then, when I met Bill, I just put the most basic, inexpensive mic on his amp and listened to it, let it come through my speakers, and it instantly sounded like all the Bill Frisell records I had loved. It's him."
On the "Floratone" records, the shuttle-production project Martine made with Frisell, drummer Matt Chamberlain and producer Lee Townshend
We'd find some little moments that sounded like a theme. So then you have to find the bits that connect those. Sometimes it's just another short piece that gets repeated. Sometimes they'd be playing organically for four or five minutes. It was always constructed. Once Lee and I had made, say, ten or eleven pieces like that, we gave them to bill, Bill would choose the ones he heard additional things on, and he would write [additional voicings] for horns or strings. By Bill writing on top of these things Lee and I organized, they started to take on a composed quality.