Wet behind the ears

Behearer is already paying the kind of dividends we (or at least I) was hoping for. I'm not able to keep up with everything, but this one caught my eye. (There's no real attribution for this post except KAJKfm. According to ontheradio, KAJK is a pop station in California. But I digress...)

"... I thought you might like to know the origin of the "Ear of the Behearer" album title. At the time the album was recorded, I was a recording engineer/producer working in classical and world music and my honey was Ed Michel, the fabuloso Impulse producer. Dewey's album was recorded in New York, but was mixed at Tom Hidley's legendary Westlake Audio in L.A. I was in the control room when the mix was completed and Ed, Dewey, the engineer and I listened to the final playback. As was his habit, Ed worked way into the wee hours of the morning, so by the time the playback was finished we had all been there for a very long time. It was so overwhelming to hear music in that room, one of the best mixing rooms ever designed, and Dewey's album had turned out so wonderfully, so it was truly, in the parlance of that day, mindblowing to experience that playback. We all sat there dumbstruck after it was over and eventually Ed said, "OK Dewey, what are you going to call the album?" Dewey had been thinking about it and remarked on the personal nature of perceiving beauty, and he said "If you're talking about paintings, you say 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', but what do you say if it's music? 'Beauty is in the..." "...Ear of the Behearer", said I, as the answer seemed obvious. Under the combined influence of sleep deprivation and our mutual ingestion of an impressive array of controlled and uncontrolled substances, we all took this to be a construction of singular brilliance, and dazzlingly apt. I have to admit that just about everything seemed singularly brilliant at that point, but you know how that goes. Anyway, Dewey really liked the idea and so he did in fact choose Ear of the Behearer as the album title.

I really miss Dewey, who I believe was way underrated his entire career. Though the circumstances of his life always seemed really difficult, somehow his playing was so incredibly UP. In that respect he reminds me of Cannonball, not because his playing sounds like Cannonball's, but because the attitude, the affect of his playing was always so incredibly positive, a kind of eternal Up Jump Spring in sound."

"Eternal 'Up Jumped Sprig'. Another great way to put it. Whoever wrote this, please e-mail me so I can attriblute properly. And THANKS!

P.S. I'm still working out all the particulars, but I'm hoping in early '07 to do a concert presentation of "Ear of the Behearer", hopefully in the newly renovated Lily Pad in Cambridge. The whole album is too much, so we may intersperse with some of my originals, or Old and New Dreams stuff. Stay tuned...