Interviews

Does anyone use the term "record man" these days? In an earlier era, it would have been used in the same way the term "ad man" was used, as a particularly American job description. People who spend their careers in and around the music business. Some of these record men are known by the public—some of it anyway—whereas others may be familiar only to colleagues.

I met Steve Berkowitz under the best of circumstances: sitting in a basement listening room hearing beautiful recordings made in 1958 that I'd never heard before, by the Miles Davis Quintet. It was the recently issued Miles Davis—Birth of the Blue (Analogue Productions APJ 172). The album was, the credits state, "Supervised by Steve Berkowitz." The name rang a bell, though prior to this meeting, I didn't have a face to go with the name.

Boris Blank has a cold, and three days after meeting him in his hometown of Zurich, I do too. This seems apt. Metaphorically, he's been infecting me for decades.

For almost 45 years, Yello, the pioneering Swiss band that Blank formed with singer Dieter Meier, has created witty electropop that provokes joy and awe in attentive listeners. You can dance to most of this music, of course—it's often hard not to—but its allure, its spell, goes deeper. For one thing, Yello's music is delightfully visual. Cinema for the ears.

In Part 1 of this interview, which announced that famed mastering engineer Bob Ludwig was retiring, Ludwig discussed his early days as a music-loving student, as a trumpet player, his graduation from Eastman College with a Master's degree in music performance, and how working with legendary engineer and producer Phil Ramone at A&R Studio awakened his interest in how records are made. In this second part, Ludwig talks about how he moved to Sterling Sound, then to Masterdisk, and finally how and why he set up his own studio, Gateway Mastering Studios in Portland, Maine.