What do they do?

[Captaindave]

I am going to be ignorant here, but this is something I have wondered about for a long time...maybe it's just common sense.

When I look at a TJB album, I notice that there are credits for the producer, arranger, engineer, art director, photography, and album design.

Now I suppose I can guess that the engineer is the recording engineer - the person that does the recording duties; gets the music recorded.

I suppose I can guess about what some of these other jobs are, but does anyone have a good idea of exactly what all these other people do? For example, what are all the duties of the producers? Is the arranger the one who puts the musical arrangements together? This is Herb Alpert, so does this mean that he wrote or created all the musical arrangements of the songs that we hear on the album? He is the one who creates the arrangement of the song that the musicians play?

When I think about a producer, I think of someone who puts up the money to get the recording done. Is that correct? In this case, Herb and Jerry are the financial backers of the recording...they are paying for the costs of the recording, yes?

I suppose the photography credit goes to the person who took the pictures that appear on the album cover?

Is the art director and album design the people who do the layout of the album cover and do things like design the cover?

Who decides what order the songs go on the album? What goes on side 1 and side 2?

Can anyone elaborate a little more on how these things go into making a record album?

 

[Mike Blakesley]

The producer is the person who coordinates everything. Puts the talent together, decides on the music, etc. If the producer is not the artist, then the producer collaborates with the artist on these things.

The arranger, as you expect, writes the charts and tells the instrumentalists (or singers) what notes to perform and when. It's also common for an arranger to give a soloist (like Julius Wechter, for example) a few bars and just let'em rip their own solo out. Herb has said that he got a lot of arrangement ideas from John Pisano and Julius, so in that sense the TJB albums were co-arranged by all three.

As for the money -- Record company contracts are amazingly complicated things, so where the money comes from can be equally complicated. Sometimes the record company puts up some cash against future sales or touring revenue; sometimes the artist finances things himself (especially if the project is unusal, such as Sergio Mendes' PRIMAL ROOTS). Since Herb and Jerry owned the record company, it's likely they financed all their own recordings, at least for the first four or five albums.

The photographer takes the pictures; the art director or cover designer decides whether to use pictures or drawings, whether to use a picture with models (like WHIPPED CREAM) or with the actual artist; and once the various elements are assembled, decides where everything will go. This person also picks the typefaces and logos, designs any interior elements (like the CD booklet or the inside of a gatefold, or in the LP era, the record label itself), and decides where on the cover the record company's logo will appear.

As for the running order; that's probably decided mostly by the artist these days, probably in collaboration with the producer. In the 60s, an artist having "full creative control" over his own recordings was relatively rare; most albums were a couple of "hit singles" surrounded by filler. I happen to think Herb A. was ahead of his time in this department. His albums are almost always cohesive listens from beginning to end, unlike some of the early rock'n'roll records (the Stones early albums come to mind.) The Beatles were the first rock act to raise the album to an art form starting with REVOLVER and RUBBER SOUL, but Herb also pulled it off with WHIPPED CREAM.

 

[Numero Cinco]

Most of these comments and guesses are extrapolations from what we know of how other albums of the period were produced. And the suggestions are probably correct, for the most part. I yearn for the day that one of this site's experts will write and publish the definitive history of the TJB, which might confirm many details from the composite memory of those who were present at the creation.*

We know, for example, that his engineers offered suggestions to Ray Charles about the order in which tracks would fall on his LPs. There was a general strategy at work: start out strong on both sides, and end with strong tracks on both sides. In other words, hook the listener and let him leave happy. For the in-between tracks, however, everyone was playing hunches, because nobody really knew for sure if Track #5 on Side B would prove to be the break-out song for the entire album.

A fairly pedestrian task, I guess: but I wonder who negotiated permissions for use of songs not owned by Almo, and the royalties to be paid to the composers (and unions). Was some unsung secretary stuck with that job, or did an associate producer do that leg-work?

*Memo to Site Historian: Write that definitive work now, while Messrs. A & M & Pisano & others are still alive!

 

[Mike Blakesley]

Most of these comments and guesses are extrapolations from what we know of how other albums of the period were produced.

Well sure, but you must keep in mind that even though Herb and the TJB were big stars, their records were made in much the same way as any other major artist of the time. "Self-produced" artists were somewhat unusual then, but after they started to sell, they would have had assistants, secretaries and other helpers to do the mundane tasks that are behind every music production.

The major difference between a Herb record and some other record was probably that Herb owned his record company, therefore he could make artistic decisions (and sign artists) without having to cut through a lot of corporate red tape.