Music Loses Two Legendary Producers: Steve Albini and Michael Cuscuna

Steve Albini; photo by Edd Westmacott/Alamy Stock.

Recording music is complicated, and without the crucial assistance of producers and engineers, a lot of great records—not to mention successful musical careers—would not happen. Producers Steve Albini and Michael Cuscuna, two key figures from the music world who departed in recent months, richly deserve to be celebrated.

Though they worked in widely disparate genres—Cuscuna primarily in jazz, Albini in punk and noise rock—they are connected by their extraordinary efforts and unfailing taste. Both were exacting, dedicated, and supremely talented. Without the passion and obsessive nature of this one-of-a-kind pair, such records as Nirvana’s In Utero and Mosaic Records’ boxed sets, including The Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions, to name just two examples, would not exist. Cuscuna and Albini were guides and molders, shaping music and our perceptions of it.

Raised in Missoula, Montana, Steve Albini was into music early, playing in the Montana band Just Ducky before moving to Chicago to go to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. While there, he wrote for various local ‘zines that covered the punk-rock scene and spent time at a side hustle in a photography studio while continuing to play electric guitar and learn about sound. He described himself as the one guy in the band who “could explain to the sound man how loud we want the bass drum.” His bands Big Black, and later Rapeman and Shellac, played noisy punk-rock and had small but devoted followings. Albini died 10 days before the release of Shellac’s sixth album, To All Trains.

Already the engineer of choice for ’90s-era Chicago-area bands including Veruca Salt and Urge Overkill, Albini made his name when he recorded the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa (1988) and The Wedding Present’s Seamonsters (1991). In 1993, he engineered Rid of Me for PJ Harvey and In Utero for Nirvana. He opened his Chicago recording-studio complex, Electrical Audio, in 1997.

Famous for his impatience and angry denunciations of the excesses of the digital age, Albini was a master at cutting and splicing tape. I interviewed Steve at the 2018 edition of South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, and several of his discerning quotes are worth repeating. A champion of analog recording and playback, he simply would not record digitally.

“No one would ask me to do that,” he explained. “That’s like going to a baker and saying, ‘I want you to barbecue me a steak.’ It’s a different discipline. Electrical Audio is a full-function studio. We have two studios here and a half-dozen house engineers, and we also host freelance engineers on a regular basis. So, there are digital sessions done here constantly, continuously. They’re just not my sessions. Every record I’ve ever made, 30-plus years, has been recorded on multitrack tape and mixed to stereo master tapes. There have been a few hybrid sessions where I’ve done the analog portion of the sessions, and then someone else has taken over and done the digital portion of the record.”

Equally incisive is his response to a question about the crucial divide today with respect to convenience versus sound quality. “Audiophiles—and when I say audiophiles, I mean people who listen to music as sort of a recreation rather than as background, people who are active listeners of music—most of them want to build a collection of music, and most of them will have vinyl as a primary medium. For convenience listeners, people who just want to pop some music on the phone while they’re doing yard work or whatever, the easy access to the music is the most important thing.

“I think both ends of that spectrum—the purely inattentive, casual listeners and then the purely intentional, active music listener—can be catered to without it being a compromise in the studio. I can make a nice-sounding master, and then that can be cut into a nice-sounding vinyl record for the audiophile portion of the market. For the casual listener, it can be dumped into whatever is the listening format of the day.

“If nobody is listening to 16-bit audio anymore, everybody wants 24-bit, and so I guess all those masters that you did at 16-bit are useless? With an analog master, it’s not useless—you can make a new, higher-resolution master. Or say nobody’s using that format anymore, they are using this other format. Well, no big deal. You just play the master through whatever the converter of the day is, and you create the new format for them. Analog masters are exceedingly flexible in that regard. You don’t have to do any number-crunching. As long as that master tape survives, you can do that many, many times.”

His studio mastery, assertive opinions, and passionate soul will be sorely missed. Steve Albini, gone way too soon at 61.

Michael Cuscuna (right) with Bobby Hutcherson, McCoy Tyner, and Cuscuna’s daughter, Lauren. (Photo courtesy of the Cuscuna family.)

Michael Cuscuna was just as fun-loving as Albini was pointedly waspish. Living in New York City and being a longtime fan of Cuscuna’s reissue label, Mosaic Records—whose completist black-box reissues are treasured by jazz fans worldwide—I was lucky enough to interact many times with both Michael and his friend/boss, Blue Note label chief Bruce Lundvall. They were a formidable pair that revitalized the label and made it into the powerhouse it contiues to be to this day. Fortunately, before Cuscuna became ill,

I was able to have a wonderful lunch out in his native Connecticut with Michael, his charming wife, Lisa, and our mutual friend Don Lucoff, a tireless promoter of jazz music. As always, Michael was full of life and had an astonishing memory. We talked about the state of the Blue Note tape library in light of the big 2008 Universal fire (they’re safe), all the unreleased sessions he dug out of the Blue Note vaults and released in the 1980s (1964’s Tom Cat by Lee Morgan, unreleased until 1981, is a particular favorite), and our mutual devotion to wine and its deleterious effects on staying upright.

Rather than recounting dates and names from Michael’s prodigious discography, I thought impressions from his friends and colleagues would paint a fuller picture.

“Working with Michael Cuscuna for upwards of 25 years through the Blue Note and Mosaic golden periods was about learning, absorbing, and better under-standing his peerless and unsurpassed commitment to artists at close range,” Lucoff said. “Michael was a behind-the-scenes A&R and producing veteran in and outside the studio, who advised on countless signings. He was also deeply sensitive and meticulous to what he discovered in the archives. His thorough grounding in the musicians who came before, especially Thelonious Monk, Woody Shaw, and Dexter Gordon, was boundless. He had an uncanny and unassuming natural style that immediately put artists at ease. His partnership with Blue Note’s president, Bruce Lundvall, was one of mutual respect but also a kindred father-son relationship.”

Michael Cuscuna with Blue Note founder Alfred Lion. (Photo courtesy of the Cuscuna family.)

Tom Evered, who was director of marketing for Blue Note during the Lundvall/Cuscuna years, remembers Cuscuna’s devotion to deep dives at Mosaic and his knowledge of the Blue Note archives. “I think the Mosaics are going to stand as incredibly important documents going forward,” Evered explained. “We should all fall on our knees and thank the jazz gods that someone had the wherewithal, the intelligence, and the vision to put all those together. Who knows if it would even be possible now with the way publishing is protected and labels don’t want to share.

“It was his relationship with Bruce Lundvall that was the key,” Evered continued. “Between Bruce and Michael was a great dynamic. Michael was the one with the indisputable knowledge and who could pull a recording date out of the air. And then with Bruce as the perfect front man in a corporate way, they were quite a good pair. To lose Bruce and then Bob Belden and now Michael, there’s a giant hole in the jazz heart.” (Lundvall and Belden died in 2015, one day apart.)

Tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano remembers the Lundvall/Cuscuna partnership and the effect it had on his own career. “Bruce and Michael loved the music, man, and they were into the people who were playing it,” Lovano told me in a recent interview. “They were sidekicks, they were everywhere together. They’d come and hear us even though we weren’t recording for Blue Note. It was like a big community, like a family.

“Michael was amazing to be around and know. For me to have his embrace from an early time was inspiring, incredible. When I recorded live at Dizzy’s”—the result was Kids: Duets Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, with Hank Jones, Blue Note, 2007—”Michael was in the booth and was there documenting everything as a producer does. I think each composition really touched him, and he was really happy to be involved. In post-production, he was great to talk with about sequencing and things like that. He was really down to earth, and you would see him out at Bradleys or other places, just, like, feeling the music and feeling the groove and having fun. Relationships with people and his love of the music—Amazing.”

Michael Cuscuna (right) with Don Was, president since 2011 of Blue Note Records.)

Producer/engineer Joe Harley, who directs Blue Note’s outstanding Tone Poet reissue series, calls Cuscuna a “dear friend” and remembers his irrepressible joie de vivre. “The research that he did, keeping the flame alive at Blue Note when the label was essentially dormant, Michael did all that,” Harley said in a recent interview. “The last conversation I had with him, which was about two weeks before he passed—and this is classic Cuscuna”—he switches to an imitation of Cuscuna’s gravelly voice—”‘you know I didn’t live my life with longevity in mind.'”

Audio engineer Jim Anderson, who worked with Cuscuna on, among other projects, recording the 1977 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, remembered a tale Cuscuna clearly loved of an early brush with jazz royalty. “Michael told me that when he was a deejay in New York at WRVR, he would take the bus to his apartment on the Upper West Side. One day he gets off the bus and realizes that standing in front of him is Miles Davis. And Miles looks at him and”—now he switches to an imitation of Miles’s breathy growl—”says, ‘Hey, you Michael Cuscuna?’ And Michael’s thinking, Wow, Miles knows who I am. So he says, ‘Yes, I’m Michael Cuscuna,’ and Miles looks at him and says, ‘So what!’ and turns and walks away.”

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