Isabel Gracefield: Recording Mulatu Astatke

Mulatu Astatke, now 81, is considered the father of Ethio‑jazz.Photo: Alexis Maryon

Recording a band live in the room is always a challenge — especially when it’s led by a jazz legend who switches instruments without warning!

“In engineering culture, there’s this idea that everything is always being recorded with the perfect microphone in the perfect position,” says Isabel Gracefield. “But my experience of really big, high‑pressured sessions is that often it’s that first, instinctive decision. You check it’s OK and it’s working, and then you move on.

“A lot of times you’re doing these quite prestigious projects and it’s just: that mic was spare, it was sat on top of the piano, so I grabbed it and put it on the stand. And I’ll often say to the assistants, ‘Can you just put it somewhere you think is sensible?’ and I’ll listen to it — and if it’s OK, great, because there’s eight other things that we’re dealing with. And so, it’s not always micro‑finessed. It’s just if you don’t like it, it changes.”

The sessions for Mulatu Plays Mulatu took place at RAK Studios in London, under Head Engineer Isabel Gracefield.Photo: Alexis Maryon

The sessions for Mulatu Plays Mulatu were at the top of the scale both for pressure and prestige. Over six days at London’s RAK Studios, with Isabel and her team engineering, Mulatu Astatke took his band through new interpretations of 11 compositions drawn from his own back catalogue. Producer Dexter Story then flew to Addis Ababa to track overdubs by musicians there, before Gracefield mixed what may prove the valedictory album by the 81‑year‑old father of Ethio‑jazz.

Slow Cooking

The complex live sessions tested the resources of both RAK and its Head Engineer Gracefield. Meticulous planning was vital, but so too were pragmatism and adaptability. Above all, it highlighted the importance of the technical team’s ability to serve the artist and the music.

“We started talking with the label at least three months beforehand,” recalls Gracefield. “We had multiple Zooms with the label and the producer and James Arben, who plays sax on the record and is also the MD. They were really clear that they needed to keep to the stage plot as close as possible in the studio, because when Mulatu turns to this side, he expects to see this person. Obviously their live plot is amazing for playing live, but instinctively I looked at it and just went ‘That’s not a recording plot!’ All the drums and percussion were on one side.

“So there was a lot of negotiation about whether we could put the drums and the percussion on opposite sides, because I wanted to have a coherent stereo picture. All those choices had to go through the label, the producer and the MD, to make sure Mulatu was going to be comfortable when he walked into the room. It took a while to negotiate how everyone was going to be in the space.”

All Together Now

The Studio 1 live room at RAK is a large space that can optionally be divided into two, isolated areas. Gracefield’s original plan had been to set up the louder instruments such as drums and brass in one of these, with Ethiopian instruments and other delicate sources in the other. However, rehearsals for the sessions forced a major change of plan, when Mulatu Astatke decided that RAK sessions would not include the Ethiopian instruments after all. It also became clear that dividing the space wouldn’t work from the point of view of Astatke communicating with his band.

This left Isabel and her team with some serious engineering challenges, because alongside drums, congas, trumpet and saxophone, the band also included much softer instruments such as cello, upright bass and Astatke’s vibraphone. With lines of sight being vital, hiding these away in booths was not an option, so microphone choices became as much about managing spill as they were about getting the perfect sound for each individual source.

Screens and gobos were used to reduce spill as much as possible, and Gracefield employed a lot of dynamic mics, often positioned very close to the instruments they were capturing. Happily, the results were often in line with what the musicians had hoped to hear. “We originally had a Neumann FET U47 on the cello, and we were just getting two percent cello and 90 percent percussion. I grabbed a Sennheiser MD441, and interestingly, the cellist was like, ‘That’s much closer to the sound that I want to hear on myself anyway.’ It was much more pokey and nasal. There were a couple of tracks where there was no percussion, and I asked if he would like us to swap, and he was like ‘Nope, this is the sound.’ So that was a really interesting lesson for me, because I would never have considered a 441 on cello.

“Then James came in and he just went, ‘It’s an SM58 on the flute. That’s the only microphone you need.’ He put it right at the mouthpiece, and it sounds amazing. It is quite a classic sound, and I hadn’t come across that before. I’m always doing posh things with 87s and Schoeps, but I’ve used it quite a lot since. The trumpet was a Coles 4038, and the bell was almost touching the mic.

Jon Scott’s drum kit was tracked using an ORTF pair of Schoeps pencil mics with MK4 cardioid capsules, plus close mics.Photo: Alexis Maryon

“We did stick with Schoeps as the overheads on drums, on a stereo bar very close above the kit. They are just so soft in the top end, and I think especially in an ORTF setup, you get this very natural stereo picture with a ton of detail but you don’t get harshness off the cymbals. The internal balance of the drummer’s got to be immaculate and it helps if they’re a quiet player, but I use them a lot.

Isabel Gracefield: The studio environment is really different, and it requires everyone to recalibrate who they’re listening to and why.

“The first couple of days that the band were in, they were still very much in live mode, and I had no separation on the drums. So the drums were just in everything, and we were getting this big boomy room sound. The studio environment is really different, and it requires everyone to recalibrate who they’re listening to and why. And so there was a real dialogue between Dexter and the players to try and get a softer sound.”

Good Vibes

As well as leading the band, Mulatu Astatke himself switches between a variety of instruments, often spontaneously, and the setup had to be flexible enough to accommodate this. “We had a set list, but we never knew exactly what instrument he might play. So we had a Wurlitzer piano, we had the timbales, or there’s quite a lot of places on the record where all he’s doing is he’s playing wood block and he’s setting the time, but he’s not really playing anything else. Or he might play vibes. Sometimes it would be piano. He would just get up and move, and we would just have to chase after him and make sure we were recording it!”...