David Less and Robert Gordon are no strangers to the Memphis Listening Lab (MLL), being scholars of music from Memphis and elsewhere. During their appearances at MLL listening events, they’ve premiered, willy-nilly, their share of unreleased, just-released, or little-known tracks on the lab’s hi-fi stereo system. But now they’re about to make a regular thing of it with a new listening series, Echoes in the Room: Unreleased Recordings & the Stories They Left Behind, slated to premiere this Saturday.
Curating a listening experience of raw, unreleased recordings comes naturally to Less and Gordon — and to the music insider guests they’ll be hosting. Saturday’s inaugural event will feature one such guest, who’s been heavily invested in some of the deepest music of our times: John Snyder. Having played in bands through the ’60s, then rising quickly to produce jazz sessions from the ’70s on, Snyder has decades of experience heading up projects at labels as diverse as CTI, A&M, Atlantic, and RCA.
Reaching him by phone in Athens, Georgia, I ask Snyder what we could expect in the way of unreleased tracks from artists he’s worked with. Would there be sonic treasures by, say, Chet Baker, Etta James, or Dave Brubeck? Surprisingly, the first audio gems he thinks of are not artists’ outtakes from studio sessions, but even rarer gems: audio interviews.
“I have a lot of spoken word Ornette [Coleman],” Snyder notes, “because every time I would talk to him about his business stuff, he was so opaque in his speech and his syntax that I couldn’t really understand him. Trying to make legal sense out of it was impossible. So I said, ‘Tell me what you’re actually talking about,’ routinely, with the tape machine sitting right in front of him. Just hearing his speech is kind of instructional because it’s a lot like his playing. You can have some difficulty in understanding it until you get used to it.”
Yet another interview from his archives may be even more fantastical. “I have some Sun Ra talking about interstellar travel,” says Snyder, “and his opinions on this planet in comparison to others. And that has a story, too. When I signed Sun Ra back in the ’80s, he objected to the contract that was ‘for the universe’ because he wanted the rights to Saturn. He wasn’t kidding. So when the lawyer said A&M wouldn’t let me do it, my question to the president of A&M was, ‘Who’s crazier, your lawyers or Sun Ra? Because Sun Ra is for real. You guys are just making shit up.’ They didn’t need the rights to Saturn. They could give up Saturn. Sunny [Blount, aka Sun Ra] was … different.” Moreover, in the audio interview, “you can hear him talk, you can hear that voice.”
Snyder pauses to marvel a minute at the echoes of souls he’s encountered over his decades of work in music production, promotion, and education. And then he mentions some music that might be unearthed on Saturday: Chet Baker or the last recordings of Ornette Coleman’s original quartet. Snyder clearly takes delight at the thought of sharing them. “It’s fun because you see so much of the history of how things were done.”
Echoes in the Room: Unreleased Recordings & the Stories They Left Behind, Memphis Listening Lab, 1350 Concourse Avenue, Suite 269, Saturday, April 26, 6-8 p.m.