'S Wonderful!

The first three reviews of “Retrophonic Gershwin” have been posted just in the last two weeks — a “’S wonderful” antidote to our bleak-midwinter blues. I am doubly grateful that the reviews were overwhelmingly positive, since we are hardly old hands at the whole recording process.

Here are a few of the highlights, with links to the full reviews:

“Though she’s no Miniver Cheevy, soprano Joan Ellison is fond of revisiting what many regard as the golden age of popular song. Her live show, “Gershwin on the Radio,” and her new CD, Retrophonic Gershwin, take her fans back to what she calls in her album notes “a more glamorous age than ours…”

Thus Retrophonic Gershwin draws on the content and vocal stylings preserved on vintage recordings, “everything from inspiration to note-for-note transcriptions,” but also enjoys the state-of-the-art studio amenities of Clonick Hall at Oberlin….

Ellison’s partners-in-time-travel are vocalist Mark Flanders and duo-pianists Jason Aquila and Jodie Ricci, who collectively channel the spirit and style of such Gershwin landmarks as “I Got Rhythm,” “A Foggy Day,” and “The Man I Love” in a twelve-track performance that’s on the short side in duration …but packs in a lot of fine singing and piano playing. The songs may be retro, but Ellison and Flanders make them sound fresh and new.”

— Daniel Hathaway, ClevelandClassical.com

Retrophonic Gershwin in the Studio

Joan EllisonJuly 29, 2015Retrophonic Gershwin, Joan Ellison, Mark Flanders, Jason Aquila, Jodie Ricci, WCLV 104.9 Ideastream Comment

A Tune with "Distinct Potentialities"

From the beginning, George Gershwin felt that a song he and Ira had just penned for the film Shall We Dance had, in his words, "distinct potentialities of going places." The song was "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and he was right: the film (starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) wasn't even released until May 7, 1937, but between March and June of that year, everybody who was anybody was already recording it: Ozzie Nelson, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Carl Fenton, Billie Holiday, and Count Basie with their respective orchestras....and, of course, Fred Astaire with Johnny Green and his Orchestra.

Silver Linings

It's been an exciting week: Robert Friedrich has been mixing the tracks on our second album, "Retrophonic Gershwin" all week and just finished the final mixes last night, or rather early this morning. The first recording session at Oberlin with the two Steinway behemoths was July 7, 2012, and getting the arrangements ready took months before that, so it's really been a long haul, with, I must say, a staggering amount of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction hurdles. The second session was January 6, 2013 but Mark had a head cold, so we had to record all of his vocals later in our home studio, which took more than two years after that and involved such adventures as learning how to replace the vacuum tubes on our Avalon preamp (thank you Keifer Wiley, who reassured me that I could really do it myself), getting all the last bits recorded at home, editing everything on ProTools, and learning audio mixing from scratch from Lynda.com videos and GearSlutz. Let me repeat: two years of my life and goodness knows how many hours it took for me to learn how much I still didn't know about mixing.