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Reice Hamel Legacy Project
Maurice Murray Hamel, who later changed his name to Reice Hamel was born in the lower east side of Manhattan, NY. June-18-1920. His mother Freida Bernstein and Father Leo Hamel were Jewish immigrants from Austria who came to America in the early 1900's. In World War II he became a Navy Lieutenant, Chief Radio Officer. The Germans had developed a very advanced recording system called the Magnetophon and history tells that Jack Mullen, an Army Signal Corps Captain, brought the first of these machines to the US after the War. This was the birth of the Recording Industry in America. With the help of stolen German technology the company Ampex Magnetic Recorders was formed in Northern California. After the War, Reice Hamel worked for International Telephone as a field engineer and was also a freelance television technician in Manhattan NY. In 1956 he became interested Audio and Magnetic Recording and decided to try it as a business. He used a modified Ampex 601 tape deck to record his first client, the Girl Scout Jamboree.
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The business of recording was a new frontier in America during the 1950s so he moved west to a city filled with new ideas and talent, San Francisco. In the 1950s San Francisco was a hot bed of talent and in a small night club, called the Hungy I , on any given evening there would be legendary comedians, singers and bands of all types. Reice Hamel became the recording engineer to stars when he was granted the job of recording a well known Jazz group called the Cannonball Adderley Quintet . The recording was to take place at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco.
The legendary record producer Orrin Keepnews started a small record label, Riverside Records, and he commissioned Reice Hamel on
Oct.18.1959 to record the two day session. The recording and subsequent album that resulted became, according to Keepnews, " one of the most exciting, influential and successful live recordings in modern jazz history ".
FOR THE RECORD: It is said that during the recording sessions of Thelonious Monk, George Shearing,the legendary blind pianist, walked in on the play back of the recordings and was complimenting the musicians on their skills as he thought the band was playing but in-fact it was the tape rolling.
Nat Adderley once said " Reice Hamel is the greatest remote recording engineer in the world" source, Gary Barclay, jazzverbatim.com
The success of the Cannonball recording propelled Reice Hamel into national attention and he was nominated for a Grammy Award for recording excellence. This was the first Grammy Awards and he was the first engineer to be nominated. After all the success Reice Hamel went back to the work bench and improved his electronic circuits. Ampex Corporation, the maker of his tape deck, used him as a field test engineer to improve the design of tape decks during that era. In 1963, at the Hungy I club, a young teenage singer made her debut recorded by Reice Hamel her name was Barbra Streisand.
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Robert Collins Post: "Reice Hamel tape archiving project explained. If you're wondering why I'm posting videos of us in the recording studio over the past few weeks, here's the answers.
A few years ago I was introduced to Reice Hamel recordings by Keith Lewis. Keith gave me some recordings by Hamel of never-released material. Two of those recordings were Bill Evans 1975, and Barbra Streisand 1963. I learned that Reice Hamel was a pioneer in the field of live music recording. He literally invented many of the live music recording techniques and invented his own recording equipment. He was active between 1959 to about 1980. Reice passed away in 1986.
If you've ever heard any of those Newport Jazz Festival recordings from the 1960's, most of those were recorded by Reice Hamel. He is also famous for recording Miles Davis, Buddy Rich, Duke Ellington, and Lenny Bruce...to name just a few.
It took a little courage, but I reached out to Reice Hamel Jr. to see if we could digitize and archive his dad's tape collection. After about two years planning and building my own portable recording studio for digitizing the recordings, we finally started hitting the studio in April to begin the archiving project.
The project consists of 105 recordings. They are all master tapes, or "safety copies" of the master tapes. Two or three of them have already been turned into records -- so these must be the safety copies of those recordings. But the others all seem to be the master tapes.
The recording technology I'm using was designed by Merging Technologies. I built a portable studio using Merging Horus, 8-channel A-D/D-A. We are archiving in DSD-256 format (11.2 Mhz, 1-bit delta-sigma encoding). DSD-256 is the nearest equivalent to PCM (WAV) files at 384 Khz, 32-bit sampling rates. For you geeks out there, you know that PCM at 384 Khz is about double maybe quadruple the sampling rate of anything you've ever seen. This is how we are future-proofing the archive.
The archiving process starts by baking the tapes. Because the tapes are 50+ years old, the oxide can shed or remove itself from the mylar backing. Putting the tapes in an oven at relatively low temperatures for 6-10 hours, allows the glue to soften up and reattach to the oxide. The process works remarkably well, and so far all but one or two of the tapes seems to be in perfect playback condition.
Once the baking is done, the reels are placed on a playback machine, then played at real time and archived at DSD-256. The videos you're watching come from the playback process when we're actually archiving the material.
Of the 105 recordings, some are well marked, and others are a mystery. Some of them have nothing but a date and location, no artist listed. That's where it gets fun to figure out who the artists are. But we've been very successful thus far figuring out some of the mysteries. One of those mysteries ended up being Cannonball Adderley from a benefit concert in 1960. Another mystery turned out to be Dizzy Gillespie with James Moody on Tenor Saxophone.
Another mystery will get solved tomorrow...one way or the other. One box is marked "Led Zeppelin" and "Jeff Beck" -- Newport Jazz Festival, 1969. If you're like me, you think that's a typo, and neither of those artists every played the Newport Jazz Festival. Well, if you're like me, you would be wrong. I looked it up. Both of them played the festival in 1969. I still think it's doubtful what's written on the box is what's inside the box. That's because the reels inside the box say something different. But tomorrow, we'll answer that mystery when we archive that recording.
I've been trying to pick out and show some of the more interesting finds. Here's a very small list of the artists we know are on these tapes. Here's some of the artists we have already archived:
Barbra Streisand 1963, Bill Evans 1975, BB King 1972, Tom Jones, Englerbert Humperdink, Pete Seeger, Carl Perkins, Doug Kershaw, Johnny Cash, Count Basie, Ramsey Lewis, Herbie Hancock, Rambln' Jack Elliot, Ike & Tina Turner, Ramsey Lewis, Cannonball Adderley, Count Basie, Joe Williams, and Dizzy Gillespie.
Artists yet to archive: Duke Ellington, Mose Allison, Joan Baez, Thad Jones & Mel Lewis, Woody Herman, Jack McDuff, Shelly Berman, Dizzy Gillespie, Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin, Peggy Lee, Pete Seeger, Les McCann, BB King, Buddy Rich, and Canned Heat!"
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