Chesky Records Recording Session: An inside view

David Chesky wears plenty of hats these days. As co-founder of Chesky Records and HDTracks, David’s also an accomplished classical pianist and is often seen and heard playing congas inside NYC’s Central Park. For more than two decades Chesky Records – a Grammy Award-winning independent audiophile label – has captured and delighted our spirits with contemporary greats like Sara K, Christy Baron, Rebecca Pidgeon, Kenny Rankin and Livingston Taylor. These names are synonymous with state-of-the-art recordings among most audiophiles I know. 

The Chesky Records philosophy “to create the illusion of live musicians in a real three-dimensional space” sounds easy but is quite the opposite. A few years ago David, his brother Norman Chesky and his recording team started experimenting with Binaural recordings using a dummy head (named Lars) equipped with special calibrated microphones (B&K model HD 4100s) located at each ear. Binaural has been around for a long time but it’s been relegated to headphones since it’s considered almost impossible to create the ambience it provides from a pair of loudspeakers. However, after hundreds of hours experimenting with Lars and hi-rez 192kHz/24-Bit recordings David and his team achieved the impossible: true ambience retrival from a standard pair of loudspeakers!

Subsequently, two Binaural recordings have been released: Explorations in Space and Time and Dr. Chesky’s Sensational, Fantastic, and Simply Amazing Binaural Sound Show (available via HDTracks). Having listened at length to these recordings I will contend that they do sound extra open and more dimensional. However, I found the material to be less than ideal. David’s next challenge proved to be the most exciting for me personally, he wanted to do a series of jazz recordings featuring what he officially named Binaural+.    

Having recorded such legendary jazz greats like Cedar Walton, Hank Jones, Jimmy Cobb and Ron Carter David wasn’t afraid of placing Lars in front of a new crop of jazz musicians who’ve already made their mark in the world of contemporary jazz.  In fact, David’s latest recording entitled Primal Scream – an avant-garde style of jazz music – composed by David (where he’s on piano). His band Jazz in the New Harmonic  features (above from left to right); Peter Washington (bass), Javon Jackson (Sax), Jeremy Pelt (Trumpet) and Bill Drummond (drums). Recorded in a Greek church located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (my old stomping grounds) Primal Scream is scheduled for release later this year while Chesky’s Jazz in the New Harmonic will be performing live at Jazz at Lincoln Center on October 1st.   

Williamsburg, Brooklyn is not the same Williamsburg I left back in 1999. It’s the hippest place in NYC at present and really reminds me more of the Soho and the East Village. The cost of living there has skyrocketed and although I lived there for more than 12-years, I felt like I was visiting it for the first time. 

Inside the Greek church is huge but amazingly it produced the right amount of ambience. The space sounded acoustically correct and/or neutral – especially where the musicians were placed.