Here are some photos of the Manhattan Brass recording Paquito D’Rivera’s “Four Songs For Brass” and Wynton Marsalis’ “Spiritual and Blues.”

The recording sessions took place in April 2009, at the Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village of NYC.

Both of the pieces were commissioned by the Manhattan Brass, and are incredible contributions to the brass quintet literature.  It’s not often that composers (and huge stars!) of Marsalis and d’Rivera’s stature write for brass, and I speak for brass players everywhere when I say “Thanks!” to the MBQ for getting some great new music into the world.

If you’d like to take a listen to these awesome performances, I’ve included links to Amazon.com and iTunes where you can buy CDs and downloads.
Manhattan Brass “New York Now” – on Amazon
Manhattan Brass “New York Now” – on iTunes

I worked with them to record just these two pieces. This was a project they had worked on for some time, and the other pieces on the CD were recorded at a different time and location, with a different engineer.

Although you can see many microphones set up around the group, the sound you hear on the album is simply from the main stereo pair of microphones.  These two microphones are a matched pair of Schoeps CMC6 MK21.  We experimented with a number of different mixes and found that with the group playing so well, and on that day in that room- simpler was better.