Harlem Parlour Music Club: Capturing the Natural Dynamic
HARLEM, MANHATTAN: A heady week has just wrapped for the Harlem Parlour Music Club, a 15-strong collective comprised of top New York musicians and audio professionals. On April 13, the group played to a packed Living Room on the Lower East Side. The following day, they traveled uptown to public radio station WFUV, based in the Bronx, to record five songs for upcoming broadcast. The next day, they started recording new songs for the next HPMC release.
Harlem Parlour Music Club at WFUV with John Platt
And at week’s end, word came that HPMC’s two videos, both for songs on their recent release Salt of the Earth, were winners at the 43 Annual WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival: “Dyin’ to be Born Again” won a Platinum Award, while “Runaway Train” took Silver.
“It was a very competitive category with hundreds of submissions from all over the world,” director Bill Goins relayed to the band. “Us New York folks kicked country western ass! Thanks for the great music.”
Things seem to come unnaturally easy to this “down-home uptown,” organic and rootsy collective. Considering the combined talent and experience involved, however — members have performed and/or recorded with the likes of Bob Dylan, Sting, Hall & Oates, Joan Osborne, Shania Twain, Joe Jackson, Billy Joel and Cameo — it turns out that Appalachian music can be fused with Sly Stone-esque funk.
“There’s never really pressure to get something,” drummer/co-producer Sammy Merendino says of their recording sessions, “because we always seem to manage to.”
“They blew the roof off the Living Room,” says WFUV’s John Platt. “The energy that came out was totally captivating. For me personally, it was an incredible treat to have them in Studio A at FUV the next day, where they arranged themselves in a semi-circle and I had a chance to be surrounded by their sound.”
HPMC, Platt adds, “caught my ear right away with the down-home organic qualities it had. It felt like the McGarrigle Sisters sat down to jam with Ollabelle. But what Sammy and the rest of the musicians are doing is on an even larger scale.”
THE HARLEM PARLOUR: A RECORDIST’S DREAM
HPMC Control Room. Photo courtesy of Angelo Merendino.
Located in an 1892 townhouse situated between Broadway and the Hudson River, the Harlem Parlour is a recordist’s dream come true.
Home to Merendino — Cyndi Lauper’s drummer for the last decade — the Harlem Parlour boasts five separate acoustic spaces on three levels, including a dedicated drum room and a separate control room housing both a Pro Tools|HD3 rig and Otari MTR90 Mk II 24-track tape machine, among plenty of other gear.
It was here — those two rooms, along with the entry foyer, kitchen and cellar, where speaker cabinets are housed — that Salt of the Earth was recorded and mixed in its entirety. Patch panels are installed in closets and other discreet locations around the townhouse; amplifier heads are housed in the control room with cable runs to the cellar below.
The Pro Tools system is accessed both from the control room and Merendino’s drum kit, via remote monitor, keyboard and footswitch-activated talkback mic. The rooms are wired for video, allowing eye contact between players and engineer, and a Mytek Private Q system allows all musicians to create an individual headphone mix.
Sammy Merendino in the Parlour. Photo courtesy Paul La Raia.
These amenities, says engineer/co-producer Tim Hatfield, allow HPMC to flourish despite as many as 11 musicians recording a basic track in different rooms and on different floors. What’s also apparent is his unique status among the collective. Credited with “Knobs and Cables” in Salt of the Earth’s liner notes, he is one of the 15 members of the club, and seemingly considered part of the band.
I voice that observation to Hatfield, who counts Keith Richards, Steve Earle and Death Cab for Cutie among his credits. “In this situation, it seems to work that way,” he allows. “I was in it from the start and have even contributed some material. If young bands have an engineer friend and the chemistry is right, I believe it will help them more as an ensemble. If you have a home studio, you can start the process, but if musicians and engineer are really working together, you’re going to be able to branch out more.
Harlem Parlour Music Club, which includes Ann Klein, Andrew Carillo, David Mansfield, Steve Count, Andy Burton, Allison Cornell, Sammy Merendino, Chris Tedesco, Mary Lee Kortes, Darden Smith and Tim Hatfield. Photo by Jeff Fasano Photography.
“People should look at the engineer not as ‘a necessary evil to get this down’ but as part of what they are doing,” he adds. “You just become part of the overall sound; that’s the way it is with this group.
“With these players, the musicality is always going to be great. But you have to make sure the vibe stays there; for example, we tried to separate the vocalist from the band, but we were losing so much energy that I couldn’t mix it to make it sound like this band.
“Handling the whole thing and getting the whole vibe to happen at once is pretty tough. But that’s the kind of music I like: people playing together. The natural dynamic between players in a room speaks to you. That feel can’t be beat.”
CDs of Salt of the Earth and HPMC’s A Harlem Parlour Christmas, the latter reaching No. 15 on FOLKDJ-L’s Top Artists of December 2009, were duplicated downtown, at Village Digital. “We went there because we were making short runs and they do a real quick turnaround,” says Hatfield, who is also a partner in the Cowboy Technical Services studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“With the Christmas record, we made 100 and thought ‘that’s it.’ Then radio stations started contacting us and we kept going back for 200 more. I don’t know how many we ended up making.” Distributed by TuneCore, both releases are also available on iTunes, Amazon.com, and other e-tailers.
Harlem Parlour Music Club’s WFUV performance will air this Sunday, April 25 at 10:00 a.m. Tune in! 90.7 on the FM dial or http://www.wfuv.com.