It's no surprise that one of our owners is in the news this week because of his love of music. Carl Smith is one of our owners and founders of Transparent Audio. Below is taken from an article titled "Sonny Rollins Hits the Road" by Alexandar Varty of Vancouver's Online Source; it explains the very interesting story behind Carl's contribution to Sonny's Grammy winning song in 2006:"The version of “Blossom” heard on Road Shows, Vol. 1 comes, along with two other tracks, from the collection of Carl Smith, a businessman and jazz scholar whose surreptitious recordings so angered the Rollins camp that Sonny's late wife and manager, Lucille, once threatened to confiscate his tapes should he be caught red-handed with a DAT machine. In a further irony, Smith had never really been a Rollins fan until encountering him in concert in the year 2000.
It was, as Smith explains over the phone from his summer home in Maine, a life-changing experience. “What I heard on the stage was something entirely different, with so much more improvisation and, well, freedom—emotional and artistic freedom—than I'd ever heard on any of his records,” he reports. “I remember turning to the fellow next to me and saying, ‘We are in the presence of greatness—and I don't mean past greatness, I mean right now!' ”
Smith began to acquire as many Rollins recordings as he could find, and his own tape of Rollins's first appearance following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks—which the saxophonist witnessed from his Manhattan apartment—was used on the Grammy-winning release Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert.
“After my wife passed on, I got a more benign attitude towards these things,” says Rollins. “He [Smith] made me understand that these weren't bootlegs; they weren't being sold. These were mainly records done by collectors, and they were not being copied and sold. All of these things sort of softened my attitude, so I finally met Mr. Smith, and together with some of my own archives, we came out with Road Shows, Vol. 1.”
Read the full article here:
http://www.straight.com/article-236547/sonny-rollins-hits-road
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