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Last week an old friend visited me and he casually asked me if I had ever seen Tom Dowd & The Language Of Music. I said, “Who’s Tom Dowd?”. My friend was flabbergasted, and I must say for myself that I have no excuse. If you haven’t seen the documentary Tom Dowd & The Language Of Music then you need to go here or here or here and find yourself a copy of this film.

I’ve been a sound engineer and mixer for thirty five years in the motion picture industry and have seemingly been so isolated there from the world of music engineering that I never registered the name Tom Dowd until last week. This film was an amazing experience for me. It was like watching myself speak for two hours about all the things I love about mixing sounds together. He put voice to many of the thoughts that have been rattling around in my own mind during my quiet moments for all these years. Here is some of what Mix Magazine had to say about him after his death in 2002.

And we were all lucky that Dowd decided to forego a promising career in physics to pursue his love of music. In New York City in the late ’40s, he worked as a freelance engineer; then, he latched onto the fledgling Atlantic Records label for a quarter-century, working as the company’s technical guru, principal engineer and later a top producer. It was Dowd who introduced Atlantic to stereo in 1952, and who designed the label’s pioneering 8-track studio on West 60th Street in 1960. He built consoles and other equipment from scratch, and single-handedly came up with miking principles in the late ’50s and early ’60s that are still popular today. Though he is perhaps best known for the work he did in New York, he also made extraordinary records in Muscle Shoals and Memphis. From the ’70s on, Dowd worked mostly out of Miami, where he helped put Criteria Studios on the map. His records were noted for their naturalness and their clarity; he was, in a sense, one of music’s great documentarians, capturing the magic in the room but not imposing his own sound on the artists with whom he worked.

And what a collection of musicians benefited from Dowd’s easy-going but conscientious manner! In the jazz world, he engineered multiple projects with such notables as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Hank Crawford, Eddie Harris, Mose Allison, Herbie Mann, Milt Jackson, Charles Mingus, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Bobby Short, Nat Adderly and Freddie Hubbard. He was behind the board for all of The Drifters’ early hits and for early rock-era titans such as The Coasters, The Clovers, Ben E. King and Bobby Darin. He engineered some of the greatest soul records to come out of Atlantic, cutting classics by Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke and The Bar-Kays. He produced or engineered scores of important rock albums, too, including numerous dates with Cream, the Young Rascals, the Allman Brothers, Eric Clapton, Derek & The Dominos, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Wet Willie, Dr. John, Delaney & Bonnie, Black Oak Arkansas, Dusty Springfield and Rod Stewart, to name just a few. If you want your mind blown away by the sheer scope of his career, check out his listing on http://allmusic.com.

Dowd had great ears and a big heart; few figures in our business were so universally loved and respected. Up until his last days, Dowd had a twinkle in his eye and a good story on the tip of his tongue — he was quite the raconteur, his sharp memory overflowing with anecdotes about the business that he loved so much.

Dowd is indeed an amazing raconteur and his stories of the making of the songs that are featured in the film are funny and entertaining, and the interviews with Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, Phil Ramone, Gregg Allman, and Dickie Betts are riveting. When I look at the list of artists that he recorded and all the different kinds of music that he mixed I have to conclude that he was the common denominator to all of this musical genius. I am in awe of what he did. He made it possible for all of us to hear the music of our time and he also preserved it for future generations to enjoy. I really wish I had known this man and I just have to say thank you Tom Dowd, not just for giving us all the music, but also linear faders, multitrack recording, and all of the recording and mixing techniques that those of us who followed you now take so much for granted.