Master class

Nick Tate talks to the men behind a significant new series of MQA releases: The Montreux Years

- Nick Tate

Over the past two decades, the recording industry has been busy archiving vast amounts of historic music. Superficially at least, the result has been a never-ending stream of ‘anniversary remasters’, repackaged with extra content. Behind the scenes, much painstaking work has been done to bring rare and special music into the public domain – material that had hitherto been buried for many decades.

BMG’s latest Montreux Jazz Festival series is one such example. The series includes live recordings from luminaries such as Nina Simone, Etta James, Marianne Faithfull, Muddy Waters, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea and Monty Alexander. They are all meticulously remastered using MQA, after being carefully selected from the festival’s recording archives which span 55 years.

If you’re a jazz fan, The Montreux Years should be of interest to you. And just as fascinating is the story of how the project came to be, including the processes that went into turning the raw live recordings into the finished products we can now buy.

I spoke with Tony Cousins – the man who mastered The Montreux Years – and Spencer Chrislu, who is MQA’s Director of Content Services. The latter’s working life has been spent in high-resolution audio and music reproduction – while the former has a redoubtable CV in music mastering.

Cousins has spent the last three decades at Metropolis Studios, which he co-founded in the early Nineties. Few people alive now have had so much experience mastering music for public consumption. He’s worked with artists as diverse as Adele, George Michael and Robbie Williams to Massive Attack, The Verve and The Stone Roses – not forgetting Peter Gabriel and Elton John.