Andy Summers: Keeping Things Murky Sounding
Cris Cohen: Now, one of the first things you notice when comparing Thelonious Monk's recordings to yours is the difference in the quality of sound, quite obviously because you had much different recording materials available to you than he did. Was there ever any concern about making the songs too clean or too crisp?
Andy Summers: Well, it's a good thought. Yeah, I understood what you were saying, but I guess the way I almost visualized it was that everything's just going to sound much clearer and fresh because of what we can bring to recordings now, the actual recording quality. No, I saw that as a plus actually.
Cris Cohen: So it's like when you pick up an older vinyl album and you think, "If only he had the kind of recording equipment I have access to, how much better we could have heard him."
Andy Summers: And also personally, I like recordings to be… I mean, this is always just something I have to go through with every engineer because engineers will tend to separate everything out and make them very clean, because that's what they do. And I always try and keep things a little rough, a little murky sounding, punchier. I don't like things to be too audiophile as it were, because I think it tends to take away from the richness of the music sometimes.
