JIM CZAK died on March 15, he was 71. Co-owner and the chief mixer at Nola Recording Studio in New York City. Having recorded a veritable who’s who of jazz musicians and big bands over the past 41 years.
He explained his function, saying, “I’m not really an engineer. I consider myself an audio mixer—sort of like a cook. You can learn all the ingredients, but putting them together is an art. It’s more art than science.”
Lew Shaw started writing about music as the publicist for the famous Berkshire Music Barn in the 1960s. He joined the West Coast Rag in 1989 and has been a guiding light to this paper through the two name changes since then as we grew to become The Syncopated Times. 47 of his profiles of today's top musicians are collected in Jazz Beat: Notes on Classic Jazz.Volume two, Jazz Beat Encore: More Notes on Classic Jazz contains 43 more! Lew taps his extensive network of connections and friends throughout the traditional jazz world to bring us his Jazz Jottings column every month.
