Esquivel

[Girl Toes]

Can anyone tell me more about the recording techniques used by Esquivel? I'm under the impression he was quite a bit innovative. I've been listening to some of his records and they are rules.

[bobbydj]

Whoah. He is star-gazing with his japs eye. Cool.

Uh, yeah though. I read something about this dude a while ago on these here internets. Lemme see if I can dig it up again.

[Slider]

I love these records.
That's all I know.

[dumbangel]

To me his best album is "Latin-esque" where he used two orchestras in two different recording rooms playing live. You've got one orchestra on the left of the cans, the other on the right, if my memory serves me right. The stereo effects on his early albums are caricatural.

Beyond all these recording details, this guy in his own VERY peculiar style, was a total genius as an arranger. Just amazing.

Has anyone got a copy of Esquivel interviewed by Jeff Buckley (yes him) in the 90's?

[Holding Pattern]

Apperently some of his scores were colour coded, using a different colour for L and R.

[Girl Toes]

Yeah, the stereo technique seemed to be the big thing. The arrangements are incredible, and played so perfectly, I can't fathom them being done live. But everything sounds SO GOOD!!!!! HE has such lavish instrumentation, but probably not that many mics, and to cover two rooms? These could probably among the best recordings of the era, no?

[Mix413]

Some of those extreme stereo tracks were recorded in separate buildings simultaneously using some sort of phone line hookup. Back in the late 50's - early 60's no less. Pretty amazing stuff. That guy was OUT THERE.

[Holding Pattern]

I love these recordings.
Also worth checking out Peter Thomas.
His soundtrack to the German 60's sc-fi tv series Raumpatrouille is truly mind blowing.

[armanbohn]

CHeck out stuff from MArtin Denny and Henri MAncini from the same time period. There are many ohers along the lines of Esquivel. He is one of my all time favorites. Enoch Light is another great one. ANything on Command in the late 50's early 60's is good.

[pk]

I remember hearin Esquivel's "Space Age Bachelor" album back in the mid-90's at some bar in Denver. It was the dawn of the whole martini/lounge/chillout trend. To this day, nothing has surpassed the sheer depth and quality of his material. He's brilliant, and now am a bona fide fan.

[Girl Toes]

Ok, so how did he record his first couple records?

[pk]

Just Googled him, lots of info there. Not sure how much of it deals with actual recording techniques, but there's gotta be some juicy bits in there somewhere.

[Professor]

OK, well please remember that it's "Esquivel!" and not just "Esquivel".
I have a couple of CDs though not the one pictured at the top. I did find a live recording from much later that was never released commercially until the somewhat recent CD, and it doesn't have the crazy stereo action going on, but is really fun for the character and has Esquivel! on piano rather than just conducting.

As for the recordings, here's what I know about them. In the late 50s, RCA records needed recordings to show off this new invention called "stereo". Their target audience was the 'jet set' which were the yuppies of the late 50s & 60s. All those images we tend to forget about that aren't quite Ozzie & Harriet and definitely ain't hippies or beatniks, but rather the 20 & 30 something group that had prosperous careers and liked to hang out in supper clubs, wearing tuxedos, sipping martinis and listening to Esquivel! or Mancini or Ricky Ricardo OK, so that's the target audience because they have the money to actually purchase a brand new hifi set, and not one but TWO amplifiers, and not one but TWO speakers - a pretty tall order. So with that as the target audience, RCA set about creating a whole series of intensely stereophonic recordings called the "Stereo Action" series.
Esquivel! had done a little bit of work in Hollywood but was most successful as a television composer in Mexico where he was already contracted to the RCA Victor Mexicana label, and he was given the resources to record some albums for the Stereo Action Series. I'm sure I'm leaving out parts and maybe even getting a few things wrong, but you can look it up to find out more. Either way, the recordings were done in Hollywood studios with Esquivel's! orchestra and I'm pretty sure a number of Hollywood film-score session players. And not only did they record the whole thing live (because there were not multi-track machines available at the time) but the first album, the whole album, was slated to be recorded in a single 3 or maybe 5-hour session but he finished it in about 90 minutes and was able to record a second album with his combo.
As for the actual sessions, there isn't much out there on the mic techniques or other technical details, but there's alot we can presume from just listening and knowing the time period. There aren't multi-tracks of any great size, but you can bet that the RCA studios would have the cutting-edge technology whether that was a 3-track or maybe even a 4-track, though all the stories point to the whole thing being recorded and mixed live. There are obviously lots of microphones at work because everything that is moved must be on its on console channel. So I imagine they may have been running at least an early 10-channel film scoring console, if not something larger (I mean Fantasia was made in 1940 so the tech was there). You can hear the reverb being dialed up and down within the tracks, and various voices and instruments are panned around the stereo field. So I'd expect individual mics (even if only 1 per group) on male voices, female voices, drums, aux percussion, trumpets, bones, saxes, piano, bass, steel guitar, xylophone, etc. and a mixing engineer literally playing the console like an instrument, following the score and making the moves and level changes and reverb changes live. It must have been really, really intense.
At least one of the albums, Latin-esque was recorded with the orchestra split between two separate RCA studios about a block apart. At the time, there were high-quality, dedicated phone lines pulled around to various studios so that sessions recording in one studio could send balanced audio over to another studio perhaps just to use their reverb chamber, and then take the reverb return coming back across town. It was done to heighten the separation between the instruments to allow for all the crazy panning.

Eventually, the albums fell out of favor, and Esquivel! put together a live show which he ran in vegas for about 12 years. He travelled back to Mexico in the 70s and returned to television composing for children's shows. His albums were "rediscovered" in the late 70s in used record shops where someone got the clever idea to catalog them under the "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music" category which has stuck surprisingly well. He disappeared again in the 80s and reappeared in the 90s where his music had a true rebirth including all those CD re-releases during the last decade of his life.

It's pretty hard to find the discs at average record shops because they are pretty esoteric. Even if the store has typical easy-listening or lounge music like Burt Bacharach, they probably won't have Esquivel. I've found that if you are in a city with a reasonably good sized gay neighborhood, you'll likely find Esquivel in the 'lounge music' section in an indie record shop there. Not as big as the Divas section, but it should be there.

Oh, and it's really fun to keep Esquivel! around the studio, because it's a great tension breaker. No matter how hard they might try, nobody can really listen to Esquivel! and get mad - you just have to smile and feel good about things.

-Jeremy

[joeysimms]

If ya dig Esquivel!, do yourself a favor and look up R.D. Burman's 60's/70's bollywood soundtracks. it's not the same wacky stereo image tricks, but it's got more wacky arrangement and general sound tricks in one album than most groups pull in an entire career.

[konabuzz]

The (now defunct?) magazine Cool and Strange Music did an issue featuring
Esquivel and went into some depth. I think you may still be able to get back copies -- of course, Google.

Here, in Minneapolis at Electric Fetus (the best record store I've EVER encountered, this city or others) has a few Esquivel selections. Gay fanbase? Don't see the connection there necessarily, but.....hey, good trippy/inventive music is just that. Good for evr'body : ).......

Yes, quite interesting re. the phone linkup.....Phone lines typically are designed strictly for voice comm...300khz to 3000khz, low and high passed filtered. There are duplex devices that one can buy (and find on Ebay occasionally) that give one full bandwidth so that theoretically you can hear (and record) exceptional quality audio even over long distance trunk lines. Jam with your buds in London, anyone? Seriously...guess it works great. Kinda pricey, though.....What I'm blown away with is that this technology existed in the 50's (!!).....Damn......Gotta hand it to Senor Esquivel...


He deserves a complete SACD treatment.