Fwd: Don Dorsey (was: Tomita Tribute Album)

To: tomita at listbot.com
Subject: Don Dorsey (was:Re: Tomita Tribute Album)
From: IXQY at aol.com
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2000 07:05:47 EDT
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In a message dated 7/25/00 5:30:15 AM Central Daylight Time,
ndkent at optonline.net writes about Don Dorsey:

> He sold enough that there should be some floating around the used
> market. I heard one and I don't think I made it through the whole album.
> It suffers from an 80s sound as I recall. "I'm making all this cool
> music with all this hi-tech gear", but my memory is growing hazy. There
> are a lot of these kind of albums, he's more rare in that he did like 3
> of them.
>
> Bob James who wrote the theme music to the TV show "Taxi" did one album
> of Couperin and one of Scarlatti. There's one great track on the
> Couperin album, but in general he lost the life and delicacy these
> pieces need.
>
> The thing a lot of people forget is you really have to articulate and
> tweak on a note by note basis, far more than just using velocity...
> though a surprising number of interpreters don't even get that far.
> While its possible to overcome the limitations of expressive lack on
> polysynths and monosynths a lot of people don't even bother, the novelty
> of doing it on a sequencer and hearing their patches seems satisfying
> enough to the music maker but not to the listener. Thats always a trap.
> A lot of electronic music gets made beacuse its satisfying to make to
> the maker, a lot of the stuff that brings quick thrills and sounds neat
> the first time has little staying power.

That last sentence is an interesting train of thought, which I tend to agree
with...

I have Don Dorsey's BachBusters CD and found that it had very little
"staying power" for me as well. The music is has a very mechanical feel to it
and is compounded by the fact that there is very little timbral variety in
the sounds that he used throughout the recording. Compared to Tomita, there
is a huge difference in listenability.

One of the things about Don Dorsey's recordings was that he was on a record
label known for their high quality recordings. The dynamic range and
transient capability of the synths he used (DX7s?) offered a big "wow"
factor. I know for a fact that his music was often used by high end stereo
shops to show off their high dollar systems.

Andrew Sanchez


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