Santana
Seattle Center Arena
Seattle, WA
March 13, 1978
JEMS Full Track Mono Master
16/44 Edition

Recording Gear: Sony ECM-22P Microphone > Tandberg Model 11 Portable Reel to Reel

JEMS Transfer: Master reel > Otari MX-5050 w/full track mono head stack > Sound Devices USBPre 2 capture (24/96) > 16/44 > iZotope RX and Ozone > xACT > FLAC

01 Announcement & Tuning
02 Zulu
03 Jugando
04 Black Magic Woman / Gypsy Queen
05 Dance Sister Dance (Baila mi hermana)
06 Europa (Earth's Cry, Heaven's Smile)
07 Batuka
08 No One To Depend On
09 Incident At Neshabur
10 I'll Be Waiting
11 Evil Ways
12 Soul Sacrifice
13 Wham!
14 She's Not There
15 Toussaint L'Ouverture
16 Oneness
17 Transcendance

Known Faults:
-None

Tale of the Tapes and the Tandberg

With Jared's passing in October 2016, the JEMS Archive was packed up and moved south from his home up north. That change, sad impetus aside, presented the daunting opportunity to go through and organize the collection. With the help of amazing friends and experts (among them Slowburn, SS, RD and slipkid68), JEMS tapes are now accessible in ways they have never been before. Stan G was also on hand to help and fill in our taping history as he always does.

A year later, most of the same crew (joined by mjk5510) reconvened at JEMS South to continue organizing the archive. While most of our attention was spent on the storage unit where the bulk of the collection is stockpiled, for the first time we gathered, sorted and shelved all of Stan's original Tandberg reel-to-reel masters.

If you don't know about the Tandberg, it was a remarkable piece of gear in its day, not only capable of recording at 3-3/4 and 7-1/2 IPS, but in full-track mono. I won't do the math, but compared to a cassette, the surface area of tape capturing the music is orders of magnitude higher, which is why so many of Stan's Tandberg masters from the likes of David Bowie, Elton John, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen are considered by some as audience-recording classics. The Tandberg required 10(!) D-cel batteries to operate, is roughly the size of a compact typewriter and weighs around ten pounds. Imagine sneaking that into a show and your respect for what SG accomplished only grows.

The original Tandberg deck is still fully functioning, but after years of making transfers from it, I noticed that the Model 11 introduced a lot of noise. Not surprising considering the age of the unit (over 50 years old), but an issue just the same. In recent years, I used software to help address the noise it introduced, but I wanted a better solution.

The obvious answer would be to transfer the tapes on a different reel to reel tape deck, but because the Tandberg recorded in relatively obscure full track mono, transfers done on any standard deck, be it 1/4 or 1/2-track, would still not capture the full fidelity of the master tapes.

As luck would have it, I was taking another reel to reel deck in for repair at the one place in Southern California that still specializes in them and has for decades, Adrian Proaudio Services in Canoga Park. I was talking to Adrian about the Tandberg issue and my primary reel to reel, which is an Otari MX-5050. He said, "Why don't you get a full-track mono head stack for the Otari?" Before I even had a moment to ponder why I had never thought of that, Adrian pulled out a brand new, dead stock full-track mono unit which I could plug and play into my Otari. Needless to say I bought it on the spot.

The Otari full-track mono playback was a revelation. The noisiness I had come to expect from any Tandberg playback was gone. The fidelity was everything I had always hoped we could extract from Stan�s master recordings.

###

In the last couple of years, we've revisited some of Stan's greatest Seattle recordings by making new transfers from the master reels, shows like Led Zeppelin '73, George Harrison '74 and Pink Floyd '75. In the process, I did an audit of all Tandberg master reels released by JEMS on DIME and compared that to the tapes sitting on the shelf just above me as I type this, an exercise I had inexplicably never undertaken.

You can probably guess where this is going (I seem to revisit this narrative thread often): turns out there are at least two dozen Tandberg masters that don't appear to have been torrented or posted. Several of these may not have circulated in any form, even in the analog trading era. I suspect some haven't been played since the day after the show--if at all.

Stan would have been the first to admit he devoted 95% of his energy to capturing these shows and only 5% to listening to them. His legacy of over 100 Tandberg recordings made between 1972-1979 is a truly remarkable archive that, delightfully, has not been fully tapped.

Which brings us to this installment in JEMS Tandberg Masters series, Santana on tour in the spring of 1978 supporting Moonflower. The band's double album mixing studio and live tracks was released in October 1977. The setlist draws heavily from the studio tracks on Moonflower, surrounded by classic and deeper cuts from the catalog.

In the pantheon of Tandberg masters Stan's Santana capture is certainly up the with the best of them, sounding close, full and consistent. Samples provided. It's a high-energy show, too.

###

Stan was one of the kindest and humblest people I ever met. He took me on as an apprentice in the mid-'80s and taught me everything I know about taping. He also gave me access to his archive, and the act of doing so was in effect the beginning of JEMS, as we began to treat our collective recordings as a single entity.

Thanks this week to Professor Goody for providing pitch guidance and to mjk5510 who helped out with research and post-production.

BK

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