Calliope

Located on 37th Street and 8th Avenue in the heart of New York City’s Garment District, Calliope Studios was a major catalyst in the creation of 3 Feet High and Rising. Based on an entirely new blueprint both technically and philosophically, and populated with a cast of characters—many of whom would go on to become legends—Calliope was instrumental in hip-hop’s changing of the guard. In today’s hip-hop landscape, that sounds like an almost outlandish claim, especially when tweenagers can record entire albums at home on software that may even rival some of the best professional equipment of yesteryear. But Calliope was much more than a place where music was recorded, it was a place where soul was exposed. Stetsasonic, De La, Tribe, and Brand Nubian all started their careers at Calliope. Chaka Khan, Queen Latifah, Black Sheep, D-Lyte, Biz Markie, Afrika Bambaataa, 3rd Bass, Naughty by Nature, Fat Joe, and many, many more recorded there. There was something in the building that seemed to give way to genius. But What?

It all started in 1984 when a young musician named Chris Julian’s newfound career as an engineer began to take form. “I was a musician in a band, and I was interested in production ever since I was a kid. I was making tape recordings and sound on sound…sort of making my own records. And when I got out of my band, I started working for a guy that had a little private studio. I started as an engineer and a producer, working with clients, and building up a base of people to work with, and at a certain point, a couple of my friends said, ‘You know, this thing that you’re doing is really cool, and we’d like to be partners. We want to put up a little money and have you have your own place.’ So I got a bank loan and my friends put up a little money and together we made this little corporation and started with probably 80,000 bucks, and bought equipment, and I found this place in Manhattan,” remembers Julian, who operated two additional Calliopes after the original, and has since relocated to California. But did Julian really know what was about to transpire within his walls? Had he set out on a mission to create the most progressive hip-hop studio in the world? The crazy thing is, not really. At first it was just about getting in the game. “My first ad ran for $24 an hour. And I think the lowest competitor that I saw at that time in 1984, was $40 an hour. So I started by offering time for just about half of what the nearest competitor was,” says Julian. Like many things, Calliope started by just trying to survive.

But it wasn’t just dumb luck either—not by a long shot. Julian had a knack for connecting with the right people and he also had a crooked eye out for new technology. The intersection of these two things is what really started to set it off for Calliope. “I started out with just the people that I assembled as clients when I was working for another guy. They felt a loyalty to me and liked what I was doing. So that got things going. It was a struggle for a bunch of years. And I remember thinking and valuing that my goal in life was to have a gold record. We got into the sampling technology and some hip-hop acts started coming in and we started getting good at that, and next thing you know, De La Soul is in there and bam, we got a gold record. So that was a huge triumph for me personally, to be involved in a record that went gold, and especially with people that were of the kind of character that they were. They really had something different and something special going on with what they were doing and what their approach was. So at that point it became a great emblem for us, and it was a great confidence booster for the labels. They suddenly looked at us like, ‘Whoa, wow, this is the place that got it going on,’ and they sent all their acts there. So we did tons of people for Tommy Boy, Polygram, and Def Jam, and it just became an East Coast hub for hip-hop. That was fantastic because then there were a lot of people getting gold records, and it really became a funnel of that movement and of the technology and of the art. It was fantastic. It was just fun times. And it got really busy and it just kept growing and growing, which was what my dream was.”

“I can’t remember exactly the first time when we met ’em, but it probably was at Calliope, and it was flattering to know that people like that, that we respected, was respectin’ us, and we was just comin’ out—the fact that they was likin’ our shit, and it was still being made. The shit wasn’t even out. And it was people like that, matter fact—Q-Tip and niggas like that—that fuckin’ was blowin’ us up in the industry. People in the industry was likin’ us before people in the street was likin’ us. ‘Cause they was hearin’ us in the studio and was like, ‘Aww! You gotta hear this Brand Nubian shit! This shit is crazy!’ So it was like, they was the ones promotin’ us to the world. And then the world was likin’ what the industry people was tellin’ ’em to like. And that’s kinda how it started bubblin’.”

Ira Schickman, one of the legendary producers that worked the boards at Calliope remembers it, too. “Calliope was an amazing place. I think it was like my home base. It was an amazing time in music.” Sue Wright, now an elementary-school music teacher who was one of Calliope’s ace engineers, also recalls the studio as one of the most unique places she ever experienced. “There were a lot of people doing demos. I remember there was this guy who was a preacher for a church and he’d bring in his entire choir to spend the night. They’d bring fried chicken and hot dogs and we would be just going all night long recording this house-gospel music. Calliope was a real hand-made, nuts and bolts, do-a-demo type of studio.”

Energy alone, of course, doesn’t a hit record make. There is the issue of sound. But sounds were changing in 1988 with the first major advancements in recording having to do with sampling, and Calliope was on the cutting edge. A roll call of equipment from Ira Schickman is like a visit to the museum of sound recording. “Synclavier, Fairlight, TONTO, Vision, Opcode, Voyetra, Sound Workshop Series 30 consoles, Urei Time Align, DMX compressors, 3M 2-inch Machine.” Calliope had everything. But as advanced as it was at the time, it’s impossible not to wonder if it was the relative simplicity of the systems that allowed them to be so groundbreaking in the sounds they captured. Sue Wright recalls, “Back then, when we did De La Soul, that stuff wasn’t computer at all. It was one little drum machine and a sync tone. That’s the tone that you record on one of the 24 tracks that would tell the drum machine when to start, and then you’d just layer different beats with this one little sampling machine; it was called an Akai S900.” Bob Power, the master masterer, engineer, and producer, probably contextualizes it best:

“With ‘I Am I Be,’ there’s that audio collage at the beginning, of all these voices kinda floating in space. And that song, when you think about it conceptually, it’s really a soul confessional without any of the trappings or artifice surrounding a lot of the bluster with hip-hop. So that’s why it was really a huge paradigm shift. But, because we were working with 24-track tape, I couldn’t put all the vocals on different tracks, and there were maybe 20…30…40 samples in there. Pos would get them from talking to his little cousin on the phone, or me, or somebody else. So I wanted to have it be this soundscape where there were a bunch of heads or voices floating in different spots in space, including closer to you and farther away, so it was three-dimensional. So we put it all into a sampler, which at the time there was very limited memory in the sampler. What I ended up doing was printing two tracks of stereo pairs, because I couldn’t get all the voices in one load on the sampler. I was using something called Notator at the time, which became Logic, and I set the timing up so all the voices came in at an interesting point with different amounts of reverb, louder or softer, darker or brighter. I set it up so we could print it on two passes. Well, the Akai S1000, which was the state of the art at the time, had a particular page that you assigned certain notes on the keyboard to certain sounds. And there was a mode by which, if you had a bunch of different sounds, you could hit a key, it would assign it, pop to the next one, you hit another key, assign it, pop to the next one…. But if you had software MIDI information playing, you had to turn that off, or it would just go through and reassign all the things. Well, I spent two…three hours setting this whole complicated thing up, and the drums were also in the sequencer at the same time, and I forgot to turn that thing off. I hit play, and I was spinning through these different pages, landed on the assignment page, and it went (computer noise) and totally wiped out the last couple hours of work. It was funny.” That is the essence of Calliope in one brilliant anecdote. From the equipment to the confluence of open- minded and passionate people, to the innate understanding that everything they were doing there was new, that allowed true art to be made inside a non-descript building five blocks from the degenerate hub of NYC—art that speaks perhaps stronger after 20 years on the shelf.

It really is kind of sad, despite the sense of egalitarianism it brings, that today’s aspiring artists can be so self-sufficient, because that same self-sufficiency denies them the experience that a place like Calliope could provide. Can the same sort of environment be accessed in today’s DIY and do-it-alone culture? Lord Jamar puts it like this: “I mean, maybe, if they got people around their way that do it in a collective way. But, you see what I’m sayin’? I ain’t been to a studio in a while that had that type of, ‘I’m comin’ in and y’all comin’ in, and we all crossbreedin’ with each other.’ I’m not gonna lie. Calliope—the last of the great hip-hop studios.” And that’s what it is.