Rock’s unsung genius

It’s called “Tom Dowd & the Language of Music,” but “Tom Dowd Invents the Language of Music” might be a more accurate title. That’s how significant and influential the career of this unsung savant has been. If you care about the popular music of the last 50 years, this is a documentary you’ll want to see.

Dowd is not as well known as he deserves to be, because he was a studio recording engineer, one of those rarely celebrated individuals who sit behind the board and make sure the music being played gets recorded the way it sounds. Ordinarily, Eric Clapton says frankly in the film’s opening section, “I’m not interested in guys like this.”

But by the time Clapton and Dowd finished collaborating, recording work by Cream and Derek & the Dominos (including the classic “Layla”), the guitarist had a different story to tell. “The quality of success of those records could be laid at his door,” he says unequivocally. “He inspired confidence.”

And not just for Clapton, and not just for rock musicians. Dowd was a key figure in so many jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, as well as rock artists’ professional lives that the names almost don’t fit on a page. Ray Charles, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Booker T and the MGs, the Drifters, the Coasters, the Allman Brothers -- the list goes on and on for the man who was in the booth for both the Otis Redding and the Aretha Franklin versions of “Respect.”

As revealed in Mark Moormann’s enlightening documentary, which delighted viewers at both Sundance and Toronto, Tom Dowd never got a swelled head despite his accomplishments. “The most positive human being you’ll ever meet,” in the words of producer Phil Ramone, Dowd comes across as good humored as the day is long, a happy pixie who remained in love with his work for more than half a century.

According to Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records, Dowd, who did most of the engineering for the legendary label, made his sweet nature work for him by “putting musicians and artists at ease.” When you add in the man’s two other gifts -- a great musical sense and peerless engineering skill -- you begin to have some idea why he was as successful as he was.

Dowd came by his musicality honestly -- his mother was a light-opera singer, his father a concertmaster and stage manager -- but his first love was physics. In the film’s overly leisurely opening, we get to walk with the man on the New York streets he grew up in, visit both his high school and his college, and hear about an early engineering gig that turned out to be a precursor to the Manhattan Project.

“The Language of Music” ups the tempo when it takes us through Dowd’s musical career, which was blessed from the first. He had a summer job at a studio that specialized in demos in the late 1940s, and one of the first songs he helped record, “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake,” became a nationwide hit.

In those early days, according to Ertegun, “you started to mix as you were recording, on the fly,” and Dowd, who pioneered the technique of putting separate microphones on each instrument, “was a master at that.”

In addition to all his other accomplishments, Dowd, inspired by the work of Les Paul, is credited with putting together the first commercial eight-track recording system, making it possible to isolate the different components of a song. When he visited with the Beatles in 1967, he was surprised to learn they didn’t know eight-track recording existed, “though I’d been doing it for 10 years.”

Moormann, whose debut documentary this is, tells his story through a combination of talking-head interviews, video clips from performances and recording studios and an extended dialogue with Dowd himself, who saw an early cut of this seven-years-in-the-making film just a week before he died in October 2002.

If there is one moment in “The Language of Music” that will thrill old rock fans, it’s watching Dowd, his fluid hands moving with a surgeon’s grace, remix for the film’s benefit the 24-track sub-master of “Layla,” isolating and analyzing the guitar solos of both Clapton and Duane Allman. To hear him and watch him is to understand how, as one grateful musician put it, this gentle wizard “brings the best out without pushing too hard.”

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‘Tom Dowd & the Language of Music’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Nothing objectionable

Released by Palm Pictures. Director Mark Moormann. Producers Scott L. Gordon, Mark Hunt. Executive producer Juan Carlos Lopez. Cinematographer Patrick Longman. Editors Tino Wohlwend, Mark Moormann. Set decorator Lewis Zucker. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

In limited release.