Jazz Reflections From Below: From His Basement, Rochester Hills Man Creates Podcasts
By Bill Laitner, Detroit Free Press
Feb. 18–From the street, it’s a nondescript house in an old part of Rochester Hills.
But beneath this small home near Auburn Road and John R is a sleek, updated basement with a modern recording studio.
At the controls this month was homeowner and ace trumpet player Mark Byerly, home on a break from the nationwide tour of rock star Bob Seger.
Byerly, 41, is a soft-spoken guy who seems the opposite of the prototypical flamboyant rocker. Almost under the radar of Seger fans, Byerly’s Motor City Horns group is helping to reinvent the Seger sound, adding a pulse-raising brassy backup to the national tour that earlier this month was listed tops in attendance among this year’s big touring acts.
Seger’s ticket sales have been so hot that the rumor afloat on this night in Byerly’s basement, he reported, was that Seger’s tour would add two shows to the end of its run, to be held in Detroit at the Joe Louis Arena in mid-March. (Get the latest on that at www.segerbob.com.)
But Byerly is pushing other boundaries in music, right from his home studio. Last year, he and several partners launched a company, JazzStage Productions, creating programs that sound exactly like great jazz radio shows, except they aren’t. They’re podcasts. Listeners can tune in via computeror iPod, downloading the shows from the Internet.
It started when Byerly and his wife, Kindra Byerly, who works for the Matt Prentice Restaurant Group, built the studio — actually built it, themselves, right down to laying the 18-inch ceramic floor tiles.
“It costs a lot of money to produce a record in somebody else’s studio, maybe $85 an hour,” Mark Byerly said. “And then you have to spend a lot of time talking to people mixing the sound, trying to get what you want.
“Here, I can do it exactly the way I like.”
Byerly said: “It was really the Justin Timberlake tours that gave me the money to build this,” referring to his city-to-city gigs with the pop singer in 2003 and ’04. The Seger paydays also have been good.
Yet, on a recent night when his fellow Seger musicians were kicking back on a four-day tour break, Byerly was bent over his computer.
A few feet away, behind the glass of his studio, sat a bevy of other pros. Doing an interview was Jim Gallert, 56, an extensive writer on jazz and host for two decades of jazz shows on Detroit Public Radio WDET-FM (101.9). Like many in metro Detroit’s music world, Gallert has a day job, a 34-year career as a quality manager with Troy-based Delphi Corp.
“What we’re really doing is promoting the Detroit area’s great jazz musicians,” Gallert had said minutes earlier, before the session began.
On this night, behind the studio glass, Gallert was having a chat with jazz-saxophone stalwart Wendell Harrison, 66, of Detroit, probing his memories. Harrison was rolling through his childhood in the Motor City. And their smoothly modulated chatter came effortlessly through the speakers clustered around Byerly’s perch.
“All of a sudden, one day, my grandfather gave me a clarinet,” Harrison said, in a voice almost as mellow as his music.
When they finished, Byerly would edit the 90-minute interview to 30 minutes, splice in an equal amount of music from Harrison’s performances, and bingo: There on tape would be the next show — called Detroit JazzStage — ready for Internet users to download from the Web site: www.jazzsstage.us.
They tape about one show each month. So far, it’s all been a labor of love. But the podcasters hope to attract sponsors and ads to ultimately turn a profit, said Dean Sahutske, who watched the taping from outside the studio.
By day, Sahutske, 43, is a Compuware software guru at DaimlerChrysler’s North American headquarters in Auburn Hills. But by night? When not dashing after his young children, he’s another trumpet player, another inveterate lover of jazz, and he’s also the producer of JazzStage.
Like the others, Byerly loves jazz, but he has feet as firmly planted in rock, pop and almost everything else. He grew up in Grand Rapids, began blowing classical at 11, majored in jazz at Western Michigan University, and then lived in New York City, backing up such stars as Leslie Gore and Bobby Vinton in the 1980s before playing Big Apple salsa clubs in the ’90s.
Tiring of that, Byerly moved in 1997 to Royal Oak, and to Rochester Hills two years ago. Last fall, with his podcasting in full swing, Byerly got quite a call: The Seger tour would start in a week and the star wanted to try out horns.
“I was pretty familiar with Seger’s music. I have been all my life. They gave us five tunes to come up with these horn lines. We had half a day, and then they called us in to play with the band. It was literally at the last minute,” Byerly said.
He and his Motor City Horns — another trumpeter, a trombonist and a sax man — showed up at the Cadieux Studios, an anonymous building on Detroit’s east side. They rehearsed for a week, wondering if they were hired.
“We finally cornered the tour manager and said, ‘Do we have the gig or not?’ He looked at us and said, ‘It’s yours to lose.’ But Bob just loved us from the get-go.
“So we started with five songs and now we’re at 13. And I understand Bob is asking for us now on more,” Byerly said.
Remaking the Seger sound, indeed. It’s happening onstage, across the country.
And remaking the sound of jazz broadcasting? That’s down in the basement.
Contact BILL LAITNER at 248-351-3297.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Detroit Free Press
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