At the 2009 Grammy Awards, Dr. John won Best Contemporary Blues Album for City That Care Forgot (429 Records), which, according to Rolling Stone Magazine, "is the New Orleans soulman's impassioned lament about the natural destruction of Hurricane Katrina and the man-made tragedy of the aftermath. Over ominous funk ('Land Grab'), gospel-inflected blues ('You Might Be Surprised') and horn-boosted R&B ('Time for a Change'), Dr. John's bourbon-and-sandpaper vocals reflect the bitterness of a man who can sense that 'the smell of death still hangs on the honeysuckle vine.'" With guest-star appearances from Ani DiFranco, Willie Nelson, Terence Blanchard, and Eric Clapton, the album represents the latest of many accomplishments from Dr. John (aka Malcolm John "Mac" Rebennack, Jr.), a legendary artist whose career dates back to the 1950s. This Grammy-winning album was mixed entirely in Digital Performer by Jeff Jones, "The Jedi Master."

We caught up with Jeff, aka "Jedi," and spoke with him about the making of City That Care Forgot.

Background

Jeff Jones is a New York–based producer and director with credits that range from touring with the band Talking Heads to working with Def Jam records to producing a Grammy-nominated album for Wynton Marsalis.

"My mother was an opera singer with the New York Metropolitan Opera," says Jedi. "My first interest in music was listening to Louis Armstrong records. When I was a kid, I liked recording and I used to take my mother's Wollensak (an early 3M tape recorder), disconnect the capstans and record while the thing was in fast forward. I started shooting and editing 16mm film when I was ten years old."

So how did this curious kid from Connecticut end up making an award-winning record for a New Orleans legend?

"I had done gigs with Hugh McCracken. Hugh is a session cat who has played on so many records it's ridiculous. Mac (Dr. John) called Hugh and said he needed somebody to set up his studio in the Hamptons. Hugh said the first person that came to mind was me. He told Mac, 'Call Jeff Jones, the Jedi Master.' So I got a call and went out there. I had been a Dr. John fan since I was in eighth grade. I got his recording gear up and running and we hit it off right away. I ended up doing a lot of work for him and he told me that I'd be working on his next record. Eventually I got a call from his management one day and they said Mac wanted me to engineer his record. I told them I don't engineer anymore, I produce. They said they'd have to call me back. They did and said, 'Okay, you can co-produce.' I said, 'Fine!'"

Po' boy sandwiches, a view of the bayou, and a shared vision

"They flew me down to New Orleans for the basic tracks, and I worked with Chris Finney at Dockside Studios in Maurice, Louisiana. Chris does a lot of work in New Orleans. He's just a brilliant cat. Chris and I have a similar rule of thumb. We're both in this business to make records that stand up as classics, and we'll go to any length to do that. Chris and I hit it off really well. We combined our techniques and did the recording in this great room with a Neve console. We ate po' boy sandwiches while looking at the bayou.

"The overdubs by Ani DiFranco and Willie Nelson were done at their respective studios and the tracks were shipped in. My buddy Jeff Rothman and I recorded Eric Clapton's tracks at Legacy Studio in New York. I was the clearing house for all the overdubs and worked with Mac on his vocal tracks in my own studio.

Dr. John performs selections from the album, City That Care Forgot on the "Late Show with David Letterman."

"The first thing I did was make rough mixes of the entire record. I spent three weeks just listening to rough mixes to get a feel for how the album should be sequenced. The record to me had to make sense. It's a record about New Orleans, it's a record about Katrina, and it's a record about the political climate and such, and it had to make sense from top to bottom.

"I had a number of conversations with Mac about the sequence of songs on the record. I did a lot or work with timing between songs and key changes, transitions, and so on. There's a sense that when the next song comes in that it's uplifting, that it's fresh."

The technical details

"For the mix I used two computers. Computer A was a G5 running Digital Performer feeding mixed, two-channel output to a Neve analog summing mixer. The stereo output of the summing mixer went to a Mytek A/D converter that fed into a second computer B, also running Digital Performer, for the final two-track mix. On the second computer, I used native DSP effects to finish off the mix. Everything was done at 96 kHz in 24 bits. My final output monitor was through a MOTU 2408.

"The processing on the second computer was to give the record a treatment. I had listened to the Amy Winehouse record and was very impressed by how it sounded. People said it was retro, but I thought it was very clever the way they had made that record sound. I wanted to do something similar. So for each song I used distortion, reverb, and Speakerphone from AudioEase – whatever it took to get the sound I was looking for for that part of the record. I come from an analog background and I wanted to get that magic that only analog can bring. I think I got pretty close."

Creative freedom pays huge dividends

"Dr. John told me that I could do whatever I wanted with the mixes. He was not present at the mixes. When we went to the mastering session and he heard my mixes, he said, 'Let me tell you something. I am pleased. I am really pleased, and I don't say that often. You captured it. You made it happen.'

"It's very important to me that I won a Grammy. It's a crowning achievement. But it was really important to me that Mac said he was pleased, that he dug it."

Why Digital Performer?

"I use Digital Performer because it is intelligent from a tactile standpoint. My favorite features in DP are simple things like temporary grouping. With a single mouse click I can drag across multiple tracks to record-enable them all at once. I love the pitch automation in the tracks. Love it, love it, love it! I love the ability to do timing corrections and tempo mapping. To me, Digital Performer has the most overall feel and mindset of what I would call a real mixing console. I just like the way it's laid out. From my analog standpoint, I perceive a lot of things in DP that are really well thought out. DP just makes it easier to work faster. When I look at the competition to DP, it just looks like they are always trying to catch up. DP just makes it easy for me.

"I love DP6. I've been using the Euphonix MC Mix with DP and that works flawlessly. One thing I really love about DP6 is that I can work with any kind of file format I need – WAV, AIFF, interleaved. Whatever I need, it's there.

"I get Pro Tools files all the time to work on. I used to drag the raw audio files from the Pro Tools session into DP. Then I started using OMF transfer and that works great."

What's next?

Jeff is currently working on the next record for Wynton Marsalis. He's also doing a Blu-ray disc and soundtrack work for an A&E special that features Norah Jones.