This is a very unusual album for the Band of Renown.
It really wasn't designed to be an album in the first place. When we were doing our daily show in Branson a few years ago we were told that a gentleman, named Gene Bicknell was building a state-of-the-art recording studio at his, beautiful Mansion Theater. They had wired the theater so that the stage shows could be recorded live. This fascinated me, so I asked to see the set-up.
While I was there, they asked if I'd be interested in recording the band on stage to test the room and make sure everything was properly set up, I jumped at opportunity. We came in on a night the theater was dark and recorded as many songs as we could in the few hours allotted to us. We just went from one tune to the next, very multiple takes, When we heard, the tracks we realized what a great sounding room the theater was.
A few weeks later, while mastering another project I played a copy for Jon Raney our mastering guru. He flipped out over the sound and said we ought to release it. I agreed with him and sent it to my partners Pat Patterson and Howard Wolf. They also loved it so I added a few tracks I had from other sessions, put on some finishing touches and voila, here it is.
Jana King Evans does her usual out standing job on the vocals and Danny Stone did an excellent job recording the tracks. Most of fhe songs are from our Branson show at the Mickey Gilley Theater. I added the title tune "A Time to Smile" that was written and used as the theme song for the Dean Martin summer replacement TV shows. Great big band music from the Great American Songbook. Enjoy.... |
