By 1949 Columbia Records was running out of space for recording audio. Their largest studio had been taken over for CBS TV broadcasts, and so Mitch Miller, Head of A&R, began looking for a space exclusively for audio recording.
He found an abandoned Presbyterian church on 30th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. The interior space was huge - almost 50 feet wide and 100 feet long with a 100-foot high vaulted ceiling, and a natural echo that gave the studio a unique acoustic signature.
Miller insisted that the building interior was not to be altered in any way. Janitors were not even allowed to wash the floor, for fear that water soaking into the unvarnished wood could alter the acoustic properties of the space.
The studio became Columbia’s primary recording space, with notable recordings such as Glenn Gould's “Goldberg Variations” in 1955, Leonard Bernstein’s Original Cast Recording of “West Side Story” in 1957, and Igor Stravinsky conducting “The Rite of Spring” in 1960
“The Church,” as it became known, was the best-sounding recording studio of its time, and is considered by many to have been the greatest recording studio in history.
Glenn Gould testing which piano to use for "The Goldberg Variations", 1957. © Don Hunstein.
Miles Davis recorded almost exclusively at The Church while he was signed to Columbia Records. Kind of Blue was recorded in three sessions—two on March 2nd, and a third on April 22nd, 1959
Davis assembled a sextet of now-legendary musicians in the prime of their careers: saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, pianist Bill Evans, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb,
He didn't provide sheet music for the musicians, who had little idea what they were going to play when they showed up at the studio. “I wanted a lot of spontaneity,” Davis later wrote in his autobiography, “If you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time ... that’s where great art and music happens.”
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Davis conceived the entire album as a series of modal sketches, giving each musician a set of scales rather than chord progressions to improvise with. This small change had a huge impact on the overall sound.
“No chords ... gives you a lot more freedom and space to hear things,” said Davis, “It becomes a challenge to see how melodically innovative you can be.”
The first complete performance of each track was the "take,” with the exception of “Flamenco Sketches,” for which a second take was selected. The entire album was recorded in less than nine hours.
Kind of Blue was released on August 17, 1959. Over 50 years later, it remains the bestselling Jazz album of all time, having sold over five million copies, and been certified quadruple platinum.
Many critics regard it as Davis's masterpiece - a standard by which other jazz recordings are measured. Quincy Jones described it as “a work of art that explains what jazz is.”
Miles Davis in session for Kind of Blue, 1959. © Don Hunstein.
Columbia Studio C Control Room. © Unknown.
In 1982, new neighbors in an adjacent townhouse began to make noise complaints against the studio.
“Imagine being in the middle of a great moment in a recording session at Columbia Records, in one of the finest sounding studios in the world, and spinning around on your chair to a dozen police officers who explain that the session has to stop because the new neighbors complained about the noise,” recalls Engineer Jim Reeves. “Not wanting to be a nuisance, CBS decided to shut it down not long after.”
Columbia’s official position was that the decision to close was an attempt to keep overhead costs down, which prompted Billboard to comment, “It is rather like shooting the patient to keep the medical costs under control.”
The building was sold to a real-estate developer and demolished in 1982.
A 10-story apartment building called “The Wiltshire” opened in 1985. The building is pet-friendly, with a doorman, and laundry facilities in the basement.
The typical rent for a two-bedroom apartment is approximately $4000 per month.
