“If Something Works, Don’t Change It”: Frank Laico on Engineering
Too soon after Thursday’s news, word came today that legendary recording engineer Frank Laico died yesterday at the age of 95. Laico was one of Columbia Records’ house engineers and has been celebrated for the recordings he made at the label’s 30th Street Studio in New York City. 
Among them were Miles Davis’s ’Round About Midnight (RAM) and Miles Smiles, the Miles Davis-Gil Evans collaboration Porgy and Bess, Thelonious Monk’s Straight, No Chaser, and a number of recordings by Tony Bennett, Bill Evans, and Frank Sinatra. Discogs.com has the fullest list of credits I could find, and it gives you a good sense of the variety of work one skilled engineer can do in a career. If nothing else, the number of artists with whom he worked serially indicates the respect they and their producers had for Laico. A few years ago, Sound on Sound published a feature on Davis’s RAM and the work done by Laico and others to make that recording (and the studio) sound as good as possible. You can get a more personal sense of why they loved his work and how he did what he did in an excerpt from an Audio Engineering Society oral history project video posted on YouTube. Click through to view it.