HOLLYWOOD MUSIC IN MEDIA AWARDS NOMINEE
SINGER/SONGWRITER JEFF KOSSACK 
 TALKS ABOUT HIS VINTAGE EQUIPMENT AND
“OLD SCHOOL” APPROACH TO RECORDING
FOR BIG BLEND RADIO’S “CHAMPAGNE SUNDAYS”
ON NOVEMBER 7

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Shakefire.com Gives Kossack An A+ Album Review For ‘halflife’

So Cal’s singer/songwriter Jeff Kossack was recently nominated for a 2010 Hollywood Music In Media Award (HMMA) in the Best AAA Song Category for “One More Day,” a popular track from Kossack’s new album halflife. The HMMAs take place on Thursday, November 18 at The Highlands within the Kodak Theatre Complex/Hollywood & Highlands Center in Hollywood. The singer is scheduled to boast about his HMMA nomination and discuss his penchant for using vintage equipment and “old school” approach to recording on Big Blend Radio’s “Champagne Sundays” segment on November 7.

The singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and a veteran of the Los Angeles club scene, has created his infectious soul and rock-n-roll influence collection in the classic tradition of his favorite artists, including The Beatles, Van Morrison, Marc Cohn and the Scottish band Del Amitri.

Recording at the Otherhand Studios, his own facility in Canoga Park, California, Kossack invited the renowned studio musicians, who make up his studio band also named theTheOtherHand, to help him achieve an organic live-in-the-studio vibe. halflife harkens back to the days when albums had creative productions featuring instruments likeHammond Organ (Paul Katz), viola and violin (Julie Pusch), cello (Ro Rowan) and sizzling, simmering horn sections (trombonist Steven Bent, multi-saxman Walter Davis, trumpeter and flugelhornist Joe Bebiak). Throughout the recording process, Kossack used “great equipment, some old and some modeled on older circuitry.”

Believing that the most important things an engineer, producer or studio owner can have are a great microphone, top of the line mic pres and a state of the art compressor, the singer used some classic analog equipment to record the album. This includes tube mics by Neumann and Mojave (a boutique division of Royer, a manufacturer of high end mics); mic pres put out by Brett Avrill, who uses circuitry from the vintage Neve consoles he is notable for rebuilding; and Manley compressors.

“I like music that has an organic quality,” says Kossack, “so even when I start the songwriting process with digital composing tools, by the time I’m recording, I will be using real horns and strings and live instruments. In this day and age, many producers use samples to keep their overhead low, but to my ears, nothing tops the sound of live musicians and nothing is more fun than getting in the studio and creating new tracks with my favorite players.”

To that end, Kossack has been engaging in exciting sessions while working on tracks for his next album, including a recent session several weeks ago in which he invited 15 of his musician friends, eight of them to play in the studio at the same time, and the rest of them for a studio audience. The inspiring session, which ran from midnight to 5 a.m., has prompted Kossack to consider producing an ongoing half-hour concert series with sessions in his studio attended by a small live audience. He plans to put a sample episode of“Midnight at Otherhand” on his next blog post.

Kossack’s halflife recently received an outstanding album review on the popular site Shakefire.com. Shakefire.com’s editor AJ Garcia gave the album 4.45 out of 4-equivalent to an A+-and writes, “Kossack states that this album was inspired by the love he has in his life, and not just the good times but the bad and hard to understand times, and lyrically Kossack handles this aspect of the album with flying colors, not to mention the ambiance of the albums concept thanks to the emotional rollercoaster of music on the album.”