Y'all remember Chris Blackwell? He's the guy who founded Island Records and Island Pictures, and helped fund and distribute The Harder They Come (1973)--one of the finest music movies ever made. Well, his new bag is Palm Pictures, and they have just released a documentary on one of the more influential recording engineers of the past 40 years, Tom Dowd. Anyone who makes a habit of scanning album covers looking for the technical names behind the music recognizes his name. Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Cream, Cher, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, and countless others, the former Atlantic Records recording engineer worked with them all.

Dowd helped build Atlantic's first eight-track recording console, years before George Martin and the Beatles had one (and were still blowing people's minds with four-track). Examining this history of Tom Dowd--complete with plenty of archival footage and interviews--is, by default, walking through the history of the development of recorded music. Dowd went from the days of properly placing the musicians strategically around a microphone to achieve a proper balance, cutting directly to acetate, to mixing on the fly, to isolated, multi-track recording, into the digital realm.

Tom Dowd seems, by all accounts, the type of engineer you would want with you in the studio because he understood music. All kinds of music--R&B, jazz, rock--Dowd was responsible for some of the most important albums ever made. Tom Dowd passed away at the age of 77 on October 27, 2002, after losing the battle to his longtime respiratory illness. Though he did not live to see the release of this film, Dowd had already more than left his mark before this documentary was even conceived; yet The Language of Music reminds us how crucial it can be for even the technicians, engineers, and producers who help artists get their sounds to tape to understand and to feel music. Which is to say, to have soul. - EDWARD BURCH