As some of you know, years ago I toured as bass trombonist with the Phil Collins Big Band, which was a great time, musically, professionally, and personally. Phil is a great musician, great businessman, great person, and a humble guy despite being an international superstar of pop singing, drumming, composing, and then of film-scoring ("Tarzan" and the like).

So Phil's dream was to tour with his own big band as did his idol, jazz drummer Buddy Rich. And since Phil had some funds, he multitrack-recorded every rehearsal of the band (in Lausanne, Switzerland, which was not an awful place to be in May), would obtain a stereo dump of it daily, and would study it that night for self-improvement and to create constructive advice for the band. He has a great work ethic.

When the band toured for two months across Europe and the U.S., he had the live concerts multitrack-recorded at probably seven cities along the way as potential material for an album. And there was a lot of good material.

But when we played at Carnegie Hall, the only recording that was allowed was Carnegie's own hanging ambient stereo mic. And when Phil heard that recording, he loved its quality of no rough edges (versus digital perfection); yet he knew that a modern audience accustomed to HD sound would not like such a simply recorded audio product at all.

So, being both smart and fiscally solid, here's what Phil did. He lined up his producers, Don Murray and longtime guitarist Darryl Steurmer, and placed them in a concert hall in the Los Angeles area with superb acoustics suiting a big band. They then placed chairs on the stage in position for a big band; and on each chair a great speaker fed with the solo track of the instrumentalist who'd sat in that chair, recreating a virtual big band comprised of properly mixed volumes on each speaker-chair.

And then they used a stereo mic in the hall to digitally capture the resulting "live broadcast" from the stage, mixing in a bit of the ambient-mic tracks that had captured the audience's reactions.

So the project stayed digital but was re-captured in a sonic environment that smoothed over the unnaturalness of separate tracks. I doubt any other album has been recorded that way, much less big band album—how many artists have sufficient money to burn on such a project? Phil was not worried about making his money back: he wanted an artistic recording that best represented his hard work and that of his bandmates and arrangers.

To my ear that Phil Collins Big Band recording, "A Hot Night in Paris," is one of the best recorded big band albums ever released. Unfortunately, you'll likely never hear it, unless you find an original pressing of it. It's long out of print; and I believe that Amazon sells copies duplicated onto CD-Rs (which limits the fidelity). But even if you hear lo-res files on YouTube, some of the quality will poke through. Most of the stuff available on YouTube from that band is not from the CD. It's from live broadcasts fed off of the soundboard that were never properly mixed. They're more fun to watch than to listen to, but they are enjoyable!