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Sigma sound studio4/5/2023 And hey, look, it’s Lou Rawls, and Teddy Pendergrass, and a young Michael Jackson. There’s Bowie at Sigma with then-girlfriend Ava Cherry. Young was also a member of the Trammps, and his is the bass vocal heard on the 1976 hit “Disco Inferno.” There’s Barbara Mason of “Yes, I’m Ready” fame in the studio with Ron Baker, Bobby Eli, and Earl Young, all members of Philly International backing band MFSB. Sigma’s illustrious history was demonstrated in a slideshow by Arthur Stoppe, an engineer who worked there from the early ’70s through the 1990s. “The only one that’s left is Sigma,” said Ochester. ![]() A fire in 2010 damaged the building, though, and it was sold and razed in 2015. Gamble, Huff, and Bell bought that property in 1973, and located the Philadelphia International Records office there, as well as a studio operated by Sigma. Broad Street, which housed the Cameo Parkway label, where Tarsia gained technical expertise working on records by Chubby Checker and the Orlons. On Wednesday night, Ochester rued the reality that so many of Philadelphia’s vintage recording facilities are gone. Ochester will be part of Saving Philly’s Soul: The Why Live on March 20, a discussion with radio host Dyana Williams and WHYY-FM (90.9) journalists Annette John-Hall and Shai Ben-Yaacov, with a free performance by Philly band York Street Hustle at WHYY’s 6th Street studio. In an Inquirer story in January about Brewerytown’s reissue of an album by the 1970s soul group the Thompsons, Ochester referred to Philadelphia as “the city that sleeps on itself,” often guilty of giving its own cultural history short shrift. “It’s Sigma and the Uptown, to be honest.” A subject that will come up: opening an official city Music Office.Īlong with the Uptown Theater in North Philly, where James Brown and Aretha Franklin once performed, Sigma is the city’s single most important music landmark in need of safeguarding, Ivory said. Ivory is a member of the Philadelphia Music Industry Task Force started by City Councilman David Oh in 2017, which was to hold a public meeting at City Hall at 1 p.m. Speakers at the Sigma summit, held at the Spring Arts Building in Callowhill, included David Ivory, who engineered Erykah Badu’s 1997 album Baduizm at Sigma, as well as several by an up-and-coming Philly band called the Roots. “But a Philadelphia music history museum” - an institution sorely lacking in a city that has been home to Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, Eugene Ormandy, Hall & Oates, Schoolly D, and the War on Drugs. Ochester wants to not only save the Sigma Sound building, but also turn it into a museum. The meeting was called by Max Ochester, the mover-and-shaker owner of the Brewerytown Beats record store and label, an impassioned advocate for the preservation of Philly music. On a recent Wednesday, a group of Sigma Sound veterans from the studio’s glory days joined a younger generation of Philly music lovers and preservationists for a #SaveSigma brainstorming session, to mull the future of the gutted building that has been owned by real estate developers since 2015. Bruce Springsteen took the bus from New Jersey to meet him, and teenage fans of the British rock star attained legendary status as the “Sigma Kids.” ![]() And there was the Sigma Sound.”įamously, David Bowie recorded Young Americans at Sigma in 1974. ![]() “It was black music in a tuxedo,” Tarsia told me in 2018 at a 50th anniversary celebration. There, producers and songwriters Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell - “The Mighty Three” - oversaw the careers of the O’Jays, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, the Stylistics, and more. That would be Sigma Sound Studios, the recording facility on North 12th Street that engineer Joe Tarsia founded in 1968.
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