Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
2003, NR, 82 min.
Directed by Marc Moormann, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring .

The correlation between music and math, if not explicit, is seldom documented with as much panache as Tom Dowd & the Language of Music. Dowd was one of the Atlantic Three; while Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler scouted talent, Dowd, a young physics student straight out of the university, recorded it and engineered it. Recorded, engineered Bird, Diz, Prez. Otis and Aretha. Coltrane. Skynyrd. Introduced Allman to Clapton. Standardized eight-track recording. Helped make the atomic bomb. Dowd, who died Oct. 27, 2002, was a similar force in modern music, and producer/director Mark Moormann preserves ground zero with jaw-dropping archival footage, music, and mathematical precision.

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This article appears in March 5 • 2004.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.