I'd never heard of him but if he played with N. Brignola, he must've been an excellent player. Reading the article, I get the sense he was a not only a multi-talented individual but a person who who touched those he met in memorable ways. It comes as no surprise that such an individual is sorely missed.
George Kaye
In case any of you missed the news, George passed away last month after a long illness.
He was a kind, thoughtful and helpful person and a great bass player. I and others will miss him.
I apologize for not posting this sooner.
from the Daily Hampshire Gazzette:
by Carolyn Brown
February 26, 2025
Passionate on and off the bandstand: Jazz community mourns the loss of bassist George Kaye
Jazz bassist George Kaye, longtime member of the Valley’s Green Street Trio, died on Monday, Feb. 10, at the age of 73 after a period of failing health.
“He was a very deeply caring person,” said Ruth Griggs, president of the Northampton Jazz Festival. “He loved to mentor young musicians. He was very curious about new people coming into the community and onto the bandstand and always reached out to people to just get to know them better. He was also very creative in his thinking, let alone his playing.”
Kaye, a self-taught musician who learned from jazz albums, started playing bass in high school. He lived and worked as a musician in Albany in the mid-’70s, performing with saxophonist Nick Brignola, then moved to New York City to continue playing bass as a freelance musician. He got his bachelor’s degree in music from the Manhattan School of Music in 1997, then moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, in 2001.
In 2015, Kaye got a master’s degree in music from the Jazz Composition & Arranging Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The school’s Department of Music & Dance posted a tribute to Kaye earlier this month on social media, which said, “He was an extraordinary bassist and a great friend with a huge heart.”
Locally, Kaye was a member of the Northampton Jazz Festival board of directors from 2018 to 2021 and served as an advisor to the festival after that. Griggs said that Kaye was foundational to the growth of the western Massachusetts jazz scene because he brought musicians from New York City and beyond to the Pioneer Valley – and he liked to think big.
“When he was on the board of directors of the Northampton Jazz Festival, he would say, ‘You’ve gotta bring Ron Carter here,’” said Griggs. Carter, the most recorded bassist in jazz history, a three-time Grammy Award winner and an NEA Jazz Master, would have been a big get. The other board members were skeptical.
“Sure enough,” said Griggs, “we had Ron Carter here in 2022, and it was a completely sold-out show.”
With all of the musicians that Kaye brought to the Pioneer Valley, Griggs said, “We’re just reaping the beauty of that generosity that he had.”
One of Kaye’s longtime friends, Paul Arslanian, the pianist in Green Street Trio and executive producer of the Northampton Jazz Workshop, said Kaye was a generous man who cared about helping young musicians and had a “really creative, spontaneous mind.”
“He was a natural-born teacher,” Arslanian said. “He always wanted to pass on what he knew,” telling students “not what they were doing wrong, but what they could do better. He did it in such a good-natured way that people are writing, testifying how important that was to their careers.”
Arslanian, like Griggs, said that a key element of Kaye’s legacy is that he “brought New York City to the Valley” – not only in the musical talent that he recruited to play here, but in a particular work ethic as well: “You have to really work at the craft. You don’t stop practicing, you don’t stop learning, every gig is important.”
“I’ll never forget him, for sure,” Arslanian said.
Nearly everybody who spoke with the Gazette for this story mentioned that Kaye was known for being outspoken about his opinions.
“He loved life. He was always totally engaged when you talked to him, very opinionated. He was very New York brash, almost. He spoke what he meant. He said it, and he didn’t have very many guardrails in terms of his social interaction, but he wasn’t afraid to say what he was thinking,” Arslanian said. “Sometimes it [rubbed] people the wrong way, but most of the time, they took it as someone that was very genuinely interested in who they were.”
“George impressed me as a person with the aura and intensity of someone with a strong or passionate point of view,” said jazz historian and radio host Tom Reney, who also serves as an advisor to the Northampton Jazz Festival. “It may have been for a particular artist he was endorsing for the festival, or for artists booked for the weekly Northampton Jazz Workshop. I don’t think George was shy about speaking his mind.”
Beyond his outspokenness, Reney said, “George leaves a legacy of excellence, readiness, and openness to jazz at its freshest and most spontaneous levels of creation.”
Outside of music, Kaye was also passionate about science; he studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and loved watching Neil deGrasse Tyson’s lectures online. He founded the company Moscode, which produced amplifiers, and co-founded a recording studio in Manhattan with jazz drummer Jimmy Madison.
“I’m a carpenter and a fix-it guy, and he was sort of a fix-it guy, too,” said Arslanian. “We had a lot of conversations about how to make the world better.”
Eugene Uman, director of the Vermont Jazz Center, knew Kaye both as an educator and a musician. The two met when Kaye moved to Brattleboro, where he joined the faculty of the Vermont Jazz Center as an educator. Uman is a pianist, and the two played about 200 gigs together.
“As a bass player, he was really tremendous. He had a really steady quarter note, and you could always rely on him to have good time,” Uman said. “He always would add his own creativity into a composition. He was always trying to make things groove and feel like they swing hard.”
“We’re gonna miss him a whole lot,” said Uman. “He was a strong personality, and he made a really great impact on our personal lives as well as our musical lives.”
Kaye’s sister, Maggie Kaye, wrote in an email that her brother “lived his last days as he lived his life. With courage, grace, complete commitment to those he loved and equally committed to the truth in every single in stance. He left us, listening to Miles [Davis] all day. Our hearts are broken but we are forever grateful for the time we had with George and for the extraordinary friends who loved him.”
Kaye is survived by his partner Maria de la Vega, his sister Maggie Kaye, his daughter Chelsea Kaye-Bidinger, and de la Vega’s children, Lisette, Nico and Alicia.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.
23 responses Add your response
Very sad to learn this. Excellent player he was! Not mentioned in his obit is that he also spent a fairly long stint as saxophonist Houston Person’s bassist. I got to know George years ago when I would make periodic trips from my home in Brooklyn, NY to his house in Yonkers out of which he operated his audio equipment repair and modification service with emphasis on NY Audio Labs vintage gear. He was a very talented electronics designer as well as musician. He was the designer of many of the NYAL “Moscode” pieces. The Moscode 600 amplifier was my first “serious” amplifier and George did some wonderful updates/mods to it. To this day I regret not buying the pair of Futterman OTL’s that he offered to sell me. Great guy who was very energetic and passionate about music and audio. He will be missed. |
I bought my pair of NYAL Futtermans from Dave Wasserman’s Stereo Exchange in 1985. at first, when something went wrong with them, I took them to Dahong Seetoo, but Dahong soon went on to bigger and better things, eventually winning 5 Grammys for his work with the Emerson String Quartet, and though he always found time for me because I was one of his very first customers, he was never really a tube guy anyway, and somehow I then found George Kaye. He did the first overhaul, but when he moved to Brattleboro, well, that was a distance, and then I found Jon Specter, who was in Staten Island, who did the recent overhaul and installed George’s triode conversion for me. Jon can be heard here at this Dan Lynch YouTube bootleg, he is a blues guitarist and member of the blues hall of fame: https://youtu.be/k_BYPhgsooI?si=gQHL6ZasLA8klk9g Look in the comment to see Jon’s amazing bio/resume. I have been really blessed to know both of these guys. |
George Kaye was the founder and designer of New York Audio Labs (NYAL). I have one of his hybrid tube/transistor amps: the Moscode 150 (75 wpc). 6CG7 front end, Mosfet outputs. NYAL also made some OTL tube amps based on Julius Futterman's H3aa circuit. Go to the Stereophile archives to read a review of the Moscode 300 amp. |
@unreceivedogma , I still have the pair of Stax F81’s that I always hoped would be able to drive with a pair of Futterman’s. Best midrange and small(er) scale soundstaging I have ever heard. RIP, George.
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Right you are @frogman. Harvey (I’m sure Harvery was just a typing mistake) was well known for his love of three hi-fi products: The Futterman OTL amps, the QUAD ESL loudspeaker, and Decca pickups. Harvey befriended Julius Futterman, eventually talking him into giving him the rights to his OTL circuit design, and to manufacture amps employing that circuit. Harvey wasn’t an engineer, and he hired George Kaye to help him in fixing the problems the Futterman OTL’s were infamous for. He marketed them under the New York Audio Labs (NYAL) moniker. Another fan of the Futterman OTL was Roger Modjeski of Music Reference renown. Roger studied the Futterman OTL design for years, and came up with an OTL that solved the problems inherent in the Futterman. He eventually sold the rights to his OTL to Counterpoint, who marketed their own version of Roger's design.
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Thanks for the spell check @bdp24 😊 @unreceivedogma , as you obviously know OTL’s are great with high impedance loads. The Stax are a very difficult load. From 40-800 hz their impedance is 100+ ohms. Limited bass and volume, but if midrange is your thing, they sound glorious with good OTL amps. |
One serious problem with most OTL amps is their very high output impedance. When that behavior interacts with a wildly-varying modulus of impedance (the fancy way of saying impedance) in a loudspeaker (such as the QUAD ESL), the result is a different frequency response that when the speaker is driven by an amp with a low output impedance. Many loudspeakers are designed assuming they will be driven by the latter, and are voiced to sound accurate with such an amp. In spite of the above, OTL amps partnered with the QUAD ESL (both single and double stacked pairs) was for years considered one of the best systems available. Harvey Rosenberg drove his stacked QUADS with Futterman OTL's for years. In spite of frequency response aberrations, OTL's were (and remain) valued for their transparency. Superior output transformers are hard and expensive to make, and are responsible for some of the weaknesses in tube amplifiers. Two tube amp designers/makers who were known for their excellent output transformers were Tim DeParavicini of EAR-Yoshino and Roger Modjeski of Music Reference. Roger wound some of his transformers himself, for those willing to pay him to do so (I think it was a thousand dollar surcharge). For the unwilling, he had custom transformers manufactured to his specs. Most tube amp companies just pick their off-the-shelf/stock transformers from the catalogs of companies who make them.
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Thanks, @dogearedaudio- I was obviously confused. |
@unreceivedogma thank you for letting us know. I met George Kaye in Las Vegas at THE Show in 2008. We had a room across from his, and spent the week getting to know each as neighbors. I don't have any recollection of the speakers he used, but was struck by the elegant looking and sounding Moscode amplifiers he built. They had that warm, relaxed, lush sound that appealed to me in the sort of way that makes you forever remember it, and often wonder if you should purchase it. I also noticed a lot of folks sought him out, wanting to give his amplifiers a listen, reminisce over the days many in this thread brought up, or just say hello. Over the years I thought about his amplifiers many times. More than that, I remember George Kaye as a warm, engaging, humorous, kind soul who offered us his generous insight, became my friend, and made that week memorable for the best of reasons. Rest in peace, George and family |
On pages 258-261 of his book "The Search for Musical Ecstasy", Harvey ’Gizmo’ Rosenberg describes hearing the NYAL Futterman OTL1 combined with the Altec "Big Red" for the first time:
(But) think about the problem of recording engineers, producers and musicians ... moving from recording studio to recording studio. You do some tracks in one city and others in another city or state. If the monitors are not constant, then confusion will prevail. It is extremely important to have a stable reference point so that when you are doing your mix-down, you don’t have to constantly readjust your acoustical frame of reference. That is how the tradition of using Altec and JBL loudspeakers as studio monitors got started, and over five decades things haven’t changed much. ..... (Nevertheless,) I was trying to sell OTL-1s to the professional trade, and what better way to start than to convince Phil Ramone to use OTL1s in his own mixing room? With the help of his studio engineers, we disconnected his favorite glass-burning transistor amps and installed the OTL1s. How would a 125 watt tube amp compare to a 1,000 watt transistor amp on these monsters? I really did think that these speakers were so inherently bad that nothing could make a difference, why spend $15,000 on tube amps when a $1,000 transistor amp will sound just as bad? Spool up the 2-inch 30IPS master tape, boys, and let her rip. Every one of Ramone’s studio engineers were on hand to see what this 4 foot tube tower would do. How good was the music? My first impulse was to rush home and kick sand in my Quad’s face and say " Get outta here you audio wimps". Here at last, was the ecstasy of the audio edge. This was a defining moment. How could anyone ask for more? At last, all the sweetness and natural harmonics of tubes with effortless and unlimited dynamics of what seemed like a gigawatt of OTL power. The voices were real, the drums were right there in the room. All of the harmonics were right, from the crash of the cymbals to the piano. This was the first authentic reproduction of state-of-the-art rock and roll music that I had ever heard. I was stunned. This formula did what no other combination state-of-the-art audio gizmos ever had. Super-efficient horn loudspeakers with micro-powered tube amps is the formula for rock and roll ecstasy, which as you know is 180 degrees fro audioxtasist [sic] dogma. Yes, nothing else would satisfy the the longing for rock and roll ecstasy. ..... I knew what I wanted in my home. At the next Audio Engineering Society Trade Show we demonstrated the Futterman OTL1s with the Altec Big Reds, 1-inch 30 IPS master tape played on a professional Studer tape deck. Recording engineers were in disbelief at what they were hearing."
Jon tells me that my OTL3s - with George’s triode mod, the bass tweak that Jon added himself @frogman and the modern, contemporary caps - are now functionally equivalent to the OTL1s. I have a pair of 604Cs from 1956, and a pair of 604Ds, from 1958. Basically the pairing that Harvey describes. Harvey is a little hyperbolic (maybe omit the word ’little’), but I am inclined to agree with him: the sound is holographically encompassing, the dynamics allow for profound musical expressions in the vocals to show through, the bass is rock solid and convincing, the soundstage specific, the timbres and textures palpable. I had decided on the Altec 604C - tube amp (Dynaco Stereo 70, then the Dynaco MK IIIs) combo in my early 20s, during the mid 1970s, about a decade before I discovered the Futtermans, so I didn’t need Harvey’s convincing. It was a natural progression for me.
@trelja yes we miss him for sure.
Question to anyone: what's with the "glass burning" transistor thing? why does he say "glass burning"? |
@unreceicedogma: In the mid-80's I received a call at home awhile after writing Harvey regarding Decca phono pickups (he was a well-known expert on them). I hadn't included my phone number in the latter, he called information to get it! I took notes as he spoke, sharing with me all his wisdom on the idiosyncratic and demanding Decca design. I have a copy of his book, quite collectible now. And a bunch of his NYAL newsletters. What an interesting guy! I also attended an in-store appearance he made at Havens & Hardesty in SoCal when he was promoting his line of Moscode products. Harvey died at far too young an age, only 59. That it was from a heart attack is no surprise!
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