CEAC-2020-04-April

American Street Guide
Fans Hope Sound of Philly Studio Can
Become Music Museum
By Dan Deluca | The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — What’s the most significant Philadelphia
music landmark that needs to be saved?
In February, Preserve Pennsylvania announced that the John
Coltrane house in Strawberry Mansion is under threat.
That’s a big one. The importance of the site where the jazz
great composed his 1960 album Giant Steps was stressed in
an Inquirer opinion piece by Faye Anderson headlined “Preserving
John Coltrane’s house can help save Philly’s soul.”
But when it comes to protecting the places where history
was made, another imperiled building is unparalleled in its
importance to the sophisticated music for which the city became
known in the 1960s and 1970s. Its name is synonymous
with Philly soul.
That would be Sigma Sound Studios, the recording facility on
North 12th Street that engineer Joe Tarsia founded in 1968.
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.
“It was black music in a tuxedo,” Tarsia told me in 2018 at
a 50th anniversary celebration. “There was the Motown
Sound. The Memphis Sound. The Muscle Shoals Sound. And
there was the Sigma Sound.”
Famously, David Bowie recorded Young Americans at Sigma
in 1974. 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.”
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 (hash)SaveSigma
brainstorming session, to mull the future of the gutted
building that has been owned by real estate developers since
2015.
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.
Ochester wants to not only save the Sigma Sound building,
but also turn it into a museum.
“Not a Sigma museum,” he said. “But a Philadelphia music
history museum” — an institution sorely lacking in a city that
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| Chief Engineer