n testament to both Ron’s love of music and the scope of his appreciation, stands his remarkably extensive personal collection of recordings. Virtually everything of lasting importance has a place in Ron’s musical library: from Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms and Bach, to Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. In terms of rock, one finds: Pink Floyd; David Bowie; Earth, Wind and Fire; Michael Jackson; the Rolling Stones; the Beatles; Chicago; Deep Purple; Bob Dylan; Jimi Hendrix; the Eagles; Elton John and Frank Zappa to name but a very few. Along his international shelf are sounds from Russia, Southeast Asia, Turkey, the West Indies, Mexico, Japan, China, Spain, Portugal, Africa, Senegal, Bali, Mongolia and the lower Amazon - to again name just a few.
“What amazed me was not only the quantity of his collection but the quality,” remarked an audiophile brought to help catalog the collection. “You simply don’t generally see so many great, and now rare recordings, in one place, including an early Miles Davis album that I’ve never seen in any audiophile collection.”
The fact is, however, Ron did not collect albums for the sake of collecting. Rather, those albums constituted his research base, the window through which he viewed the whole of world music. Those within ear shot of his office would routinely hear music from his seriously high-end audio system. And as implied, his tastes were broad - from the latest Top Forty hits to obscure Renaissance madrigals, from experimental rock to 50s pop. Moreover, he was continually recording samples and pertinent comments to help convey ideas to his studio musicians.
In the late 1970s, for example, to broaden the musical scope of musicians at work on LRH compositions, he sent what amounted to an encyclopedia of world music. Included in the selection, recalled one of those musicians, “were samples of music types we had not only never heard of, but hadn’t even known existed,” including obscure strains of the Mongolian war drum, Javanese temple gongs and Balinese chimes. He also included concise descriptions of each type of music and a brief history of the tradition. The point is, he added, “Ron used it all.”
