FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #103

Fox's Den Fundraiser at the Fulford Arms, York

A G chord

Another G chord

A post-G chord pint

Lego Jim gettin' down with the kidz

THE MANY HATS OF MICHAEL EDWARD LOVE

Yesterday's set list

At the Fox's Den charity bash, The Fulford Arms, York: -

Mind Your Own Business
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Out On The Weekend
Harvest
Tennessee Waltz
Love Song
Heart Of Gold
On The Way Home
Helpless

A fun day with loads of acts running from 1pm - midnight and possibly beyond.

Roger Nichols Interview

Roger (The Immortal) Nichols has engineered all of the Steely Dan records, Donald Fagen's "Nightfly" and upcoming "Kamakiriad" as well as many of the jazz and pop efforts produced by Walter Becker. He also discovered and broke the news that MCA had been using inferior master tapes for nearly all of the Steely Dan CDs manufactured in 1990-92. In the following piece put together a few years ago by "Metal Leg" founder Brian Sweet, Nichols talks about how he got into the recording business and then gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the how Becker and Fagen operated as Steely Dan in the studio.

Brian Sweet: Tell us about your background.
Roger Nichols: I was born in California and lived all over the U.S. until junior high school because my Dad was in the Air Force. He flew B-47s. When he got out of the Air Force in 1957 I went to high school in Cucamonga, the same one Frank Zappa went to. Frank actually used to come over to my house and mess around with guitars and things. After that I went to Oregon State University where I studied nuclear physics. Then I worked for Southern California Edison at the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant as a nuclear operator from 1965 to 1968.

BS: How did you make the switch from nuclear power to rock?
RN: Me and a couple of friends built a recording studio, Quantum Studios, in Torrance, just south of Los Angeles. It started out as a four-car garage and when we'd converted it into our studio in about 1965 we recorded high school bands in our spare time. We built a hi-fi store also and began to supply custom equipment to people in the music business. That led to a lot of business for the studio and a lot of contacts. We made commercials -- Karen Carpenter sang on a lot of the ads and Larry Carlton did arrangements and played guitar. We also did some work with Kenny Rogers when he was still with the First Edition. So we expanded, building a larger studio out of an old post office and moved up from 4 tracks to 16 tracks. Then we started supplying equipment for other studios, including all the machinery for ABC's first studio. Phil Kaye was in charge of that studio and he hired me in about 1970 to do maintenance and engineering. I started right in working with Steve Barri and Phil Kaye on albums by the Grass Roots and Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds and John Phillips and Denny Doherty of the Mama and the Papas.

BS: How did you get together with Steely Dan?
RN: Gary Katz came to ABC about a year after I did and he brought in Steely Dan. No one at ABC quite knew what to make of Donald and Walter so by default I started working with them. We hit it right off. The main reason I had gotten involved in the music business and recording was that I hated clicks, pops and ticks on records. I wanted to be able to play 2-track stuff direct from the studio on my system at home and have it really hi-fi. The only way I could get 2-track 15 i.p.s. masters was if I was working on them, so that was my big incentive for doing it. The strive for true hi-fi was common ground with Donald and Walter and Gary -- we're all perfectionists, especially Walter with his quad electrostatic speakers at home and the latest tone arm. It wasn't a drag for me to do things over and over until it was perfect, as here it would have driven a lot of other engineers up the wall. In my own way, I'm just as crazy as they are.

BS: At what stage are the Steely Dan songs when you are brought in?
RN: It depends. Either they haven't cut anything or, if Elliot Scheiner has been engineering in New York, I'll come in from the first overdub. They do their demos -- just the piano and voice stuff -- just the three of them, but as soon as anything is recorded, Elliot or myself is there.

BS: By that time, they have a good idea what they're after, right?
RN: It's amazing, my mouth still hangs open. They seem to know what's going to fill a little hole in a chorus that won't be recorded for a year. I don't know how they do it. I don't know if they know how they do it either, but they do. It makes it very easy to work. We never have to do things over again because of arrangement problems or because one instrument conflicts with another. Stuff will get done over again because a player's style won't match the tune, or a player's execution isn't good enough, or the horn section is out of tune, or something like that.

BS: Was Donald and Walter's contribution equal?
RN: It was always Donald and Walter together. They're both equally talented and it really was a fifty-fifty operation. Either one of them could've done the records alone, but you can tell there is a difference when both of them bounce ideas off each other. They get fine-tuned that much more. Walter's a great guitar player. The only thing is, he takes a long time to do solos, about an hour a bar, so it takes us a day to do an eight-bar solo. When we started using studio musicians, Walter would show 'em what he wanted, so the later guitar parts were very much influenced by him.

BS: How did Fagen and Becker get so much out of jaded session musicians?
RN: It's like the musical Olympics. Here's a musician whose style and capability they know, and they'll push him to ten percent beyond his limits. Just the chords they've written and the things they have in their mind; maybe Larry Carlton's not used to playing these scales over these chords. Another big factor is that we don't care how long it takes. The musicians will say, 'Hey, I'm really sorry it's taking so long. It's a great idea, I'm trying to execute it,' and we say, 'We don't care how long you take.' It's all constructively done, and it just takes a long time to do it. But every time somebody comes out, they say they've never played that well in their lives. And then they always want to come back.

BS: What's the story behind the solo in "Peg," which apparently frustrated an awful lot of guitarists?
RN: There were only eight guitarists who tried that tune, not thirty. It was just that everyone had their own idea of what the solo should be, and it just didn't match up to what Donald and Walter expected of it. Jay Graydon was their last ditch effort -- it became the Jay Graydon solo by default. It came out pretty much the way they had in mind, though. Usually they'd put a band together for the rhythm sections based on the tune and the style of the musicians: 'These three guys will work together on this tune, let's put 'em together and try it.' Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn't quite work out, so you'd put together another rhythm date later with a different combination. But it wasn't like there were ten tunes to cut and you tried to cut five different bands on all ten, and then picked the best one. It sort of got blown all out of proportion by the times the rumors started spreading around 'Eighty-five bands tried that tune!'

BS: How were the duties of Gary Katz and yourself divided?
RN: It worked out pretty well. Once in a while I'd have to slam him against the wall, keep him in line. 'I'm not doing that! Kerrump!' But it's just one of those things that clicks. The musicians pretty much know what they want. They're in charge of that, I'm in charge of getting it on tape and making it sound great.

BS: And Gary Katz's specialty?
RN: Hiring and firing musicians. (Roger laughs) No, Gary's good at getting the most out of Donald when he's doing his vocals. The rest of the time it was pretty much Donald and Walter leading the musicians down the right path, and then Gary Katz more or less the executive producer.

BS: As Steely Dan's records grew more mature, the complaint began to be heard that they were too perfect, that the raw edges had been homogenized out. How do you feel about that?
RN: We achieved perfection and abandoned it on the second album all in one evening. I remember mixing "King of the World." Everyone else went home; Gary Katz fell asleep on the floor and Denny Dias and I stayed until seven in the morning, doing it in little sections, getting the balance between all the instruments perfect, then on to the next section, all of it perfect. Then we spliced the 2-track master sections together, which is how we used to mix down before we got the Necam digital mixing system. The next afternoon we came to the studio and played it back; the song started, and then the fade came. We went, 'Wait a minute. Did we leave something out? What's going on here?' And we played it back again and we had to really concentrate to realize the song was going by. You could hear everything, but you couldn't hear anything, like sonic wallpa-per- really strange. We ended up using the mix we'd done ten hours before which had more three-dimensionality to it.

BS: Tell us about Wendel, the drum machine you designed.
RN: We found that there were certain feels that we couldn't get out of real drummers -- they weren't steady enough. So we had to design something that would do it perfectly, but with some human feeling, the right amount of layback. Instead of just one high-hat sound that repeats machine-like over and over, we had sixteen different ones, so it had the inflections. Wendel can play exactly what the drummer plays -- if he plays a little early or a little hard, Wendel plays it a little early or a little hard. Play it once, Wendel memorizes the song, then you play it again and it repeats what it hears.

BS: What happened to the song "The Second Arrangement?"
RN: A maintenance guy at Soundworks accidentally erased it -- the best tune on the album. We tried to recut it but it never came out well, so it was never on the album. That track was impossible to get anyway.

BS: Weren't there any safety copies made?
RN: No, because we'd made up our minds a long time before that we'd never use a safety, and we didn't want to be tempted to, because it's a copy, and it wouldn't be as good as it could be.

BS: Was there any special outboard equipment that you used with Steely Dan?
RN: When we were recording, we didn't use anything. Instead of using eq on the board to change a drum sound, for instance, we'd bring in 52 different kick or snare drums to try to get the sound we want. We found it's better to make the adjustments at the instrument end rather than try to fix it with eq and things. So we'll try many different instrument and microphone combinations with minimum or no eq at all to get something that sounds right.

BS: So Fagen and Becker were methodical but quite conventional in recording. What about mixing?
RN: When we were mixing we'd use a lot of limiters, especially the dbx limiters because they're nice and fast and you can't hear them do anything. We'd use those on most of the vocals just to level things out. We'd try not to bounce tracks together. A lot of people I've worked with would take backgrounds, which might be on 5 or 6 tracks and then bounce them together onto 2 tracks or 1 track, just as a matter of course. Or they'd ping-pong all the guitars together or all the horns together just because it's easy that way: one knob for the guitars, one knob for the horns and so on. But bouncing is a generation down (in analog recordings) and if you listen you can hear the difference, no matter how good the machine is. And the ambience disappears when you ping-pong things together. So, we tried to keep all the instruments apart on the separate tracks they were recorded on, so that you get true hi-fi, with the least amount of generations before it gets to record.

BS: Did you and Elliot Scheiner work together on the mixes?
RN: The way it started was, when it came down to mixing "The Royal Scam," they wanted to do it at A&R Studios in New York. They wanted me to do it, but I figured it would be better if Elliot did because he works in that studio every day and he knows the board and the room and he knows what things sound like on those particular speakers. I came in on it later and we worked as a team. I thought that was better than doing it all myself just out of ego or something. Also, bringing in someone who hadn't heard the material before, with fresh ears, helps. The stuff came out great because Elliot was new to the songs and would work the knob while I, who had already been working on the recording of the songs for about a year, could contribute more on the balances and the overall sound. It's just different levels of concentration and we've found that things come out best that way..

BS: How about explaining how you got the nickname 'The Immortal'?
RN: That was just a series of things over the years. See, they were trying to kill me. I was working on a Johnny Winter session on the weekends, with Steve Barn all day and with Steely Dan all night, so they had me going 24 hours a day. They tried running me into the ground, but it didn't work. Then there was the time when we were working at Cherokee Studios when two of the tape machines were grounded improperly and I touched both of the machines and everything shorted out. The face plate on one of the machines was completely melted but I didn't feel a thing. They figured something weird was going on.

BS: It must have been those years you spent in that nuclear power plant.
RN: Right. Radiation poisoning.

http://granatino.com/sdresource/21nichols.htm

Roger 'The Immortal' Nichols RIP

Roger Nichols dies at 66
Engineer gave Steely Dan its distinctive sound. Roger Nichols worked with many other artists, but his association with Steely Dan produced six of his seven Grammy awards.

By Richard Cromelin
Special to The Times
April 13, 2011

Roger Nichols, the recording engineer who gave the music of Steely Dan the lustrous sheen that became the popular group's sonic signature, died Saturday at his Burbank home after a yearlong battle with pancreatic cancer, his family said. He was 66.

Nichols also worked extensively with the late country pop star John Denver. His long list of credits also includes work with Placido Domingo, Rickie Lee Jones, Roseanne Cash, Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys.

But it was the Steely Dan records — albums such as "Aja" and "Pretzel Logic" and hits including "Do It Again" and "Hey Nineteen" — that brought Nichols six of his seven Grammy awards and his stature as engineer-as-artist, in the tradition of Phil Spector's engineer Larry Levine and Jerry Wexler's Tom Dowd at Atlantic Records in the 1960s.

"The records that we did could not have been done without Roger," Steely Dan's record producer Gary Katz said Tuesday. "He was just maniacal about making the sound of the records be what we liked.... He always thought there was a better way to do it, and he would find a way to do what we needed to in ways that other people hadn't done yet.

"Yes, we were demanding, but he was demanding on himself. He wasn't just there to do tracks and mix records, he was there to improve the audio experience for everybody."

Nichols, who was born Sept. 22, 1944, in Oakland and grew up in Rancho Cucamonga, always showed a flair for science, building a 6-inch mirror telescope when he was 13. After graduating from Upland High School, he did some home recording with a guitarist whose parents were friends of the family — Frank Zappa.

Nichols went into nuclear engineering rather than record-making, working on the development of the San Onofre nuclear reactor. But as a music fan, he was so dissatisfied with the sound of the records he bought that he took a job at ABC/Dunhill Records in Los Angeles, with the goal of improving the quality of records.

That's where he encountered staff producer Katz and his novice songwriting team of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who were ready in 1971 to make demo recordings of the songs that would launch the career of Steely Dan.

In the liner notes of a reissue of their first album, Becker and Fagen recalled the first encounter.

"During our visits to the small recording studio adjoining the Dunhill offices, we were surprised and frightened to see a fellow dressed in an American flag shirt and matching pants, working behind the console from time to time. Later we found out that he drove a small yellow Lotus sports car which he referred to as 'Screaming Yellow Zonker.' He turned out to be engineer Roger Nichols."

They were a severe mismatch, the literary, jazz-steeped night-owl New Yorkers and the scuba-diving, airplane-piloting California kid, but their partnership clicked, turning out seven acclaimed albums during the 1970s that set a standard for musical sophistication and recording quality.

Nichols later worked on solo projects by both Becker and Fagen, and on the Steely Dan albums that ended a two-decade hiatus, including the 2001 Grammy album of the year "Two Against Nature."

Nichols invented and built a digital sampling drum machine in the late '70s called WENDELjr, and designed an array of plug-in devices for use in the recording studio. He also wrote columns for professional audio publications and conducted master classes in engineering.

He is survived by his wife, Connie; daughters Cimcie and Ashlee; sister Melinda Ryan and brother Jeffrey Nichols.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-roger-nichols-20110413,0,6145566.story

Gustave Doré

Tonight's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Falling
Is It Only The Moonlight?
My Friend The Sun (Family)
Down By The River
Roll Another Number (For The Road)

A fun night - enjoyed the Camerons Strongarm - and your company Tom.

Only a week left at the grindstone. Bliss!

Q and A with Van Dyke Parks

From last year...

Van Dyke Parks may be one of the few acts at MoogFest you won’t see on stage with a Moog synthesizer. But that doesn’t mean the legendary songwriter, composer, arranger, pianist and performer doesn’t have a unique history with the instrument. “If anyone should be playing MoogFest, it’s me,” Parks says, half-joking, from his home in California.

These days, Parks is most comfortable behind the keys of a grand piano, and for his MoogFest set, Friday night in Asheville, North Carolina, he will be joined by the group Clare & the Reasons. (They also play their own set before Parks’ slot.)

With Clare & the Reasons, Parks is out on the road playing songs like “Heroes and Villains” (from his collaboration with Brian Wilson, SMiLE), Clare’s “You Got Time,” and Parks’ own “The All Golden,” from Song Cycle.

In our interview below, Parks talks about his association with Moog, his influential first album, 1968’s Song Cycle, and working Joanna Newsom. Check out the audio clip of Parks’ Moog work from 1967.

What has been your connection with Moog?

I was one of maybe four people in Los Angeles who worked so hard to create a fluency in the language that Moog could produce. I was one of maybe four people who had a synthesizer in this town. The work I was doing in 1967, with the Ice Capades and AT&T commercials, I taught the machine how to say the words, “ice capades,” as the skater came close to the lens after an axel. I did that ad music because I was in an act of counter-culturalism. [Laughs] I wanted to prove that I could be commercial. So I did it with Moog and the fact is, I listen to it now, and when we go up to parking lots and, you see, the voice comes on and goes, [robot voice] “Please take the ticket,” and we make phone calls to business organizations and, rather than outsource, they’ll have a robot voice. This is all very ho-hum now, in the context of the age that we live in. But in 1967 and ’68, it was frontier activity, and it showed how hard I worked and how outside the box [I was] with Moog. That’s the truth.

Did you use a Moog on Song Cycle?

No, no. There was no Moog in my future work. The reason for that is, like the synthesizer, I saw so many people stampede to get their snouts in the trough; there was so much falderal, so much rush toward Moog, and later towards synthesizers, I decided not to go on the road more traveled. I believe that’s one of the reasons that my recorded work shows a real intense interest in analog, and the desire not to make a profit, but to put it all in the costs of the musicians who play. [Laughs] I’m famous for that. I pay for the music I make. But if I didn’t sacrifice for it, it would be worthless.

But Song Cycle is innovative in other ways – in the recording techniques, vocal effects and songwriting.

A book just came out on a series called 33 1/3 on Song Cycle. It really dishes the dirt in a great way. With Song Cycle, I am in awe of it as a collective gesture. I really think it’s a wonderful and beautiful piece of work. On the other hand, it’s safe to say, that I made every single possible mistake that could possibly be made by a person who wants to be sustained as a musician.

Why would you say that? Commercially?

Well, I think it was courageous, in fact. It was a hallmark of courage. I felt like I had a very short opportunity to show how much I wanted to learn. And I used it as an academic tool. I used the entire episode to learn, so that I could serve others in music, as well as to find some illumination. To me, Song Cycle turned on many lights and made it easy for other people to bore their way in.

It’s an incredible record.

I think it wanted to be beautiful. I wanted to make something that people would think was Faberge, a jewel of some sort, set well. I wanted people to love life because they had been through it. Although to tell you the truth, it’s filled with an almost psychotic despair on my part. I was recovering from some assassinations, on a presidential level, as well as the death of my own brother. Those things are reflected in the music. For example, in “The All Golden” you can hear the serenity, the funereal drum roll, reserved for the president of the United States, that accompanies the piece halfway through. So many of the influences of the record have to do with events of that time, as a good troubadour would want to record. I felt my obligation was to make a diary, a musical diary. That, in fact, ends up, in the long run, [to be] a monument of irrelevance. That’s what’s happened, it’s old news, but I’m glad that I went through it and I love it to this day. I never listen to it, of course, but I remember it. I have the music paper for it in my piano bench, it’s quite yellowed with age. I haven’t [yellowed with age], but it has.

People like Joanna Newsom were inspired by Song Cycle. Did working on the full orchestra arrangements for some of the songs on her album Ys remind you of Song Cycle?

Not really. I suppose in some way you could make a comparison or a commonality. I would say that it would be in that it was highly individual and reflective and more introspective than projected information. [Also] in its degree of fantasy – certainly on a very ambitious level of fantasy. In fact, I was deeply touched she asked me to do that record. We didn’t work together, per se. Arranging is a very monastic discipline. You can’t just say things are going to be purple and hum that. You don’t hum purple. You have to concentrate, you have to focus. I mean, I do. I have to be alone. It’s 180 from the extemporaneous process. I like both those worlds, by the way. I like tossing off a flip idea, with enthusiasm, sitting down and playing the piano. Things come from an unpremeditated group disorder. I like that a lot. My favorite rock and roll record, by the way, is [Music From] Big Pink. The Band plays a piece, but then they get away from the piece quickly. They each have a solo, a moment for a solo. They go absolutely ape-shit. Then, they go back to their modicum of decorum, when they get back to the chorus. In other words, they go nuts, they do all that, and then follow a very tightly-knit flight formation when they want to. So, you see, I love both those worlds: planning an event and letting it go. I like all of that. That’s far from your question. I enjoyed working for Joanna Newsom.

Tell us about the artists you’ve been working with lately, Clare & the Reasons, who will be playing with you at MoogFest.

Oh, I love these people so much. They are of a higher order, in terms of their humanity and grace. They are high people. The violinist from France, Olivier, masterful. Bob Hart, from New York. Then John Cottle is from London, he’s the cellist. I played with those people; they were so nice when I showed up. For the first time we tried this, up in Seattle, doing a show to see if we would get through it, they invited me to be with them on this. As a matter of fact, the reason I did end up coming [on tour] was that as much as anything, I just love these people. I love playing with them, they’re great people. It’s even fun being in a band with them. It’s a rough-and-tumble tour, it just gives us a chance to get together before we record. I’m going to have them do my next album with me in March. So this is kind of a chance for me to get my land legs.

What else are you going to do in Asheville?

I’m going to see Billy [Edd] Wheeler. He’s the titan of living songwriters who have a decidedly Appalachian stance – that Celtic thing that arrives from mountain men who precede satellite radio. And he’s one of them, and he’s incredible and I’m very excited that I’m going to see him. The last time that I saw Robert Moog was in Asheville, at a music festival, standing next to John Hartford. That’s an indelible memory, because John Hartford gave my son his reflections on bluegrass. My son was doing his high school dissertation. He had to write this paper on bluegrass. He called up John Hartford to speak with him. And [Hartford] did so for about half an hour, although he could not hold the phone, because he was so ill. He soon died. His wife held the phone. So when I look at John Hartford and Robert Moog standing there together, I think a lot about some wonderfully contributive people, and I’m very happy to come back to Asheville.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #102

Top Ten Bogart

In no particular order, of course...

Sidney Lumet RIP

Paul Newman, Sidney Lumet and Al Pacino

Sidney Lumet
Sidney Lumet, the American film director who died on April 9 aged 86, was such a frenetic worker that Paul Newman called him “the only man who could double-park outside a whore-house”.

A former actor and veteran of America’s “golden age” of television drama, Lumet directed more than 200 television plays in the 1950s, most of them transmitted live.

He went on to make some 40 feature films, establishing himself as a master of the grimy police procedural drama with such films as Serpico (1973), Prince Of The City (1980), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Q&A (1991).

These were notable for the authentic tawdriness of their settings; yellowing linoleum, strip-lighting, scratched institutional paint-work and row upon row of steel desks. No effort was spared to make characters unattractive. The cops had pot-bellies and dripped sweat; their faces were pasty and unshaven, their suits cheap and their shoes worn. The language was sleazy to fit.

The look might have suggested documentary, but a Lumet drama was invariably shaped to convey a moral message. He considered cinema the “last and only medium in which it is possible to tell a story of conscience outside the printed word” and his theme was cops-or-robbers; he was fascinated by the thin line that divides the policeman from the criminal, legal conduct from illegal.

He established his style with 12 Angry Men (1957), his first feature film and for many, his best. A heated drama of a rash jury won over to a not-guilty verdict by a lone dissenter, the film had outstanding acting shot with few camera movements and plentiful close-ups which Lumet considered “the very essence of cinema”.

This “verismo” gloss became Lumet’s trademark. “We are not doing documentary,” he said. “We are doing drama and everything that implies. Including fakery.”

Much of Lumet’s work flaunted the headline “based on a true story”. He went to great effort with the details of reality, but was prepared to distort facts in the cause of drama and was accused of sermonising, even of being a propagandist. He admitted that he was “essentially romantic” and that his work owed much to his background in the theatre. But what might have been obvious didacticism on stage might become, when backed with the army of cinematic devices, something close to propaganda.

He was particularly indignant that he should be thought of as “anti-cop”.

”I’m not,” he said. “Their lives are sheer hell, absolute hell. Cops like these movies because they’re honest”.

Sidney Lumet was born in Philadelphia on June 24 1924. His father, Baruch Lumet, was an actor and playwright who had small roles in his son’s films.

Sidney was a child actor, making his radio debut at four and his stage debut at five. He appeared alongside his father in several plays and at 16 played the lead role of Jesus in the Broadway production of Journey to Jerusalem by Maxwell Anderson.

Between engagements he was educated at the Professional Children’s School, New York and Columbia University.

During the Second World War Lumet served as a radar-repairman in South-East Asia and afterwards returned to acting, taking over from Marlon Brando in the Broadway run of A Flag Is Born.

From 1947 he turned his attention to directing. plays. Three years later he was hired as a television staff director by Columbia Broadcasting. After working on a number of adventure stories and a series entitled You Are There, for which he recreated great moments in history, he began to direct plays for CBS-TV’s Playhouse 90 and NBC-TV’s Kraft Television Theatre.

Among his successes were The Sacco and Vanzetti Story, a vindication of “the poor shoemaker and good fishpeddler” executed for murder in 1927, and a television version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.

The latter won Lumet an Emmy award. O’Neill’s widow was so impressed that she granted Lumet rights she controlled to the other plays of her husband and in 1962, Lumet made his fine film of O’Neill’s autobiographical tragedy, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, with Katherine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson.

In the 1960s he made several further filmed versions of plays, including Tennessee William’s Orpheus Descending (1960) and Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge (1962).

Lumet’s reputation as a cheap film-maker who came in on schedule ensured that he cantered on at a film a year, feeding mainly off adaptations of novels or non-fiction accounts. He was a reliable, workmanlike director, who occasionally enhanced the original material, as with his gripping version of Le Carre’s The Deadly Affair (1967).

Acting was always his strong-point. To convey the moral ambiguity of his characters, Lumet drew fine performances from the likes of Marlon Brando, Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, William Holden, Nick Nolte and Al Pacino.

Pacino was a particular favourite, giving bravura performances in Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon.

Both films were based on true stories, and both showed the best - and worst aspects - of Lumet’s rapid approach to his work. Serpico was a dramatised version of the story of Frank Serpico, a New York policeman, who went undercover as a “hippy-freak” and was ostracised for disclosing a massive web of police corruption.

Lumet, who had taken over the direction of the film when John Avildsen fell out with the producer Dino de Laurentis, brought the 130-minute film in under schedule in a little over ten weeks. It worked as a satire, and there was plenty of grit in the setting, and dialogue. But art was sacrificed in the cause of theatrical immediacy, and the film never captured the poisonous paranoia of Frank Serpico’s experience, the narrative ambled to accommodate Pacino’s performance and many scenes were so flat and badly-lit they ought to have been re-shot.

Dog Day Afternoon, again too long at 130 minutes, was “true story”, this time about a bungled bank robbery. For the first half it had a crazed, farcical tone true to life. The villains were as comic as they were threatening, unable to drive the getaway car, and the bank manager more obliging than frightened (“Let’s get you guys fixed up and on your way”). It transpired that Pacino’s character had undertaken the heist to pay for a sex-change operation for his male wife. Lumet then used this twist of human comedy as an opportunity for a great deal of incongruous debate about the prejudices faced by homosexuals. Dog Day Afternoon ended as a shaggy dog story.

Lumet abandoned authentic grit for Murder On the Orient Express (1974), making a plodding film of Agatha Christie ’s book, de-railed by its’ creaking stars. He proved too literal-minded for his version of Peter Shaeffer’s play Equus (1977), turning this pagan poem about a boy sexually obsessed with horses into a lecture on the roots of psychiatric disturbance.

The Wiz (1978) was a black musical version of The Wizard of Oz, set in New York. It was a flop and Lumet returned to cop movies with Prince Of The City (1981), a rambling story of one good policeman in a barrel of rotten ones, for which he used non-professional actors - a mistake for a man so dependent on manufactured drama. The Verdict (1982), with Paul Newman, a solid court-room drama, was an expose of medical and legal ethics.

Among the best of Lumet’s latter films were Q&A (1991) about a bad cop bought to book for “justifiable homicide” and Night Falls On Manhattan (1997) with New York beset by hundreds of bad cops and thousands of bent politicians. He also won praise for Before The Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), made 50 years after 12 Angry Men.

A short, trim man who favoured athletic footwear, Lumet rarely left New York. He energy was described by the producer Paul Graetz as “something that passes human comprehension”.

Sidney Lumet married four times and had two daughters. He is survived by his wife Mary Gimbel.