Documentary profiles legendary recording engineer Tom Dowd 
Documentary profiles legendary recording engineer Tom Dowd
KENNETH TURAN
Los Angeles Times
HOLLYWOOD - It's called "Tom Dowd & the Language of Music," but "Tom Dowd Invents the Language of Music" might be a more accurate title. That's how significant and influential the career of this unsung savant has been. If you care about the popular music of the past 50 years, this is a documentary you'll want to see.
Dowd is not as well-known as he deserves to be because he was a studio recording engineer, one of those rarely celebrated individuals who sit behind the board and make sure the music being played gets recorded the way it sounds. Ordinarily, Eric Clapton says in the film's opening section, "I'm not interested in guys like this."
But by the time Clapton and Dowd finished collaborating, recording work by Cream and Derek & the Dominoes (including the classic "Layla"), the guitarist had a different story to tell: "The quality of success of those records could be laid at his door. He inspired confidence."
Not just for Clapton, and not just for rock musicians. Dowd was a key figure in so many jazz, soul, rhythm and blues as well as rock artists' professional lives that the names almost don't fit on a page: Ray Charles, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Booker T and the MGs, the Drifters, the Coasters, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd.
As revealed in Mark Moormann's enlightening documentary, which delighted viewers at both Sundance and Toronto, Dowd never got a swelled head despite his accomplishments. "The most positive human being you'll ever meet" in the words of producer Phil Ramone, Dowd comes across as good-humored as the day is long.
Moorman, whose debut documentary this is, tells Dowd's story through a combination of talking-head interviews, video clips from performances and recording studios and an extended dialogue with Dowd himself, who saw an early cut of this seven-years-in-the-making film just a week before he died in October 2002.
If there is one moment in "The Language of Music" that will thrill old rock fans, it's watching Dowd, his fluid hands moving with a surgeon's grace, remix for the film's benefit the 24-track sub-master of "Layla," isolating and analyzing the guitar solos of both Clapton and Duane Allman. To hear Dowd and watch him is to understand how, as one grateful musician put it, this gentle wizard "brings the best out without pushing too hard."