The Best Musician on the Manhattan Project

The program to research and develop the atomic bomb wasn't called "The Manhattan Project" for nothing; much of the early work to build a nuclear weapon was done right here in New York City. The Times is running a cute atomic travelogue today.

That gives me an excuse to point back to my favorite character from New York's nuclear age, Tom Dowd. It's safe to say that, of all the people who helped build the first atomic bomb, Tom Dowd was the only one to make records with
Eric Clapton, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, and the Allman Brothers Band. Here's a snippet from the obituary I wrote for him, back in 2002.

Dowd grew up in Manhattan, the son of a singer and a theater producer. He studied the violin, the piano and the tuba. But he wanted to become an engineer.

After graduating from a science high school program at 16, he got a night job at the Columbia University physics department while he took classes at City College of New York.
By helping run the cyclotron – the machine that speeds up charged atomic particles – Dowd became involved in the nascent American effort to build an atomic bomb – the Manhattan Project.

After the war, Dowd couldn't get a job as a physicist; his work at Columbia and the clandestine atomic research facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico, remained a secret. So he turned to music for work.

He became a recording engineer in 1947 – and quickly developed a name as a technical mastermind as he worked with such jazz giants as Dizzy
Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

"Having worked with such sophisticated electronic equipment (in the Manhattan Project), and being musically sensitive, recording was child's play," Dowd told Mix magazine.

A longer Dowd bio is here. And there's a sweet documentary about the man, Tom Dowd and the Language of Music, that includes much of his Manhattan Project history – and a live remix of "Layla," straight from the master tapes.