Yesterday, the Recording Academy announced the recipients of this year's special merit awards, which will be presented at the Grammys in Los Angeles on February 8. David Bowie, Cream, Merle Haggard, Robert Johnson, Jessye Norman, Richard Pryor, and the Weavers will receive Lifetime Achievement Awards; Chris Blackwell, Owen Bradley and Al Schmitt will be honored with the Academy's nonperformer Trustees Award. Tom Dowd and Bell Labs /Western Electric have been named recipients of the Technical Grammy Award.

Congrats to all in this wildly diverse and meritorious bunch. Being the contrarian I am, I wanted to spotlight the career of arguably the least well-known of the bunch, ace engineer and producer Al Schmitt.

One of the most important recordists of this half-century, Al Schmitt has won fifteen Grammys for engineering pop, jazz, and rock over a still-vibrant 50-year career that has seen recording technology go from mono direct-to-disc, to today's megatrack digital effusion. Known for his magical microphone selection and placement, Schmitt has also produced important music and great records across the musical spectrum for David Benoit, George Benson, Jackson Browne, Sam Cooke, Duane Eddy, Hot Tuna, Al Jarreau, Jefferson Airplane, Hugo Montenegro, Diane Schuur, Neil Young, culminating in Ray Charles' '04 Genius Loves Company Grammy extravaganza.

Brooklyn-native Al Schmitt is literally a child of the studio: his uncle owned the first independent recording studio in New York City, Harry Schmitt's Recording, on West 46th St. Starting at the age of 6 in the late-'30s, young Al spent much of his free time observing the proceedings, cleaning patch cords, getting piano tips from Art Tatum, and meeting such notables as Bing Crosby, Orson Welles, and the Andrews Sisters.

Watching even big bands being recorded with only one microphone, Schmitt absorbed the niceties of mic balance at a time when it meant everything to the sound quality of a record. "They would move everybody around until they got the balance right, and then they made everybody take their shoes off because you could hear them stomping their feet. I would look out and see that some of the guys had holes in their socks," Schmitt recalls with a chuckle.

Schmitt served in the Navy for a couple of years in the late-'40s; after he got out in '50, his uncle arranged for him to apprentice at a small New York studio called Apex Recording, where Schmitt's mentor was the great Tom Dowd. Three months into his training - "when I was qualified, maybe, to do a voice-and-piano demo" - Schmitt was waiting at the studio on a Saturday for a "Mr. Mercer" to show up to record a demo. "The elevator doors opened up and all of these musicians started coming out. I thought, 'Oh, my God, something's wrong here.' I couldn't reach Tommy, and I couldn't reach my boss. This was no demo: it was the Duke Ellington Orchestra in to record for Mercer Records [owned by Duke's son Mercer, and Leonard Feather].