A record engineer’s sound of music – and laughter

Talk to Henry “Hank” Cattaneo, and you will find the conversation soon dissolving into laughter – his and yours. A sound engineer, record producer and production manager who built Altel Sound Systems into a family business with 22 employees, Cattaneo worked for and with some of the greatest voices of the 20th century – including “The Voice,” as Frank Sinatra was known. Needless to say, Cattaneo has some rollicking stories to tell – from winking at Luciano Pavarotti (a conducting cue) to keeping a return airline ticket in his pocket, in case the perfectionistic Paul Anka wanted to fire (and rehire him) – again.  

But it’s not just that Cattaneo has a writer’s eye for detail in storytelling. He’s got the sound man’s ear for mimicry, perfectly capturing Pavarotti’s soft speaking voice, the counterpoint to his clarion tenor. Cattaneo’s has been a career of wine, song and great food and travel but most important, respectful professional relationships that became, in many instances, trusted friendships, he said. And it began with a case of the adage “when one door closes, another opens.” 

His way 

Cattaneo wanted to make sure the reader knows that “I never had a problem getting a seat at Columbia University.” That’s because his clothes reeked of diesel fuel, so there was plenty of space around him. 

Born and raised in the Bronx through high school, when his family moved to Yonkers, Cattaneo was a diesel mechanic for his father, a superintendent in a mechanical shop. The time was 1948, and Cattaneo was making $250 a week – or more than $3,100 in today’s money – while attending Columbia at night in the hope of becoming an architect. But his fifth year of study required him to switch to daytime classes, which he could not afford to do. 

Goodbye, architecture. Hello, sound. 

“I fell in love with…high fidelity, which was becoming a big thing,” he recalled. The reproduction of a sound or an image that is close in quality to the original is still a big thing, with Spotify and other music streaming services offering a hi-fi tier to listeners. Cattaneo studied sound and went to work for a small company on Tuckahoe Road for which he fabricated and installed commercial sound equipment. This led to a job working for Phil Ramone and Donald Frey, who were among the partners at A & R Recording Inc. Co-founder Ramone – who would produce everyone from Bono to Aretha Franklin to Barbra Streisand – “was a mentor to me,” Cattaneo said. “Even though by then I knew a lot about sound, he guided me through the theatrical side of the business.” 

In a theatrical setting, Cattaneo said, a singer needs to hear the accompaniment just as a vocalist would using a headset in a recording studio.  

“It’s tough to replicate the sound of a studio in live performance,” he added. “You have to use monitors.” 

Soon he was doing sound for John Gary, a baritone-tenor whose tonal quality and large range graced movies, Broadway and his own prime-time TV series; the powerhouse duo Steve and Eydie, husband-and-wife Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé; and Paul Anka, the singer, composer and lyricist whose songs would range from the 1950s hit “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” to the Michael Jackson collaboration “This Is It” to the lyrics for what is perhaps the signature Sinatra song, “My Way.” 

In the 1960s, Cattaneo did the sound for Anka in his Copacabana engagement, no doubt a challenge as waiters at the famed Manhattan nightclub were known to turn the sound off and on, while owner Jules Podell would rap his gold ring on a table. Soon Anka was insisting Cattaneo travel on the road with him as his sound man. 

He remembered Anka as “very demanding technically, a lovely person offstage and generous in many ways but difficult.” While others might have enjoyed downtime during a three-week stint at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Anka was discontented with days off and found reasons for extra rehearsals and sound checks. Indeed, Cattaneo would keep a return airline ticket in his pocket as Anka fired and rehired him five times. Cattaneo didn’t mind:  Each time he returned, it cost Anka an extra $100 a day. 

Liza Minnelli, the Oscar-winning singer and actress (“Cabaret”) and daughter of the legendary Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, was another performer who wanted Cattaneo to do her sound on the road. He remembered that when he told her members of his staff would accompany her instead on her first European tour, “she started to cry. Big crocodile tears started to flow, sucked me right in.” 

When Cattaneo acquiesced, she responded “with a big grin. She was very sweet, very helpful but demanding when it came to sound.” 

Others were more accommodating. The “gracious” Tony Bennett – whose 70-year career spanned Mitch Miller to Lady Gaga, with a side gig, at the suggestion of friend Sinatra, as a watercolorist – accepted two of Cattaneo’s sound men, ultimately hiring them away from his company. But singer-actress Joey Heatherton would call at 3 a.m. to discuss sound. The late nights – or early mornings – and weeks on the road were a bit much for Cattaneo’s wife, Clara, with whom he has a son, a lawyer who ultimately took over the business with Andrew Musci, the son of Cattaneo’s business partner, Lawrence Musci; and a daughter who is a nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  

There was one performer for whom Clara made an exception – Sinatra, with whom Cattaneo began working in the late 1970s and ’80s at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. 

“He had a gift that was very special,” Cattaneo recalled. “His timing, his breath control, his pitch were immaculate. He could be lyrical, sentimental, mystical. He could dance with music. Few people could do that. I loved him. I was just a fan.” 

For the first two years of their professional relationship, the two were strictly employer and employee. But one day after a show, Sinatra – who had a reputation for arm’s length politesse – asked Cattaneo, “Where are we going to eat?” Ultimately, Cattaneo became Sinatra’s production manager and friend, getting along well with members of what he called Sinatra’s “gifted” family, including Frank Jr., who like older sister Nancy followed in their father’s musical footsteps. Cattaneo said he bonded with Frank Jr. – a singer, songwriter and conductor acclaimed for his command of the popular music canon known as the Great American Songbook – over the sound man’s many years in the New York National Guard, where he rose to the rank of command sergeant major (CSM). 

O ‘solo’ mio 

Cattaneo’s relationship with Sinatra would open other doors. During the Reagan Administration, First Lady Nancy Reagan asked Sinatra if Cattaneo would help set up the entertainment at the White House. He would be there for many a special performance.   

His role as co-producer on Sinatra’s 1993 album “Duets” – in which the singer joined fellow superstars on tracks that were recorded individually – led to his spending “three glorious days” at Pavarotti’s villa in Pesaro, Italy, on the Adriatic Sea. The two had met when Pavarotti joined Sinatra, tenor Placido Domingo and soprano Montserrat Caballé for a 1981 Radio City Music Hall benefit for Sloan Kettering and gave a solo concert at Eisenhower Hall Theatre at West Point. In Italy, Cattaneo’s assignment was to get the larger-than-life tenor to record his vocal track of “My Way” for his “duet” with Sinatra.  

It was easier said than done as much time was spent with good wine, good food and good company. When Cattaneo finally got Pavarotti into the makeshift studio in his bedroom, the singer wanted him to cue him without using his hands. So Cattaneo would wink on the fourth beat. He also tried to get Pavarotti to improve his pronunciation of the word “mention” in the song’s lyric, “Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.”  

“Here’s a Bronx boy telling an Italian kid how to pronounce an English word,” Cattaneo remembered of a word that kept coming out “men shoon.”  

Finally, he told Pavarotti he would clean it up in postproduction, but he never did, because, he said, it sounded so charming. Those three days, he said, were “a joy of my life.” 

Regrets? Cattaneo may have had a few, but then again, too few to mention to us. He said he has seen the challenging side of the music business, too, but prefers, “to keep it light,” in the words of advice Sinatra gave him as they “breakfasted” one late afternoon in Greece.  

At present, he has no plans for a memoir and while he served as a consultant on rocker Mark Tremonti’s 2022 Sinatra covers album to raise money for the National Down Syndrome Society, he does not listen to the unsolicited music he’s sent. 

“If I’m not getting paid to listen, I’m not going to listen,” he said with a laugh. “After all, it’s my job.”