By Joe Klein

Today, in an email sent out to fans that signed up a few weeks ago to hear the first new Jackson 5 track from the upcoming release “I Want You Back! Unreleased Maters,” Motown Records announced that four more tracks were available for “preview” online.

This brings a total of five tracks now unveiled to the public, of a total of twelve that are on the new album, which will be released on November 10. The project is being produced and marketed by UNIVERSAL MUSIC ENTERPRISES, the division of the Universal Music Group that is responsible for repackaging and marketing of most of UMG’s back catalog product, including the Motown label.

In an exclusive story we broke online back in mid-September (weeks before the “official” press release about the new album), and in a subsequent article we posted online, we wrote about our friend Russ Terrana, the engineer who mixed these newly-discovered “lost tracks” of the Jackson 5 over a month-long period from the end of August until the end of September.

(***UPDATED 10/23/09*** A press release about the new J5 songs was issued by UME and hit the wires early today and appeared on the Reuters news service a short time later.)

We also published three blog posts about the project here on our own company blog over the last month. In those articles, we mentioned how Russ worked tirelessly and diligently in a state-of the-art digital recording facility in Scots Valley, California called ROCKER STUDIOS, owned by his good friend, RICK VIERRA. Russ and Rick employed a battery of digital tools and tricks to bring the 40 year-old analog audio master tapes back to life and recreate the very same sounds Russ achieved when mixing the original Jackson 5 hits forty years ago! The result is a collection of tracks that sound like clean, digitally re-mastered versions of J5 songs recorded and mixed back in 1970. But these tracks were, in fact, mixed down just last month!

Recreating the classic Motown “sound of the sixties” with such precision and accuracy is most definitely a feat to be marveled at, deserving of praise from the most experienced recording engineers, pop music historians and fans alike. That it was accomplished on the earliest recordings of the legendary Jackson brothers makes these new recordings that much more notable.

Of the tracks just made public, the song I’LL TRY YOU’LL TRY (MAYBE WE’LL ALL GET BY) is particularly worth a listen, as it features a truly “classic” Motown style and sound, eerily reminiscent of hits like I CAN’T GET NEXT TO YOU by The Temptations and the version of I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE recorded by Gladys Knight and The Pips. Russ mixed both of these classics as well back in the old Detroit Motown studios (before Motown moved their entire label operations and studios out to Hollywood in the early seventies).

Check out the sound of these two late sixties chart-toppers in the videos below, then listen to the new Jackson 5 track “I’ll Try You’ll Try” and you’ll hear the similarities! Of course the new J5 mixes perfectly emulate the sound of the early Jackson 5 hits. But by listening to these two other tracks, it becomes clear how Russ really did achieve a signature “Motown Sound” that carried over between artists and evolved through the years. The audio style and textures Russ molded in the sixties, seventies and eighties really did influence recorded pop music in many ways that few appreciate to this day!

You can hear the four new J5 tracks mixed by Russ online now, by clicking on the photo of the group at the top of this post, or click here to be taken directly to the page where you can preview the four new tracks and order the new album online.

As Motown’s chief recording engineer for over twenty years (up until the very end of Berry Gordy’s ownership of the label), Russ is credited for having mixed and recorded no less than an incredible 89 number one hit singles, hundreds of additional charted singles and many hundreds (if not thousands) more tracks from hundreds more Motown albums. This is a feat unequaled by any other pop music recording engineer in history, making Russ a true “living legend” in the history of pop music!

All of us at New Media Creative take our collective hats off to Russ Terrana! We plan to release an extensive follow-up article (or two) about about our gifted, old friend to coincide with the release of the new Jackson 5 album on November 10. So do stand by for that.

RUSS TERRANA AND RICK VIERRA IN ROCKER STUDIOS

Meanwhile, coming up next on the company blog, extensive coverage and commentary about last week’s Blogworld and New Media Expo and all the big new media and social networking news to emerge from that conference and the just-ended Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco. There’s so much to report that it’s taken us a couple of days just to gather all the information! Now that we’ve taken it all in, we’ll try to boil it all and make sense of it all here on the company blog over the next several days. As always, STAY TUNED!