Speaker 1: West Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. Wait a minute,
Speaker 1: is that a d X seven.
Speaker 2: That is a I know chorus patch on my montage?
Speaker 1: Okay, we got it.
Speaker 3: Nice, Nice, ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to another episode of
Speaker 3: West Love Supreme. I don't know Steve and why we
Speaker 3: might need another superlative, like, you know, like James Brown
Speaker 3: has the famous Flames. I think we should be like
Speaker 3: the legendary Supreme or you know, something some even more exciting. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, because I feel like every episode has yet
Speaker 3: another kind of bucket list that we didn't know that
Speaker 3: we wanted to check off. Steve, I feel like this
Speaker 3: is going to be the Yeah, this is the Steve
Speaker 3: MVP episode. Not to put any pressure on.
Speaker 4: You, I've handled some episodes. I think I had one
Speaker 4: of the top five episodes of last year if you
Speaker 4: want to check the numbers.
Speaker 3: Like this, this is sort of like, you know, we
Speaker 3: had expectations for Lebron to be the guy back when
Speaker 3: in high school and.
Speaker 4: All right, well, I want you to do your intro.
Speaker 4: But but yeah, I was just telling honestly before the
Speaker 4: before we started the show, was telling Bob and Sonny
Speaker 4: that I do have a radio show on WKCR, Columbia
Speaker 4: University's radio station, and the show that we do is
Speaker 4: about jazz labels, and each episode we cover a different label,
Speaker 4: and quite recently a couple months ago, we did a
Speaker 4: three hour episode about tappan Zee Records, which is Bob's
Speaker 4: label under Columbia in the late seventies and eighties and
Speaker 4: into the nineties, I believe, well as part of Warner
Speaker 4: But Tappansz went on for a bit, and I'm dying
Speaker 4: to talk directly to the man who started the label
Speaker 4: and who was it was such an influential label and
Speaker 4: it's getting a little lost. So I want to refresh
Speaker 4: our listeners with some like it said in like twenty episodes.
Speaker 3: No, this is amazing, This is amazing. I might I
Speaker 3: might just skip the intro anyway. Fante laya, you guys cool?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're good.
Speaker 1: I'm living.
Speaker 4: What's going on?
Speaker 5: Man?
Speaker 2: Was that? So?
Speaker 3: I will basically say that our guest today, of course,
Speaker 3: is a legendary jazz musician, but I don't think we
Speaker 3: could just reduce him to jazz. Yeah, his music is smooth,
Speaker 3: but we dare not call him smooth jazz. His music
Speaker 3: is hip hop, but you know, we can't call him
Speaker 3: hip hop. But I think probably the most unique character
Speaker 3: trait of our guest today is probably my or not
Speaker 3: my our inability to pinpoint what is he exactly? Is
Speaker 3: he an avant garde artist, Is he a musical provocateur?
Speaker 3: Is he the godfather smooth jazz?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I will say that probably when the smoke clears and
Speaker 3: we start taking a toll of the artists that fall
Speaker 3: under the jazz umbrella, and there's many categories under that,
Speaker 3: I will say that as far as the scope of
Speaker 3: hip hop, and yes, like we kind of come from
Speaker 3: a hip hop scope because of our age and whatnot,
Speaker 3: we get to know a lot of these artists through
Speaker 3: the power of sampling, I will say that our guest
Speaker 3: is probably at the top of the list.
Speaker 1: Like I think, hands down he's the.
Speaker 3: King of textures, which is something that you don't necessarily
Speaker 3: hear someone describe another musician, but listening under a hip
Speaker 3: hop context, texture means everything. I also think that our
Speaker 3: guest is probably one of the kings of the perfect
Speaker 3: four bar capture, the ability to transform your new creation
Speaker 3: into something else.
Speaker 1: That's just how adventures he is cut to cut to
Speaker 1: cut to cut, from album to album.
Speaker 3: And I will say that probably one of the best
Speaker 3: engineered artists under the contemporary jazz umbrella, just as sound
Speaker 3: speaks to probably everyone in my generation and beyond, because
Speaker 3: of course, a lot of his music is the foundation
Speaker 3: for some of the best hip hop that I've ever known,
Speaker 3: that we've ever known. And you the listener, you've heard
Speaker 3: his music, whether you knew it or not. He is,
Speaker 3: you know, multi nominated, underappreciated, loved, worship, always in demand,
Speaker 3: an absolute legend. This is the Bob James episode of
Speaker 3: Quest Love Supreme. Finally, Man, Yes.
Speaker 2: And I hope that was recorded so I can put.
Speaker 3: I cut it in half, like because I could really, yeah,
Speaker 3: take this for eighteen minutes.
Speaker 4: You mentioned the best engineered. Did you mean engineered or
Speaker 4: did you mean like him engineering at a concept? I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm trying to bring up the name Joe Jorgenson, who
Speaker 4: was George.
Speaker 3: Organ and Rudy Like for me, just it's the perfect
Speaker 3: texture of compression and natural sounds to me that I
Speaker 3: think is what attracts my generation to his music, because
Speaker 3: you know, like there's two ways to take in music.
Speaker 3: You know, we come from a generation where you go digging,
Speaker 3: you take the records home. And I mean, with the
Speaker 3: notable exception of Primo and Dyla, I don't know many
Speaker 3: hip hop producers that actually listen and absorb the records,
Speaker 3: like listen to it over and over and over again
Speaker 3: until they actually absorb it. And you know, because a
Speaker 3: lot of us just skip put it on forty five
Speaker 3: no no, no oh, that's something you know you skip around.
Speaker 3: But to me is one of some of the best
Speaker 3: engineered music for the purpose of sampling. But you know, again,
Speaker 3: it's like you can listen to his music under different scopes,
Speaker 3: not just like from a sampling perspective. But that's the
Speaker 3: thing you can't category.
Speaker 4: Is it one more thing before? Maybe we let the
Speaker 4: guests speak.
Speaker 1: Right, Let's have a whole episode where he just doesn't
Speaker 1: good thing.
Speaker 4: You watch Keyboard Bob, I've smiling.
Speaker 2: I'll just sit here and listen.
Speaker 4: So I think the word that you were missing in
Speaker 4: your intro and why it's so hard to describe what
Speaker 4: he did and what he does is fusion. I think
Speaker 4: that what he did was basically just another version of
Speaker 4: fusion jazz.
Speaker 3: But I feel like any description for jazz artist is
Speaker 3: almost like a four letter word.
Speaker 4: Fusion. You know is includes obviously whatever many different things
Speaker 4: that are being fused.
Speaker 3: Well, let's ask him, Bob James, welcome to the show. Finally,
Speaker 3: nineteen minutes later. You know, I know we do it
Speaker 3: if all is said and done and without sort of
Speaker 3: you know, oftentimes artists will and I'm guilty of it,
Speaker 3: like sort of ducking and dodging the accolades like what
Speaker 3: would you like us to know you as? And describing
Speaker 3: your artistry.
Speaker 6: I don't know that I'd probably be the right person
Speaker 6: because so busy doing it, and I never could stay
Speaker 6: in one category for very long. Maybe I was just
Speaker 6: too restless or something. But at one point earlier in
Speaker 6: my career, my wife advised me that we were having
Speaker 6: a conversation about I thought I was spreading myself too
Speaker 6: thin and I should focus more on one thing and
Speaker 6: make up my mind whether I want to be in
Speaker 6: a ranger or a pianist in what genre classical jazz
Speaker 6: or whatever, And she said, stop worrying about it, just
Speaker 6: do what you do, and that maybe what sets you
Speaker 6: apart or makes you different from an other artist is
Speaker 6: that you do a lot of stuff. And so I've
Speaker 6: kind of stayed with that and not attempted to categorize
Speaker 6: myself or go too far into one direction, because I
Speaker 6: love the variety and the challenge of it. Right now,
Speaker 6: trying to meet hip hop head on, rather than have
Speaker 6: it happen off to the side, whether they take a
Speaker 6: chunk of me while I'm not there in the room
Speaker 6: to be able to defend myself, it might be good
Speaker 6: to get in there and say, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 6: wait a minute, before you chop me up, let's see
Speaker 6: if we just go from beginning.
Speaker 3: To end every now, Okay, So Bob James does a
Speaker 3: lot of stuff.
Speaker 4: The reason why said fusion though, Bob, is because I
Speaker 4: feel like Tapanzee Records and a lot of what you've
Speaker 4: done in your career was not only fusing different types
Speaker 4: of music together, but also really incorporating the place and
Speaker 4: the time period into your music. Like New York City
Speaker 4: in the late seventies and early eighties, and and you know,
Speaker 4: the city and the time period did that play a
Speaker 4: lot into the music.
Speaker 6: I absolutely always have thought that one of the things
Speaker 6: about jazz is it's improvised, so you're giving your feeling
Speaker 6: right at that moment, on that day in that city,
Speaker 6: wherever you are that it definitely does represent the time
Speaker 6: period of what's going on. It should anyway, if we're
Speaker 6: being honest, we're reflecting our time, and that changes. So
Speaker 6: I've resisted when people try to make a definition of
Speaker 6: what jazz is or because it changes. It changed along
Speaker 6: with everything else that's going on around it.
Speaker 4: What was your first musical memory.
Speaker 6: Getting fired from being pianist at a tap dance class
Speaker 6: in my hometown.
Speaker 2: I think I was twelve or something like that.
Speaker 6: And I couldn't keep the beat, so the tap dancers
Speaker 6: were tripping and finally the well, actually, the reason why
Speaker 6: I got hired in the first place is I think
Speaker 6: I was the only pianist in the town that they
Speaker 6: could use to play for this tap dance class. I
Speaker 6: guess it's my earliest memory of trying to learn what
Speaker 6: keeping the beat met.
Speaker 3: Still trying who would have the gumption to fire a
Speaker 3: twelve year old?
Speaker 6: Yeah, that was pretty cold, and I don't exactly remember that,
Speaker 6: but I may have defined that too harshly and they
Speaker 6: may have.
Speaker 2: I actually told me to go home to my mom.
Speaker 1: Passive aggressive firing, Okay.
Speaker 2: You couldn't keep up? Was it with a simple kickball?
Speaker 2: Change of it all. Is it one of those kind
Speaker 2: of classes of beginners. I was just curious. I just
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I'm a Heines girl.
Speaker 4: Was there music around your house growing up?
Speaker 2: Not a whole lot.
Speaker 6: My father was a lawyer, and I lived in a
Speaker 6: small town of Missouri where what I did here was
Speaker 6: mostly country music, and my parents didn't really have that
Speaker 6: many records that came close to jazz either. I started
Speaker 6: hearing a little bit and getting intrigued high school baby,
Speaker 6: and I remember kind of liking that, feeling that it
Speaker 6: was improvised, as opposed to what I perceived classical music
Speaker 6: being too much practicing, and jazz represented this at that time,
Speaker 6: escape from practicing, so because you could just make it
Speaker 6: up anything that came into your head. And it's only
Speaker 6: been in more recent years that I decided that practicing,
Speaker 6: even somewhere in the relationship to jazz was a good
Speaker 6: thing and not a bad thing.
Speaker 4: So around what year was that when you discovered jazz.
Speaker 6: In the nineteen fifties, in the mid nineteen fifties, and
Speaker 6: I do remember that that was pretty much the highlight
Speaker 6: of the West Coast jazz because I do remember Chet Baker,
Speaker 6: Jerry Mulligan, Dave bru Beck, those names formed or the
Speaker 6: style of it, the West Coast style was intriguing to me.
Speaker 6: Only in college did I kind of get more tried
Speaker 6: to get more deep.
Speaker 4: I know, there's this famous story of was it a
Speaker 4: town show or something some kind of competition where the
Speaker 4: bands were being judged by Henry Mancini and Quincy Jones,
Speaker 4: And how.
Speaker 6: About that for a panel to be judging. Yeah, it
Speaker 6: was very pivotal time in my life. I was at
Speaker 6: that time, I just graduated from the University of Michigan,
Speaker 6: and there was a kind of big avant garde group
Speaker 6: of musicians that I became associated with because they needed
Speaker 6: performers who were willing to be really daring and do
Speaker 6: crazy things. That the avant garde world was really out
Speaker 6: at that time, and so I was incorporating some of
Speaker 6: those avant garde things into my jazz trio. And I
Speaker 6: decided to take the trio down to Notre Dame where
Speaker 6: this jazz festival was being held, and it was very conventional.
Speaker 6: We were expected to play bebop and I kind of
Speaker 6: deliberately went up against that and started playing some crazy
Speaker 6: stuff along with some bebop and Quincy's here especially. I
Speaker 6: kind of don't remember whether Henry MENSI he was into
Speaker 6: what we did, but Quincy definitely was, and they put
Speaker 6: a smile on his face. Gave me a chance to
Speaker 6: meet him, and we kind of prevailed at that in
Speaker 6: the Winter Circle at the festival, and Quincy signed me
Speaker 6: to record deal. So gave me confidence to move to
Speaker 6: New York and go into the jazz business.
Speaker 2: Did you been to school? Yep.
Speaker 6: I got a master's degree in composition, mostly classical training.
Speaker 6: My jazz training was extracurricular. I'd go into Detroit from
Speaker 6: ann Arburn, look around for a place to sit in.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And so Quincy signed you to was it Mercury?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 6: And we recorded the album in Chicago. He was living there,
Speaker 6: I think at that time.
Speaker 2: And that's where he was. The Mercury was based in Chicago.
Speaker 4: And so this is like the early sixties, right, Yes.
Speaker 2: Sixty three, sixty two, sixty two.
Speaker 4: Sixty three, And so I know that at the end
Speaker 4: of this small part of the conversation, Quincy eventually recommends
Speaker 4: you or lead you to Creed Taylor, and that gets
Speaker 4: you to CTI. But what happens in between there in
Speaker 4: the mid sixties.
Speaker 6: Another big pivotal time was when I got the job
Speaker 6: with Saravon, her music director of Pianist nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 6: I had learned that her pianist ron L Bright had
Speaker 6: left and she was looking around, and indirectly Quincy was
Speaker 6: involved in that too, because where I learned that Sarah
Speaker 6: was looking for pianists was at this music copy service
Speaker 6: in Manhattan where I used to hang out and watch
Speaker 6: all the arrangers come in with their charts that music
Speaker 6: needed to be copied. This was before the computer era,
Speaker 6: where the copyists were still copying out departs for the
Speaker 6: musicians in ink. So anyway, uh, yeah, I learned about
Speaker 6: this possible job. And I had actually met Sarah very
Speaker 6: briefly once when I was playing with Maiden Ferguson's band
Speaker 6: at Bergland in New York, and Sarah came in to
Speaker 6: the club and made her ask her to come up
Speaker 6: to sing, and of course she didn't have any arrangements
Speaker 6: with her, so she couldn't do anything with a big band.
Speaker 6: And that's when my nerves kicked in because the pianist
Speaker 6: always kind of gets the responsibility to have to play,
Speaker 6: and once once she calls out a song, you better
Speaker 6: know it, because she wouldn't have come in with any music,
Speaker 6: even for the pianist. I got really, really lucky that
Speaker 6: that night because she said, do you know the Sweetest Sounds?
Speaker 6: And I was able to say fairly quickly, yeah, well
Speaker 6: key this in the jargon of that time. Lets the
Speaker 6: person who asks you about it know that you're that
Speaker 6: you're prepared.
Speaker 2: And at that time, there.
Speaker 6: Was a Broadway musical that had just opened up, and
Speaker 6: the Sweetest Sounds was one of the songs in that musical.
Speaker 6: It was a brand new song by Richard Rodgers. But anyway,
Speaker 6: I was kind of a fan of musical theater, and
Speaker 6: it's just complete coincidence that I knew this song just barely.
Speaker 6: Shoe Sarah was one of the first cover artists sing
Speaker 6: it out of the Broadway show, and so.
Speaker 2: It made an impression on her. And it was at
Speaker 2: least a year or two.
Speaker 6: After that that I responded when she was looking for
Speaker 6: a pianist, and she remembered that night and I got
Speaker 6: to John, I have.
Speaker 3: To ask a real amateur jazz question. Now, you know,
Speaker 3: my tenure in school was like in the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 3: so of course I'm in a generation that grew up
Speaker 3: with having access to what they would call a fake book.
Speaker 3: Was there any sort of cheat sheety fake books of
Speaker 3: that level back in well, you know those songs are
Speaker 3: also being written in real time, But how does a
Speaker 3: musician learn these repertoires, like you would just have to
Speaker 3: go to the store and just buy all the sheet
Speaker 3: music to everything? Or were their fake books out back then?
Speaker 6: Yeah, in my memory, there were fake books that kept
Speaker 6: getting bigger as a as a tool. You know, we
Speaker 6: have it in our phone. We could look up atty Saw.
Speaker 6: I mean, the similar kind of a fake book thing
Speaker 6: that we could do. But at that time, I'm reasonably
Speaker 6: sure that this song was so new that it wouldn't
Speaker 6: have been in a fake book anyway, because you jok
Speaker 6: them out. And in Maynard's band, the only thing I
Speaker 6: would have had on the piano was his charts that
Speaker 6: I was playing with him, so that when she came
Speaker 6: in unannounced and surprised that if I hadn't known, that
Speaker 6: song might have changed my life and I probably wouldn't
Speaker 6: have gotten the gig later.
Speaker 3: I see now every time we have a jazz artist
Speaker 3: on the show, the first thing they want to do
Speaker 3: is sort of dispel not only dispel the myth, but
Speaker 3: sort of dispel it in a kind of a stick
Speaker 3: to a pinataway. Now, in general, if you're moving to
Speaker 3: New York City looking to make a living playing this music,
Speaker 3: jazz in particular, you pretty much have to be a
Speaker 3: wizard at reading music.
Speaker 1: Correct.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say you have to what's that?
Speaker 1: What y'all?
Speaker 6: Well, you know, there were two different approaches to it.
Speaker 6: In my case, I think I was pretty clearly thinking
Speaker 6: that the more trending you had, the better, and that
Speaker 6: just meant it increased your odds of getting a gig.
Speaker 6: Some of the gigs were not necessarily going to be
Speaker 6: a jazz gig. You might get a gig playing for
Speaker 6: wedding or whatever, and certain kind of gigs, if you
Speaker 6: couldn't read, you wouldn't get that gig, But certain jazz gigs,
Speaker 6: it didn't make any difference whether you read or not,
Speaker 6: because we all know that the greats that were not readers,
Speaker 6: And that's just a particular way. And I felt also
Speaker 6: to happen for me with Greed Taylor, he was a
Speaker 6: very much his style with his label, had a lot
Speaker 6: of production values and he was adding strings and woodwinds
Speaker 6: and various things to start out with a basic jazz
Speaker 6: group and then give it the same kind of production
Speaker 6: details that pop artists had. So he needed arranger to
Speaker 6: do that, and it turned out that he he learned
Speaker 6: that I was qualified to do it after having been
Speaker 6: introduced to him by Quincy. So I got that job
Speaker 6: because of my training, and it helped me get the job.
Speaker 3: All right, let's take value of the shadows, which maybe
Speaker 3: our audience might note that as a group homes the
Speaker 3: realness now value of shadows, which has so much like
Speaker 3: stop on a dime, you know, just like all this
Speaker 3: arrangement stuff. So might I believe, like Steve gadd or
Speaker 3: it's just mohammet, we're giving these charts and knew exactly
Speaker 3: when the like the starts and stops were because I'm
Speaker 3: imagining that you guys can't live in a studio like
Speaker 3: I come from a place where like I've written complete
Speaker 3: albums inside the studio, whereas like I'm assuming that jazz
Speaker 3: musicians have to have this stuff prepared ahead of time.
Speaker 3: You just go to studio and you knock it out
Speaker 3: real quick. You don't waste time doing fifteen takes twenty
Speaker 3: takes or whatnot, So like, do they just study the
Speaker 3: music or do you give him a cassette the arrangement
Speaker 3: ahead of time and they just committed to memory.
Speaker 6: It was all variations of that over many years. You
Speaker 6: mentioned Idris Muhammad in my memory of working with Idris.
Speaker 6: It's been a long time, but Idris may have been
Speaker 6: able to read some simple chart, but he was not
Speaker 6: what we would call reader, And so I was going
Speaker 6: to hire Adrise. I wouldn't put a big complicated chart
Speaker 6: in front of him because even if he did, it
Speaker 6: would change his approach to playing, and what I wanted
Speaker 6: from him was his his own own, loose, non obedient,
Speaker 6: reading a chart kind of style. So in some cases
Speaker 6: we were deliberately trying to move away from a kind
Speaker 6: of written approach to the rhythm section at the basic tracks,
Speaker 6: because we had started during that era of overdubbing and
Speaker 6: not having everybody in the room at the same time.
Speaker 6: So for the most part, most of those CTI records,
Speaker 6: we would record the rhythm section first and the production
Speaker 6: part of it would come afterwards. So I could work
Speaker 6: with two different kind of musicians. I could go in
Speaker 6: on the rhythm section date and do a very loose
Speaker 6: with minimum kind of chart, and then once I had
Speaker 6: that basic track, I'd take that home and score the
Speaker 6: more complex stuff or the stuff for the larger orchestra.
Speaker 2: And so I guess we did it both ways.
Speaker 6: And for a piece like Value of the Shadows or
Speaker 6: Night on Maull Mountain, some of those things that were
Speaker 6: adaptations of classical music, it definitely required a chart and
Speaker 6: a musician that could read, and I hired them on
Speaker 6: the basis of that. And it wasn't categorical, because the
Speaker 6: next day I might want to do something that was
Speaker 6: totally loose and just play some blues or whatever, and
Speaker 6: then reading would take that music in the wrong direction.
Speaker 1: Got it?
Speaker 3: In developing your initial sound? Who were you idolizing?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 6: I wasn't too different from most other aspiring jazz pianists
Speaker 6: in that I listened a lot to Oscar Peterson and
Speaker 6: Bill Eppens, maybe the two that I listened to the most.
Speaker 6: Of course, I tried to listen to everybody, Gardner and
Speaker 6: Artatam and on and on, but I I usually came
Speaker 6: down to thinking that three of those pianists influenced me
Speaker 6: the most. When I was trying to break into the field,
Speaker 6: and I would add count Basie to Bill Evans and
Speaker 6: Oscar Peterson count Basie just because his minimalism of playing
Speaker 6: only a couple of notes eight measures, but he knew
Speaker 6: exactly when played them, and I loved that economy of
Speaker 6: not playing too. He was sort of the opposite of
Speaker 6: Oscar Peterson, and Oscar Peterson had so much chops that
Speaker 6: I could I knew I could never do that anywhere
Speaker 6: close to the way he did it, so I better
Speaker 6: try to find some other approach.
Speaker 3: Is Bill the Is he partly responsible for why the
Speaker 3: Fender Rhodes became your signature sound?
Speaker 1: Or was just.
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 6: As a matter of fact, I didn't like the way
Speaker 6: either Bill Evans or Oscar Peterson played the Fender Rose
Speaker 6: and they only played it occasionally, and it always seemed
Speaker 6: to me that sounded like they either had to do
Speaker 6: it or experimented with it and ended up not liking it.
Speaker 6: If you look at their overall recorded repertoire, you won't
Speaker 6: find very many Fender Rows tracks from Bill Evans or
Speaker 6: Oscar Peterson. And when I heard them play it, both
Speaker 6: of them, I hope I'm not being sacrilegious, but they
Speaker 6: they hit it too hard, They hit the keys too hard.
Speaker 6: They wouldn't change their technique.
Speaker 7: They played it like it was an acoustic piano.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you can't play that instrument that way because the
Speaker 6: acoustic piano has so much more dynamic range. And I
Speaker 6: don't know it formed my style at that time because
Speaker 6: I was asked to do it. I hadn't gone out
Speaker 6: and found Fender Rose on my own. Rudy Vank had
Speaker 6: one in his studio and I started being asked to
Speaker 6: play it, and to my ear, I had to change
Speaker 6: my technique to make it sound good.
Speaker 3: Was it was it like now it's so commonplace, but
Speaker 3: in the early sixties when they're when they're developing this instrument, Like,
Speaker 3: was it foreign?
Speaker 1: Was it like?
Speaker 3: Like, I mean the way that we look at probably
Speaker 3: the way that we're looking at AI technology right now,
Speaker 3: Like was it sort of a thing to marvel or
Speaker 3: something to master?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: What were your feelings on it?
Speaker 2: It was? It was a gig.
Speaker 6: I've also even really I was playing it because because
Speaker 6: I had to. That was my assignment on that particular gig,
Speaker 6: because they wanted.
Speaker 2: To Okay Bros.
Speaker 6: When my heart was still with the acoustic panto until
Speaker 6: I began to realize that I was getting identified with
Speaker 6: it and that I had some kind of approach that
Speaker 6: people were hearing. That almost forced me to take it
Speaker 6: more seriously. When my album, the first solo album that
Speaker 6: I made for CTI had feel like making Love on it,
Speaker 6: and there was a sound that I had used vendor
Speaker 6: Rose on ROBERTA Flex because I played piano for her
Speaker 6: on her version two, so that sound became very much identified.
Speaker 6: That was what nineteen seventy four, I guess in some
Speaker 6: ways I felt limited by it because it just had
Speaker 6: no matter what you did, there was only one way
Speaker 6: that I could make it sound authentic for good.
Speaker 3: Okay, So I kind of was starting your discography.
Speaker 1: The period in between.
Speaker 3: The first album, The Bowld Conceptions that Quincy produced and
Speaker 3: your second album Explosions, which really doesn't get discussed enough, and.
Speaker 6: It doesn't because if it got discussed too much, I
Speaker 6: might not have a career.
Speaker 3: The night and day of those two records, I meant
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty five, like I know by you know,
Speaker 3: I know, by like fifty nine sixty like there was
Speaker 3: there is avant garde jazz and whatnot, but your version
Speaker 3: of it is way beyond like you know, Coltrane's thing
Speaker 3: was more spirituality, and then you know, like the stuff
Speaker 3: with the shape of Jazz to Come and all those
Speaker 3: things like which I think they're being avant garde with notes,
Speaker 3: but you know you're kind of taking at least listening
Speaker 3: to those records.
Speaker 1: I mean, if I could be bold to say, and
Speaker 1: you know, notwithstanding the.
Speaker 3: The early like electric records of the sixties, which were
Speaker 3: more like demonstration records or that sort of thing, but
Speaker 3: like dare I say, like that might have been one
Speaker 3: of the very first electronica records, like just in terms
Speaker 3: of you using different frequencies and whatnot, Like what made
Speaker 3: you go from Night and Day from like bold conceptions
Speaker 3: to Explosions.
Speaker 6: Well, it actually, in my memory was not totally Night
Speaker 6: and Day, because they were kind of all related, and
Speaker 6: there were some elements in the Explosions album that I
Speaker 6: had already been experimenting around and that had gotten Quincy's attention.
Speaker 6: The two classical avant garde composers that participated in the
Speaker 6: Explosions album were Robert Ashley and Gordon Muma, and they
Speaker 6: were both exploring different versions of what at that time
Speaker 6: was called electronic music, but it was It was a
Speaker 6: combination of what was called music concrete, and that was
Speaker 6: taking just natural sounds like a train engine or birds
Speaker 6: or whatever, and then manipulating them with tape machines. There
Speaker 6: was no personal computer. Digital way we look at electronic
Speaker 6: music now didn't exist at that time. There was a
Speaker 6: lot of tape manipulation, and they did have oscillators, so
Speaker 6: there were some very very primitive what we now call
Speaker 6: synthesizers that were just beginning.
Speaker 2: To be put together. And what I tried to do with.
Speaker 6: Explosions is is I guess you could say it was
Speaker 6: similar to the way artists us backing track more recently.
Speaker 2: So this electronic tape of or samply something.
Speaker 6: Yes, so that's the sample plays or the backing try plays,
Speaker 6: and then we would improvise over the top of it
Speaker 6: in a more conventional jazz way. And so the two
Speaker 6: different elements would clash with each other, and that created
Speaker 6: the conflict or the gardeners. And it was all seemed
Speaker 6: to be all about pushing boundaries. What are the limits
Speaker 6: of what could be called music? A sound organized sound, chaos,
Speaker 6: And different people used the different approach. Sometimes it was
Speaker 6: anger and thumbing their nose at the audience. The idea
Speaker 6: of making an audience happy in the conventional sense or
Speaker 6: making them fall in love, they wanted to do the opposite.
Speaker 6: They wanted to make them so angry that they'd walk
Speaker 6: out of the theater with them. So there was all
Speaker 6: variations of that and debate about it and what's meaningful
Speaker 6: what isn't. So you had the people that loved it,
Speaker 6: but you had as many or more people that hated
Speaker 6: it and.
Speaker 2: Thought it was noise. And so.
Speaker 6: In my youth, I was fascinated by it. I actually
Speaker 6: loved it sometimes that and I always felt during that
Speaker 6: time that I had the power to change it because
Speaker 6: I could play conventional.
Speaker 2: Jazz.
Speaker 6: I liked to surprise my audience that just when they
Speaker 6: thought we were just playing some conventional bebop, all of
Speaker 6: a sudden, electric electronic sounds would come in and then
Speaker 6: we were suddenly in a completely different world where I'd
Speaker 6: be stroking the strings with my hand or getting a
Speaker 6: mallet and playing beating on the side of the piano,
Speaker 6: and we were part of the time seducing the audience
Speaker 6: and part of the time confronting them with.
Speaker 2: Surprise and making him deal with it.
Speaker 3: At that point, were you familiar with like artists of
Speaker 3: the time like a Raymond Scott or the Tonto guys
Speaker 3: or just any of those experimental synthesizer records.
Speaker 6: Yes, I was those two names, I don't remember, but
Speaker 6: I was more influenced by the people in the classical
Speaker 6: avoc guard world like John Cage and Stockhausen and ghost
Speaker 6: people that it was a different kind of experimentation in
Speaker 6: the jazz world. Don Ellis, the trumpet player, was also
Speaker 6: very involved on avac guarde music at that time, and
Speaker 6: there were the mob guys. When the MoG's emphasiser came up,
Speaker 6: came into being a little bit later. Actually, by that
Speaker 6: time I was sort of using interest frankly, the idea
Speaker 6: of making the audience hate me. It started to be
Speaker 6: so ob severe that I thought, well, I'll never be
Speaker 6: able to make a living if I make.
Speaker 3: My You're saying that you were going for more of
Speaker 3: like a Stravinsky make the audience hate me thing, or just.
Speaker 6: No, because Scherenberg might be a better example. Because Stravinsky's
Speaker 6: music people realized fairly quickly that it was just great,
Speaker 6: and it was they also rioted, you know, and.
Speaker 2: Had a melody.
Speaker 6: It had all of the things and it's survived as
Speaker 6: a as a real classic, even though the dissonance shocked
Speaker 6: people a little bit at the time, but it was
Speaker 6: cinematic it. I never never viewed him as av It
Speaker 6: was more, we say about.
Speaker 1: A provocateur, musical provocateur.
Speaker 6: He had come out of the Impressionist area era when
Speaker 6: when the Romantic era of the nineteenth centuries the gradually
Speaker 6: they began to get tired of tonal music and the
Speaker 6: tonal and conventional dissonance, and so the Impressionist era reveled WC.
Speaker 6: It was a blur and where's where's the tonic? So
Speaker 6: by Stravinsky's time, he was going further in that direction
Speaker 6: and more dissonance and a less provincial tonality, but still
Speaker 6: making the attempt to Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't
Speaker 6: think he wanted his audience to hate him like we
Speaker 6: were sort of doing at that time. It was it
Speaker 6: was fun and a temporary interest for me, just trying
Speaker 6: to learn what were the limits. And I learned just
Speaker 6: for myself that the limits that I wanted to go
Speaker 6: back to were far more conventional and I wasn't really
Speaker 6: getting it wasn't reaching my heart. The avant guarde side
Speaker 6: of that was a curiosity from my brain. But I
Speaker 6: more and more started to like the romantic side, and
Speaker 6: probably those four years I spent with Sara Van, she
Speaker 6: certainly wouldn't have let me play in the avant guarde.
Speaker 1: Kenna, right, Yeah, I was trying to imagine that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I had to really play all the learned the
Speaker 6: standards and not only learn and learned the great voicings
Speaker 6: and everything so I could inspire her and that became
Speaker 6: my life.
Speaker 3: So why did it take almost a decade for you
Speaker 3: to get to your third album? Your run of your period,
Speaker 3: which you know, for most collectors believe that one is
Speaker 3: your They seem to think that's your first record, even
Speaker 3: though it's not. But just as the Bob James as
Speaker 3: we know, why did it take you to nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: four to start?
Speaker 1: You're a part of the.
Speaker 6: Story from the after explosions and after I kind of
Speaker 6: thinking that it was a dead end for me.
Speaker 2: It was immediately after that that I got the job
Speaker 2: with Sarah Vong.
Speaker 6: That was a four year thing, and by that time
Speaker 6: I had given up any notion of being a leader.
Speaker 6: When I first came to New York, I sort of
Speaker 6: came as the Bob James Trio.
Speaker 2: I've thought of.
Speaker 6: Myself as a jazz pianist and was thinking about trying
Speaker 6: to make a solo career. But I really liked a
Speaker 6: job with Sarah being an accompanist, and I started getting
Speaker 6: arranging jobs as a result of it, and I liked
Speaker 6: that provided a steadier income in New York, and I
Speaker 6: was starting to get arranging jobs. And by the time
Speaker 6: I got to nineteen seventy when I got the job
Speaker 6: to play on Quincy's album Walking in Space, which was
Speaker 6: my introduction to Creed Taylor. That gave me the opportunity
Speaker 6: for Creed Taylor to see what I could do, that
Speaker 6: I could write for large ensembles. And still by that time,
Speaker 6: I was not thinking of myself as a solo artist,
Speaker 6: and I didn't even think I was going to pursue it.
Speaker 1: How musical was Creed Taylor, Well.
Speaker 6: He definitely wasn't one going out in playing an instrument
Speaker 6: or conducting or arranging. He did have some training that
Speaker 6: I heard about only by reputation. I never saw him
Speaker 6: do it. I think you could describe him as a visionary.
Speaker 6: He had a definite idea of how he wanted his
Speaker 6: label to have a style, a sound, and a look,
Speaker 6: even his packaging and his choice of covers and everything
Speaker 6: about it. He had a very strong producer vision and
Speaker 6: so his the style of the one element of it
Speaker 6: that he talked to me a lout because he wanted
Speaker 6: me to be one of the ones helping him realize
Speaker 6: his vision. He was a very very passionate fan of
Speaker 6: the music and he had his favorites. He had his taste,
Speaker 6: and that that form his choices that he made throughout
Speaker 6: those years.
Speaker 3: But does he allow you to really have say, like
Speaker 3: I know that you started producing after the four out,
Speaker 3: like by yourself, but like, are you allowed to have
Speaker 3: say in these first war records?
Speaker 2: Definitely did.
Speaker 6: I had a lot to say, And you mentioned value
Speaker 6: of the shadows right off the bat, which was completely
Speaker 6: me going as almost as avour guarde as I would
Speaker 6: have a project of his where he was a producer.
Speaker 6: But he gave me a lot of leeway and the arrangements.
Speaker 6: The basic thing that gave me that job early on
Speaker 6: working with him was one of his stylistic things was
Speaker 6: to take a classical theme that he thought that people
Speaker 6: would recognize that and then converted into having jazz performers reinterpreted,
Speaker 6: and that became such a trademark for him almost And
Speaker 6: when he saw that I was able to work with
Speaker 6: classical music and rearrange it and all that, that's led
Speaker 6: me down that path with him.
Speaker 3: Okay, So take something like A Night on Bald Mountain,
Speaker 3: which you know, if you're a Disney fan, you know
Speaker 3: that from Fantasia. I'll admit that I met Night on
Speaker 3: Bald Mountain because it was on side three of Saturday
Speaker 3: Night Fever.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I was also like seven years old when it came out.
Speaker 3: But when you're doing these interpolations of classical music into jazz, one,
Speaker 3: are you doing all the arranging? And how many man
Speaker 3: hours does it take for you to write each part?
Speaker 3: Because you're you know, I'm assuming that you're doing these
Speaker 3: arrangements for your brass section, your string sector, like for
Speaker 3: one song, how many man hours does it take for
Speaker 3: you to write these arrangements out a lot.
Speaker 2: I was fast, and you kind of had to be.
Speaker 2: I grew up watching the Great Arrangers, and Quincy had
Speaker 2: told me about that music copy service that I mentioned
Speaker 2: about earlier, and I would go in there and watch
Speaker 2: how they would work.
Speaker 6: And there were people like Billy buyer's and there were
Speaker 6: the people that got a lot of the jobs, and
Speaker 6: I saw how they did their scores and how they
Speaker 6: set up the scores that would make it easier for
Speaker 6: the copyists to copy the parts and well organized and everything,
Speaker 6: because very often there were deadlines and we had to
Speaker 6: deliver half a dozen charts overnight for the session the
Speaker 6: next day. So I learned to be fast, and I
Speaker 6: definitely wasn't the fastest, but I could put something together
Speaker 6: pretty quickly. And I had studied in college, so the
Speaker 6: part of that whole process was getting to know the
Speaker 6: range of the instruments and the kind of ways that
Speaker 6: you could write for an instrument that would make that
Speaker 6: player sound better if you kept it in the right range.
Speaker 6: Lots and lots of stuff like that, and the fact
Speaker 6: that I could do it allowed pre Taylor to give
Speaker 6: me directions depending upon what classical piece he wanted me
Speaker 6: to reinterpret. He'd give me some ideas about it, but
Speaker 6: then he'd leave me on my own to execute it.
Speaker 6: And the nine on Mountain nine on ball Mountain chart
Speaker 6: that I did, and Steve Gadd played the drum part,
Speaker 6: it was all about featuring him at that time.
Speaker 2: I just kind of know him, and I knew he
Speaker 2: could read whatever I.
Speaker 6: Put in front of him, but keep it in the
Speaker 6: spirit of free flowing jazz playing. And even with that arrangement,
Speaker 6: we went in first with the rhythm section. I recorded
Speaker 6: that and I refined to my score after that, somewhat
Speaker 6: based upon the fills that Steve would play. I used
Speaker 6: to like to do the vert rather than give Steve
Speaker 6: all them notes with all those hits on it, you know,
Speaker 6: the sycopatient things. He would just play loose, and I
Speaker 6: would him and yeah, and when he would hit those fills,
Speaker 6: I would make that the brass you know, no, that
Speaker 6: make it sound like he was he was answering the
Speaker 6: brea arrangement when actually and some of that stuff he
Speaker 6: wrote it and it was tight and in version end version,
Speaker 6: because the way he was playing it was loose, you.
Speaker 2: Know what I mean.
Speaker 3: I knew Steve Gadd was a monster, but in my mind, okay, now,
Speaker 3: it makes total sense that you do your rhythm section first,
Speaker 3: and then you build around what your rhythm section does and.
Speaker 5: Then yeah, in order that way, there had to be
Speaker 5: a pretty specific chart too, because it wasn't just a
Speaker 5: simple lead sheet for Steve and the bass player Gary King.
Speaker 6: All that I had on that particular piece, it was
Speaker 6: a lot was written out, but within that, since we
Speaker 6: didn't have a whole brass section in the studio, there
Speaker 6: was a kind of flexibility that we could use to
Speaker 6: get the groove happening and to make it so that
Speaker 6: it wasn't too too tight and too conservative in the
Speaker 6: way we played it. So my memory of what we
Speaker 6: were trying to do was both have a be a
Speaker 6: very specific chart but also the feel of a loose,
Speaker 6: improvised jazz performance.
Speaker 3: Your personnel, you know, it reads like a just a
Speaker 3: reads like a who's who of just monsters. Of course
Speaker 3: you know they're monster musicians now, but back then I'm
Speaker 3: assuming that they were just you know, dudes that played music.
Speaker 3: How did you go about gathering the personnels for your record?
Speaker 4: Because like it's the cast, it's just and leading into
Speaker 4: tap and z. It's just Yes, it's so much about
Speaker 4: who's around you. So yeah, I ask you a question, please, sorry.
Speaker 3: Yes, So, how did how did you come across like
Speaker 3: the Ralph McDonald's of the world, the Grover Washington genius
Speaker 3: of the world, the Wayne Yeah, Steve Gary.
Speaker 6: I don't think it's any different from what you're world
Speaker 6: is now. New York is a great place, and that's
Speaker 6: where maybe not quite as dominant as it was in
Speaker 6: the nineteen seventies when I was doing my thing, but
Speaker 6: everybody comes to New York too, and that's where most
Speaker 6: of the gigs were, and by word of mouth, you
Speaker 6: start to learn who are the best people. Once I
Speaker 6: got onto Retailer's list, he had his favorites, but the
Speaker 6: everybody was available to you. You could get George Benson
Speaker 6: to play guitar on you could get Ray Brown to
Speaker 6: play bass, and you could get whoever you want because
Speaker 6: it was New York. And then it just became a
Speaker 6: matter of casting. And I loved that whole aspect all
Speaker 6: through my life. I love the conversations about who's the
Speaker 6: new guy or gal, who who's going to inspire you?
Speaker 6: And so you keep searching, and every month we would
Speaker 6: find some new name that got in the door, and
Speaker 6: you'd want to use them, and the best of them
Speaker 6: became the people that we're talking about now.
Speaker 2: As a result of that.
Speaker 7: Did you and David Matthews ever collaborate at any time?
Speaker 2: No, the other David Matthews.
Speaker 6: There there's the Man, but the arranger Dave. It was
Speaker 6: one of those things, like Don Sebeski, I rarely was
Speaker 6: around him. If he got the job, I didn't, and
Speaker 6: I got the job he didn't, So there was usually
Speaker 6: only one of us on any particular project. I did
Speaker 6: get hired as a pianist for some of Don Sebeski's stuff,
Speaker 6: so I got to know him. But the the other arrangers,
Speaker 6: Robert Friedman I remember, and some of these other people
Speaker 6: that I knew them by reputation, but rarely it had
Speaker 6: a chance to be working on the same project.
Speaker 3: All right, just the sequencing of your first album is
Speaker 3: just off the chain. And I gotta know whose idea
Speaker 3: was it to make such a radical version of in
Speaker 3: the Garden, Because you know, when I hear in the Garden,
Speaker 3: it's either it's either used for wedding purposes, you know,
Speaker 3: it's always the it's always the pre song that's played
Speaker 3: right before here comes the Bride or whatever. So I
Speaker 3: totally wasn't expecting. It's almost like three things in one,
Speaker 3: like you know, it's part rockabillious bluegrass, but it's also
Speaker 3: jazzy and it's avant garde, Like do you just tell
Speaker 3: us the genesis of that or was it just like
Speaker 3: roll the tape, I got an idea.
Speaker 6: Well, thank you for describing it that way, and even
Speaker 6: thank you thank you for remembering it, because I do
Speaker 6: sort of remember the day that I came into Cretaylor's
Speaker 6: office and talked about wanting to do it, uh, to
Speaker 6: do that composition. And we had already discussed a lot
Speaker 6: about his basic theory that if if a jazz artist
Speaker 6: took a classical theme, they would turn it into something else,
Speaker 6: and that was part of his stylistic thing.
Speaker 2: So the real classical name, which is also.
Speaker 6: I'm darning in blank on it now, that I ended
Speaker 6: up calling in the Garden came from a very well
Speaker 6: known classical piece, And at that time I was using
Speaker 6: humor Crackt a lot. The really great studio guitarist but
Speaker 6: who had a.
Speaker 1: He did dueling banjos right.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, deliverance yeah. So he played bad joe guitar,
Speaker 6: and he was very authentic in those styles. So I
Speaker 6: knew that I could get a kind of raw, almost
Speaker 6: country kind of sound out of him and make that
Speaker 6: piece eclectic. We didn't know exactly where we were going
Speaker 6: with there's a lot of experimentation in the studio and
Speaker 6: crew Taylor gave me the flexibility to experiment with that
Speaker 6: and to come up with something unique.
Speaker 3: It's almost like, you know what that in particular, if
Speaker 3: a jazz artist had a public enemy, like that's the thing, like,
Speaker 3: you're so hip hop without The only only person that
Speaker 3: I could describe that way was Prince. Like before Prince
Speaker 3: purposely started rapping, everything about Prince was hip hop in
Speaker 3: terms of like drum programming and all that stuff. But
Speaker 3: I mean just the fact that you're mixing all these
Speaker 3: genres in one before it actually gets a home or
Speaker 3: some sort of identity, is you know, is kind of
Speaker 3: mind blowing.
Speaker 1: I mean, at the.
Speaker 3: Time, were you nervous or worried about what critics were
Speaker 3: going to receive this as your downbeats your you know whatever?
Speaker 3: The gods of critics of jazz critics were like, if
Speaker 3: you're not following a certain mold of what is deemed
Speaker 3: acceptable status quo, are you nervous about this or was
Speaker 3: the shield of CTI enough to I think.
Speaker 6: I can safely say that I was not nervous about it.
Speaker 6: If anything, I was not reluctant to be confrontational and
Speaker 6: to not give critics any easy thing to talk about,
Speaker 6: and I guess I always had a little bit of
Speaker 6: love hate relationship with them, and I got more hate
Speaker 6: than I did love times that so I ended up
Speaker 6: saying who cares, and I go, it's my job to
Speaker 6: do it at their job to say what they think
Speaker 6: about it. And I was not concerned about that at
Speaker 6: that time. Even forget about critics, I was not that
Speaker 6: concerned about retailer. He was my boss, but I wanted
Speaker 6: to confront him too and not necessarily come in with
Speaker 6: exactly what he expected. Bravery, I guess, has always been
Speaker 6: something that I feel like you have to stay with
Speaker 6: your vision no matter whether people will agree with it
Speaker 6: or not. And on the one album we were talking about,
Speaker 6: I was not thinking at that time as that as
Speaker 6: a solo career album for myself. I didn't think I
Speaker 6: would have one, and Creed said it was time because
Speaker 6: I'd done so many projects for him with Grover Washington
Speaker 6: and various other artists. I felt my identity at CTI
Speaker 6: was a ranger, and by doing a whole bunch of different,
Speaker 6: eclectic kind of stuff, I was hoping to use that
Speaker 6: as like an audition to get.
Speaker 2: More arranging jobs, and the more of a.
Speaker 6: Variety that I could show as an orchestrator, I could
Speaker 6: present it to other clients, and it was my good
Speaker 6: fortune that I had some commercial success with it that
Speaker 6: I was almost forced into considering a solo career after that.
Speaker 6: Can I share with you a little bit about Nautilus
Speaker 6: on that same album? Yeah, next, talking so many people
Speaker 6: about it and actually confronting with Wu Tank Clan guys
Speaker 6: of various.
Speaker 2: People about why.
Speaker 6: You know, I kept asking the question why did Nautilists
Speaker 6: get sampled by so many people?
Speaker 2: What was it?
Speaker 6: And I was able to share the story on that
Speaker 6: same one album you asked about the sequencing US was
Speaker 6: the last cut on side B kind of deliberately because
Speaker 6: it was almost a throwaway and Pree Taylor knew that
Speaker 6: the other cuts would get the attention at that time.
Speaker 6: So traditionally with the LP you always made put your
Speaker 6: weakest cuts on the center of the last cut on
Speaker 6: the side of an album because the grooves were narrower.
Speaker 6: You know, you've got your best bass sound on the
Speaker 6: on the outside cuts. So nobody paid attention Nautilus and
Speaker 6: then Upper ten or fifteen years later, I started hearing
Speaker 6: back that that that the hip hop producers were grabbing
Speaker 6: onto it and I could not. I knew it had
Speaker 6: a good baseline, and Ice Muhammad playing drums of groove
Speaker 6: was there, so I got that, but it just seemed
Speaker 6: like there had to be something else about it that
Speaker 6: it made it just keep showing up over and over
Speaker 6: and still does even to this day. So in a
Speaker 6: conversation with Rizza on an interview that he was doing,
Speaker 6: suddenly something clicked in for me that I had kind
Speaker 6: of not been paying attention to it at all. But
Speaker 6: it wasn't just a simple rhythm section groove that Price
Speaker 6: and Gary King were laying down. I had written a
Speaker 6: pretty elaborate string arrangement for fun.
Speaker 2: Let Me do It. There was enough budget that.
Speaker 6: I could hire a string section and write the arrangement,
Speaker 6: and there was this kind of mysterious, ethereal kind of
Speaker 6: sound that permeated that track, And if anything, I would
Speaker 6: have thought it would have made it less commercial because
Speaker 6: it didn't fit in with the other standard funk type
Speaker 6: of a string arrangement that I might have written. But
Speaker 6: as I've recently talk to the people in the hip
Speaker 6: hop community that that keep talking about that as being
Speaker 6: one of the essential tracts that have been sampled the most.
Speaker 6: I think it might be a combination of that groove
Speaker 6: and this almost classical blurry orchestration that's over the top
Speaker 6: of the texture.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Texture, it's that's why I say you're the king of textures.
Speaker 3: Like and I can't describe it, but it's you know,
Speaker 3: somehow you manage like I know, you don't intentionally say, Okay,
Speaker 3: let me create a song that somehow in six years
Speaker 3: will hit another generation, like no one thinks that. Like
Speaker 3: maybe a musician like me now will think that, like, Okay,
Speaker 3: what I do now, maybe twenty years from now it'll
Speaker 3: be in vogue. But you know, I think at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, you caught a compel selling performance
Speaker 3: with musicians that just were tightly locked. And the fact
Speaker 3: that you didn't plan it even makes it better because
Speaker 3: some of the best success stories and music all come
Speaker 3: from people that aren't calculating. Here's lightning in a bottle,
Speaker 3: you know, like Michael Jackson trying to follow up thriller
Speaker 3: like I'm gonna sell a hundred millionaires, Like you can't.
Speaker 3: You can't capture lightning in the bottle that way. It
Speaker 3: just happens or it doesn't happen.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I totally believe it. And that's why I've always.
Speaker 6: Tried to just enjoy the process of doing it and
Speaker 6: let whatever comes out of that happen. If you're passionate
Speaker 6: and if you're trying your best to get the best people,
Speaker 6: write the best arrangement, play the best solo, just do
Speaker 6: your best and keep trying to make the level higher.
Speaker 6: In that way, then you're still enjoying that even if
Speaker 6: it isn't successful, You've had that pleasure and privilege to
Speaker 6: make music and uh, and go through that process.
Speaker 3: You know, around eighty seven when you know Peter Piper
Speaker 3: is coming out the gate, which you know I'll probably
Speaker 3: I mean, you say, Fante, that's probably one of the
Speaker 3: first out the gate, uh, Bob Team samples, Yeah yeah yeah,
Speaker 3: so eighties yeah yeah yeah. So when when this is
Speaker 3: coming out in eighty six, eighty seven and whatnot, what
Speaker 3: is your immediate thought of what's happening?
Speaker 6: I believe my first memory was Jesse Jeff and the
Speaker 6: Fresh Prince.
Speaker 8: And they touch a jazz right.
Speaker 6: They took my son West yesterday and the way they
Speaker 6: did it at that time, because I wasn't following what
Speaker 6: was going on.
Speaker 2: In hip hop at all?
Speaker 6: But I found out about it after the fact and
Speaker 6: I listened to it, and yes, I was shocked. What
Speaker 6: the heck, you know, because it was just my record
Speaker 6: that played. It wasn't it wasn't even a loop or
Speaker 6: a chunk, right, and you could hear my melody, my composition.
Speaker 2: And suddenly I look at this album and it has
Speaker 2: a new title.
Speaker 6: They made it into a new song and they call
Speaker 6: it something else, and I'm thinking, wait, wait a minute,
Speaker 6: you know this is not.
Speaker 2: Right, what's going on here?
Speaker 6: And one of the first things back then that came
Speaker 6: into my mind is, hey, if they can do that,
Speaker 6: if Jessie, Jeff and Will Smith could just wrap over
Speaker 6: the top of my record, well I'll go out and
Speaker 6: get myself a Frank Sinatra record and I'll play some
Speaker 6: piano over the top of it.
Speaker 2: And I'll change the time from you know, from I
Speaker 2: left my.
Speaker 6: Heart, just go I'll call it Bob James something or
Speaker 6: other whatever.
Speaker 1: And I knew you couldst face does that, by the way, So.
Speaker 6: Times have changed, but that was my first reaction. And also, but.
Speaker 3: In your mind, you didn't think like some fourteen year
Speaker 3: old or fifteen year old is hearing that and now
Speaker 3: looking at their parents' record collection, like, wait, I have that,
Speaker 3: and then now you have new fans not yet okay.
Speaker 6: Eventually, you know, there's a lot of conversation about it.
Speaker 6: And if it had been just a fluke, I would
Speaker 6: have considered it more as a legal matter. And because
Speaker 6: throughout my sort of music business knowledge career, I have
Speaker 6: felt that copyrights and the protection of them are our
Speaker 6: most powerful.
Speaker 2: Weapon against big business.
Speaker 6: The copyright itself, the ownership of it, the control of
Speaker 6: it so that that you have some control.
Speaker 2: Over your destiny. Is was a very big deal for me.
Speaker 6: I fought for it in all of my contracts, and
Speaker 6: the only way that you can protect it is is
Speaker 6: by going to bat for it and not let people
Speaker 6: played your eyes or fraudulently steal it.
Speaker 2: So so that was really.
Speaker 6: Basic before I even was aware of what was going
Speaker 6: on in the hip hop world, and the whole structure
Speaker 6: of the legal thing hadn't happened yet where where you
Speaker 6: could figure out a reasonableare way to license and all
Speaker 6: those So, yeah, exactly, so you hear that happening, and
Speaker 6: I owned my recording of Westchester Lady and I and
Speaker 6: the compositions, so I had to fight for it, and
Speaker 6: I did, and that sort of started me off and
Speaker 6: world that at that time I thought it was a
Speaker 6: one off thing and that I would just have to
Speaker 6: try to do my best to be compensated properly and
Speaker 6: then go on about my business. But it proved that
Speaker 6: it wasn't an isolated thing, and not only did the
Speaker 6: field get bigger and bigger, but simply my music kept happening.
Speaker 6: So I had to make a decision about how to
Speaker 6: handle that, and eventually, yes, it became a very amazing
Speaker 6: deal that my own music got heard a lot more
Speaker 6: as a result of my name being associated in the
Speaker 6: hip hop community. So I ended up being very grateful
Speaker 6: for it, but always mixed feelings.
Speaker 3: Did you notice an immediate paradigm shift and reaction? Whereas like,
Speaker 3: if you start the intro to Nautilus back in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy four, it probably wouldn't elicit the screams of oh
Speaker 3: shit like that. I'm certain that happened at Blue Note
Speaker 3: last week when you played there.
Speaker 6: Yes, and as drastic change has happened, I have so
Speaker 6: much appreciation and new respect, new desire to confront.
Speaker 2: This whole phenomenon.
Speaker 6: I want, as a copyright holder and as a composer
Speaker 6: who has fought hard to keep the rights to my music,
Speaker 6: I want to be one of the people in the
Speaker 6: music community that educates young people to learn about that,
Speaker 6: to learn about the business, to learn that these creations
Speaker 6: need to be protected and they need to be identified
Speaker 6: in the right way and entered into the legal part
Speaker 6: of the music business in a legitimate way. So I've
Speaker 6: kept fighting for that.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 6: But as I have learned more about the sample usage,
Speaker 6: I confronted Rizza and I sort of actually confronted DJ
Speaker 6: j Jeff too, And there was a new cut on
Speaker 6: my album be coming out in the spring that is
Speaker 6: a collaboration with djj Jeff where it's like let by
Speaker 6: Gones be by Gones were.
Speaker 2: Never were in bed together with the track.
Speaker 6: You know, we collaborated, and I'm very happy that we're
Speaker 6: able to do that, and it demonstrates that we're all
Speaker 6: in the music business together. But in attempting to actually
Speaker 6: confront this issue for me, which is when they took
Speaker 6: Nautilus or take Me to the Marty Ground and redid
Speaker 6: it or used it, it was my creativity that it
Speaker 6: was in this chunk or in this recording, and I
Speaker 6: was not in the studio to defend myself artistically.
Speaker 2: And as I began to hear my music being.
Speaker 6: Sample more and more the chunks of it were taken
Speaker 6: in all kinds of different ways, manipulated more drastically, tempo chains,
Speaker 6: speed sped up, slowed down the story.
Speaker 2: Only I didn't have any control over.
Speaker 1: The creativity right right.
Speaker 6: I'm not there, so they do whatever they want. So
Speaker 6: I began to think if I could be in the
Speaker 6: same room doing my thing while they did their thing,
Speaker 6: a different result could come out of it, where I
Speaker 6: would actually be at least be able to say, well,
Speaker 6: wait a.
Speaker 2: Minute, don't change this, or something like that.
Speaker 6: So or five days, two weeks ago, I was in
Speaker 6: Riz's studio and we did pretty much exactly that. He
Speaker 6: did his thing and I did my thing, And a
Speaker 6: couple of times I would do a kind of conventional
Speaker 6: jazz melodic thing, or a bassline thing or something like that,
Speaker 6: and he would hear some very small chunk of it
Speaker 6: and he would ask his engineer, stops right there and
Speaker 6: take just these two beats, And suddenly my conventional melody
Speaker 6: had become some completely new rhythm that I wouldn't have
Speaker 6: thought of in a million years.
Speaker 2: And now we're confronting each other.
Speaker 6: Either I have to be strong enough to say, you know,
Speaker 6: stay away from that, or or go along with it.
Speaker 3: Fante, are you thinking about the guitar center beat right now?
Speaker 7: I hope it's not that I think, but the guitars
Speaker 7: that would beat that's a whole other, you know.
Speaker 3: For me, For me a person who takes that, it
Speaker 3: makes I feel like someone's gonna flip it, like either
Speaker 3: vitamin D or something.
Speaker 4: You make it hard.
Speaker 1: It's inside joke.
Speaker 3: It's one of his most like unorthodox creations I've ever
Speaker 3: heard of my life. Ze When I when I heard
Speaker 3: you two were collaborating, the first thing I thought about was, okay,
Speaker 3: the guitar set beat, Bob.
Speaker 7: When you recall, do you remember the reasons why you
Speaker 7: cleared Dayton off my puncher but you didn't clear the
Speaker 7: Flowers record for ghost Face?
Speaker 2: Do you remember, uh, the reason for that? I do remember.
Speaker 6: In those days, we were trying to create a kind
Speaker 6: of formula which almost never worked, because every new creation
Speaker 6: is different and every circumstances different. But I tried to
Speaker 6: identify it in the amount of my actual recording that
Speaker 6: was used, and if it was just a little chunk
Speaker 6: that only occupied, you know, ten percent. Tried to base
Speaker 6: the licensing fee on the the prominence of my music
Speaker 6: in the track, and if my baseline or my melody
Speaker 6: was prominent all the way through the track. It's essentially
Speaker 6: my composition that I have, that I own, and that
Speaker 6: I own that copyright, and they're using it from beginning
Speaker 6: to end. I always was pretty firm and rigid about no,
Speaker 6: I'm not giving that up, and I don't. I don't
Speaker 6: think any composer who's proud of the ownership.
Speaker 2: Of their creation would ever want to give that up.
Speaker 2: Just say I.
Speaker 7: When you say not giving it up, you mean not
Speaker 7: giving up any publishing on it, or just not letting
Speaker 7: them use it period.
Speaker 6: Well either version, yes, not using letting them use the
Speaker 6: period unless they license it properly, if they license it,
Speaker 6: and and to get a license to change my music
Speaker 6: when they use it from beginning to end.
Speaker 2: U why why would I? Why would I? Why would
Speaker 2: any of you agree to do that? So here here
Speaker 2: you've got this.
Speaker 7: Understand Yeah, I think yeah, Well you asked the question,
Speaker 7: whyle we any of us would do that?
Speaker 2: I think definitely, it has to be.
Speaker 7: It has to be you know, you have to be
Speaker 7: compensated and the business has to be worked out. I
Speaker 7: just know, for me as a hip hop fan, there
Speaker 7: are so many records that I never would have listened
Speaker 7: to if it were not for hip hop. Like I
Speaker 7: never would have went and listened to you know, your
Speaker 7: first Floor, Well not first for but your album's one, two.
Speaker 4: Three, and four.
Speaker 7: You know what I'm saying, Like, I never would have
Speaker 7: went back to those records had I not heard them
Speaker 7: in this context now, you know what I mean. So
Speaker 7: for me now, I look at it as just you know,
Speaker 7: kind of just planting that seed and putting it in
Speaker 7: a context that we may not understand, but the generation
Speaker 7: after us they may hear it, and you know it goes.
Speaker 7: You know, it's pretty much I look at what sampling
Speaker 7: was back for us back then.
Speaker 1: It's like what mean.
Speaker 2: Culture is now in the Internet, you know.
Speaker 4: What I'm saying.
Speaker 7: Like my son, you know, he you know, watched the
Speaker 7: Wire and all because the gift there's a gift of
Speaker 7: webade that's like being used as a meme a million times, right,
Speaker 7: But to him.
Speaker 4: It was just oh my god.
Speaker 7: So that's where that came from, like, you know, this
Speaker 7: is a year old.
Speaker 1: Old that's right it that is the new sampling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like that is crazy, you.
Speaker 6: Know, right in defense of the way this thing started
Speaker 6: to come together in the legitimatizing of licensing and all that,
Speaker 6: any of the biggest samples of my music, such as
Speaker 6: Peter Piper, I didn't find out about until even two
Speaker 6: three four years later, after the thing was too late
Speaker 6: and I suffered even if I wanted to confront, the
Speaker 6: statute of limitations prevented me from really being able to
Speaker 6: do what I wanted to do in some of the
Speaker 6: cases to protect my copyright.
Speaker 2: Couldn't couldn't do it.
Speaker 6: Quest I've just called it the Wild West, and yes
Speaker 6: it was during that time. You fend for yourself and
Speaker 6: you don't know the history of how it's going to
Speaker 6: turn out. If I had known that, I would have
Speaker 6: had so much respect from the whole hip hop community,
Speaker 6: and they treat me with so much dignity. It makes
Speaker 6: me so happy and proud that I'm a part of it.
Speaker 6: And I know that I have gotten a lot from
Speaker 6: the fact that it historically happened.
Speaker 2: But when it was the wild West, when all that
Speaker 2: stuff was going on.
Speaker 6: I had no idea, and I was fighting for my
Speaker 6: own image as a jazz artist and had enough time
Speaker 6: with that, let alone have a hard time holding on
Speaker 6: to my own composition.
Speaker 3: I understand are there certain songs that you favor of
Speaker 3: your usage? Like for me, I feel like DJ Premiere
Speaker 3: is probably the most ideal person to have utilized your
Speaker 3: work where it's not just straight up jacking it, but
Speaker 3: it's like the way he does it is amazing. But
Speaker 3: like for you, do you have favorites of like, oh,
Speaker 3: that was clever or that sort of thing.
Speaker 6: A little bit by the way. I really loved meeting
Speaker 6: him last week. He had come a year ago, but
Speaker 6: finally had a chance to meet him and talk with
Speaker 6: him a little bit last week at the Blue No such.
Speaker 2: A cool guy, and.
Speaker 6: I am embarrassed in jum ways to admit that I
Speaker 6: still don't listen to that much hip hop music.
Speaker 1: I don't guess what neither do.
Speaker 6: I'm not well versed to talk about it. But because
Speaker 6: of the opportunity to be up on the stage with
Speaker 6: Talib Khali and his other guests, finally I got some
Speaker 6: very great insight into the performance of rap and hip
Speaker 6: hop and the way it feels like jazz when I'm
Speaker 6: on the stage, and the skill and that the spirit
Speaker 6: of it that I had not paid attention to and
Speaker 6: listening to the recordings, but being there with him was fantastic.
Speaker 3: Let me let me explain to our listeners. So basically,
Speaker 3: mister James did a residency, a three night residency at
Speaker 3: the Blue Note in New York City with to live
Speaker 3: quality black thought was there, rock him was there? Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like just basically, you know it, is this the first
Speaker 3: time that you finally had a meeting of the minds
Speaker 3: between yourself and and hip hop MC's and a band
Speaker 3: that knew how to make this happen.
Speaker 6: I did the same thing with Talib last year. That
Speaker 6: was only the other time, and I really liked that
Speaker 6: in a way of getting and know in real time
Speaker 6: the music's happening. The two starts and I'm playing right
Speaker 6: along with him, and and when Rakiema was was playing
Speaker 6: his UH version where he had set well my peak Shambouzi,
Speaker 6: and it made me smile because I remember UH percussion
Speaker 6: players that I used to work with all the time,
Speaker 6: Doc Gibbs, and Doc Gibbs had given me the title shambousie,
Speaker 6: which was the kind of part of his vocabulary, and
Speaker 6: it just brought back a whole bunch of memories. And
Speaker 6: this again, this, this, that was just the intro for me.
Speaker 6: The melody or the main part of that song. Rackim
Speaker 6: didn't use it at all. It was just those chords
Speaker 6: of the intro. Nevertheless, I loved the way he performed
Speaker 6: on stage with such confidence and charisma and and made
Speaker 6: me proud, happy and smiling that he had chosen my
Speaker 6: you know, as something to create a new piece out
Speaker 6: of it.
Speaker 7: What were your thoughts on Everyday People or People every
Speaker 7: Day by rest of development, because I thought that was
Speaker 7: just a genie that taking that little piece, Like to me,
Speaker 7: that was Jens, Well, we your thoughts on.
Speaker 6: It very very complicated from the business end of it,
Speaker 6: and actually even from it was another example of something
Speaker 6: that I was not paying attention to know that my
Speaker 6: sample had even been used until way after the fact,
Speaker 6: oh wow, way after it had become a big hit.
Speaker 6: So it came to me late in the game. And
Speaker 6: what had happened was People every Day had been released
Speaker 6: as a single without my sample on it. The first
Speaker 6: release out didn't have my recording on it and kind
Speaker 6: of didn't go anywhere, and they kept working with it,
Speaker 6: did a new mix which ended up being called a
Speaker 6: metamorphosis mix, did add my sample, and that became a
Speaker 6: big hit.
Speaker 2: And so quite clearly I knew that my.
Speaker 6: Sample had made a difference in that record, but what
Speaker 6: we had did not know at the time and until
Speaker 6: it got retigious and kind of got a little bit ugly,
Speaker 6: shall we say, series. And this may or may not
Speaker 6: have had anything to do with their management, but more
Speaker 6: of the record company's management. When the royalties came in,
Speaker 6: they somehow or other got channeled into the other version
Speaker 6: of U did not have my sample in it, so
Speaker 6: the royalties did not come my way and after a
Speaker 6: long period of time, and it was a very significant difference.
Speaker 3: So that that's why they had to identify the metamorphosis
Speaker 3: remix every time I see it used in public.
Speaker 2: But even though they did some.
Speaker 6: Unbeknownst to me and in the final I couldn't prove
Speaker 6: it anyway. Uh, it got channeled wrong, and it took
Speaker 6: us a long time before we figured out, well, why
Speaker 6: is this statement for the other version so huge and
Speaker 6: the statement for metamorphosis mixed nothing?
Speaker 3: Because no one wants to write Metamorphosis mix. I assure you, yeah,
Speaker 3: I assure you, ninety nine percent of the time, if
Speaker 3: someone's playing that song, they're they're definitely playing your version in.
Speaker 6: That TP appearances and everything else. That was the version
Speaker 6: that became a hit. But I probably shouldn't even be
Speaker 6: talking about details of this because there was a settlement
Speaker 6: that we finally reached and it was.
Speaker 2: Not particularly good. But so I don't have good memories
Speaker 2: about that, Let's put it that way.
Speaker 7: You have good memories about Taxi that Angela.
Speaker 6: Well, of course, that's all good news for me, you know,
Speaker 6: kind of I could have never anticipated how that would
Speaker 6: become such a signature piece for me, and I thank
Speaker 6: the producers of that series, which is still in syndication.
Speaker 6: But the most weird but it turns out to be
Speaker 6: very celebratory. Simple usage of it turned out to be
Speaker 6: Celo Green when he used it on a two called
Speaker 6: Sign of the Times recently, and he just kind of
Speaker 6: sang over it, redid it added a lyric to it.
Speaker 6: And first, it was a little bit shocking when I
Speaker 6: first found out about it, because they hadn't come to
Speaker 6: me in advance about it either.
Speaker 2: But when I first heard it, I loved it so much.
Speaker 2: I just couldn't be anything but.
Speaker 6: Happy about it, and we ended up the really fair
Speaker 6: and nice licensing arrangement, and it has led to me
Speaker 6: being able to meet him in person in a similar
Speaker 6: way that I confronted Rizzard recently. But Celo and I
Speaker 6: did some stuff together and we wrote a song together
Speaker 6: that's going to be on the same new album of
Speaker 6: the album You haven't heard Side of the Times by Celo.
Speaker 6: It's my Taxi piece reinterpreted by him.
Speaker 3: Wow, okay, well wait, you mean the Sign of the
Speaker 3: Times that Rod Timberton worked on that.
Speaker 2: That's by Side of the Times.
Speaker 6: So the Times, Yeah, right, that Rod Timperton worked on
Speaker 6: this on my album. The Selo version, which he called
Speaker 6: Side of the Times, has his lyric that has Sign
Speaker 6: of the Times in the lyric.
Speaker 3: I see it's you have another version another song called
Speaker 3: Sign of the Times that's not.
Speaker 1: Right related to the tempert.
Speaker 6: Several Side of the Time songs, but but here his
Speaker 6: side of the Times has my Taxi melody and a
Speaker 6: very very cool but very specific reinterpretation of it that
Speaker 6: It was a great opportunity for me to meet him
Speaker 6: and collaborate.
Speaker 1: I want to ask about your gear.
Speaker 3: I know that as a creator who you know, since
Speaker 3: the Explosion record, like you've been experimented with like electronic
Speaker 3: sonics and whatnot. But I do know like a lot
Speaker 3: of those early synthesizers that were available in the seventies
Speaker 3: were monophonic, which kind of makes it limiting for you
Speaker 3: to play chords or anything, like you got to play
Speaker 3: one note. But I know, like around seventy six seventy
Speaker 3: seven when they're making polyphonic synthesizers which allows you to
Speaker 3: make chords. Are sort of manufacturers the Yamahas of the day,
Speaker 3: the or the the electronic makers of the day.
Speaker 1: Are they courting you? Are you getting endorsements? Are you.
Speaker 3: Sort of in that Stevie wonder way where you know
Speaker 3: they go to him and Herbie Hancock with all this
Speaker 3: new gadgetry and like here like use our stuff. And
Speaker 3: more specifically in the seventies early eighties, not now where
Speaker 3: of course, now you know we use that every day,
Speaker 3: but in the late seventies and eighties, like what was
Speaker 3: the courting system like with keyboard makers and you.
Speaker 2: I don't remember.
Speaker 6: Exactly when I got endorsement from Yamaha, but I've been
Speaker 6: affiliated with them for many many years now, specifically the
Speaker 6: discal Vier, the acousticana that has many capability that I
Speaker 6: use all the time. I love it, and I have
Speaker 6: a montage and motif whatever. I use a lot of
Speaker 6: Yamaha gear and I am affiliated with them. Most of
Speaker 6: the rest of my gear throughout has been I pay
Speaker 6: for it and I go to the music store and
Speaker 6: buy it whatever. Ara, you were talking about the polyphonic synthesizers.
Speaker 6: I can remember the early stages of that when it
Speaker 6: was very primitive by today's standards, and Oberheim was the
Speaker 6: company that I remember that had the polyphonic synthesizer that
Speaker 6: had separate oscillators for each sound. So in the Oberheim
Speaker 6: eight voice was the one I a lot that you
Speaker 6: could play polyphonically on it, but each note in the
Speaker 6: chord was going to it through a different oscillator and
Speaker 6: manipulated very differently than the way the more recent polyphonic synthesizers.
Speaker 2: Are, so that gave it a character.
Speaker 6: Each oscillator you could kind of tweak it, and there
Speaker 6: was a thickness about it that they gave that Oberheim
Speaker 6: eight boys, where I made a lot of records using that,
Speaker 6: and I remember that they were also funky in a
Speaker 6: sense that yes, you could play four six eight no chords,
Speaker 6: but it was the sensesizer was trying to catch up.
Speaker 6: If you try to do anything too fancy or too
Speaker 6: fast changing, it didn't behave like a.
Speaker 1: Yato.
Speaker 2: So if you held the.
Speaker 6: Notes down, you could do a string pad or something
Speaker 6: like that, but if you tried to do something really
Speaker 6: really technically fast with it, it was clumsy.
Speaker 7: I was just gonna ask. I wanted to make sure
Speaker 7: we got in questions about four play. I used to
Speaker 7: do my homework to those records in school in high school,
Speaker 7: so I specifically I just wanted just the between the
Speaker 7: sheets album and the lixer like those like I played
Speaker 7: those records like you know, back and forth. I wanted
Speaker 7: to ask one how did all you guys come together?
Speaker 7: And specifically, if you have any memories of recording, why
Speaker 7: can't it wait till morning?
Speaker 4: Phil Common, what that session was like?
Speaker 6: That's my shit, many many, many great memories from those years.
Speaker 6: In nineteen ninety one, I think it was I was
Speaker 6: headed out to Los Angeles working on an album of mine.
Speaker 6: That album ended up being called Grand Panel Canyon, and
Speaker 6: I had brought Harvey Mason to New York many many
Speaker 6: times to play with me because most of my sessions
Speaker 6: were being done in New York at that time.
Speaker 2: But I had also Lee Retnauer had used me on
Speaker 2: the project of.
Speaker 6: His, and we were dealing with wanting to do reciprocal
Speaker 6: So if I do something for you, play for you,
Speaker 6: I want you to play on my album whatever. He
Speaker 6: re owed me reciprocal, and since he was LA based,
Speaker 6: I thought it might be more interesting for me to
Speaker 6: go to LA and use bothly Written Hour and Harvey
Speaker 6: Mason on my album. So I planned it and didn't
Speaker 6: know who to hire on bass. Wasn't that familiar with
Speaker 6: the LA scene. So I asked both Lee and Harvey
Speaker 6: who try to use on bass, and separately both came
Speaker 6: up at the same answer Nathan East, who I had
Speaker 6: not met, never had worked with him before. And I
Speaker 6: found myself in the studio with those three other guys, Nathan, Harvey,
Speaker 6: and Lee, and something clicked and all four of us
Speaker 6: could just feel it wasn't like a regular recording session.
Speaker 6: The combinations of our backgrounds are things that we had
Speaker 6: worked on.
Speaker 2: Different projects. Whatever, It just felt really special.
Speaker 6: And on a break we had a conversation about the
Speaker 6: idea of how do groups get formed?
Speaker 2: When?
Speaker 6: How did Weather Report get formed? How did the modern
Speaker 6: Judge portet get formed? When did they decide to put
Speaker 6: a name on it and be a group rather than
Speaker 6: an individual? And one thing I do another I had
Speaker 6: at our job at Warner Brothers Records, and I was
Speaker 6: able to go to a meeting there and say, will
Speaker 6: you give us a budget to experiment and do a project,
Speaker 6: never thinking about it becoming a full time long thing.
Speaker 6: It was at that time maybe just one project was
Speaker 6: all we were thinking about. But the first song of Restoration,
Speaker 6: my composition on my album, was what we remember as
Speaker 6: being kind of like the first idea of a four
Speaker 6: place sound.
Speaker 3: Okay, so, speaking of warners, I always wanted to know this.
Speaker 3: I'm not asking this because you're categorized in a certain
Speaker 3: type of jazz, but I always wanted to know, you know.
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy seven, when Tommy Lapluna and George Benson
Speaker 3: create The Breezing Record, which was such a breakthrough album
Speaker 3: in terms of the multiple nominations that it got for
Speaker 3: Grammys and whatnot, you know, people were pretty much ready
Speaker 3: to dismiss George Benson, and not dismiss him, but you know,
Speaker 3: even he said like, well, I'm at the end of
Speaker 3: my room. Let me make this last record real quick
Speaker 3: and then retire. And then suddenly Breezing blows up. But
Speaker 3: did you see the embracing of that album as a
Speaker 3: victory for the type of jazz that you were doing,
Speaker 3: the type of instrumental music that you were doing. The
Speaker 3: fact that that album was somewhat embraced by the mainstream
Speaker 3: community and given all those accolades, all those Grammy nominations
Speaker 3: and whatnot.
Speaker 6: Yes, I was experiencing it from a distance, having done
Speaker 6: some collaborating with George when he was at CTI, and
Speaker 6: I was a little bit familiar with the complicated exit
Speaker 6: from CTI and when he went over to Warner Brothers
Speaker 6: and the sort of transition from just being a guitar
Speaker 6: player to a singer, and watched what was in George's
Speaker 6: mind of what he really wanted to do. And somewhat
Speaker 6: later after he went to Warner Brothers, I also got
Speaker 6: the job of producing one of his records, and at
Speaker 6: that time big bosses of Warner Brothers gave me the
Speaker 6: assignment of wanting to him play more guitar, but as
Speaker 6: I started to work with him, his heart was in
Speaker 6: singing more, and I could see that that has always
Speaker 6: been a conflict.
Speaker 2: And a lot of people, jazz.
Speaker 6: Fans just are aware of the genius that comes out
Speaker 6: of his fingers when he plays guitar that nobody else
Speaker 6: and do it.
Speaker 2: But uh, his.
Speaker 6: Whole other part of his personality felt that talent that
Speaker 6: he had as a singer too, and in the In
Speaker 6: a Breezing album, both were happy, both of course.
Speaker 2: Masquerade and.
Speaker 6: Every time I hear Breasons that tune, the same thing
Speaker 6: happens to me. There's no bridge, which was for us
Speaker 6: at that time. It's unusual. It's just the same. It's
Speaker 6: it's the same key and it just keeps repeating. But
Speaker 6: it was eight bars, uh, and it's just simple. He
Speaker 6: never goes away from it. And some of us who
Speaker 6: who have all these things, we think about stay with
Speaker 6: the hook, you know, don't get away from the hook,
Speaker 6: don't get too cute, don't get too complicated, because the
Speaker 6: fans want to hear that melody. And the way that
Speaker 6: that record was produced was so clearly on the on
Speaker 6: the money in terms of drive home that hook drive
Speaker 6: home uniqueness.
Speaker 2: It just made me want to go back to the
Speaker 2: drawing boards. I want to try to do that.
Speaker 6: I want to try to do something similar, but then
Speaker 6: you realize it's not easy to buy that matchic.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of our fan base might not
Speaker 3: know that Reason was written by Bobby Womack. It's actually
Speaker 3: a Bobby Womack cover, which I didn't know. I just
Speaker 3: recently found the Bobby Womack original, And you know, I
Speaker 3: tend to forget that Bob Womack was actually a good
Speaker 3: guitar player, Like so you know, that was the instrumental
Speaker 3: on one of his records in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 6: And I know I'm getting to know quest love as
Speaker 6: a musicologist.
Speaker 1: To music nerds man.
Speaker 2: Because I knew.
Speaker 6: That sort of in my district memory. But I don't
Speaker 6: think I ever heard Bobby one Mac's version.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it's it's damn near the same song, just
Speaker 3: with a harder Well when we say harder more like
Speaker 3: a hip hop is that should jump on it like
Speaker 3: it's it's actually amazing. The drums are more kracking on
Speaker 3: the wool Mac version. We are you going to ask Steve.
Speaker 4: Well, we kind of reazed right over it the time
Speaker 4: period that I wanted to talk about. I mean, Bob
Speaker 4: James had the coolest, one of the most iconic jazz
Speaker 4: labels of all the time with tappan Ze Records, and
Speaker 4: I'm a little curious about the the timetable because you
Speaker 4: were a and ring at Columbia. Was that during the
Speaker 4: CTI years when you were arranging and also playing on
Speaker 4: CTI records.
Speaker 2: I kind of had reached the end of my CTI.
Speaker 6: After my four solo albums that ended up around nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy seven, and there were some problems with CTI in
Speaker 6: the business world too, and then the lack of payment
Speaker 6: of royalties, et cetera, which necessitated me litigating there. I'm
Speaker 6: beginning to make it sound like a which I hope
Speaker 6: I wasn't in the long version of that. But there
Speaker 6: have been times when I've had to protect and in
Speaker 6: this case, I'm glad I did because I ended up
Speaker 6: with the ownership of my four records, which made it
Speaker 6: possible for me.
Speaker 2: To make many many things happened.
Speaker 6: So I left in nineteen seventy seven, negotiated with Columbia
Speaker 6: and signed there where Bruce Lenvall was the president.
Speaker 2: And he did give me the opportunity.
Speaker 6: To start a small custom label with the idea that
Speaker 6: I could do a continuation of sort of the CTI approach,
Speaker 6: in which I had done enough in this role of
Speaker 6: a ranger conductor for pre Taylor that my intention was
Speaker 6: to not do exactly what Greed Taylor did, but my
Speaker 6: version of it and tried to develop my own style,
Speaker 6: but influenced by him, and very early tonight you mentioned
Speaker 6: Joe Jorgenson. For many, many memories, I wanted Joe Jorgenson
Speaker 6: to be my Rudy van Gelder because Rudy Van Gelder
Speaker 6: was a very unique engineer for Preed Taylor and his
Speaker 6: style of engineering the sound of those records very different
Speaker 6: from anything else was out there, and in my experience
Speaker 6: of doing studio work in New York, Joe was the
Speaker 6: guy that I thought had the most interesting ears that
Speaker 6: the two of us could collaborate on trying to come
Speaker 6: up with our own sound.
Speaker 3: Would Rudy pre mix the stuff or like, would you
Speaker 3: guys track first then mix afterwards.
Speaker 6: That's a very good funny question because Rudy was extremely
Speaker 6: secretive about any of his techniques and he did not
Speaker 6: like sharing. He didn't not like anybody asking me any
Speaker 6: questions about you.
Speaker 1: Knew what my next question was, like share the secrets.
Speaker 6: So I got the job of writing these arrangements on
Speaker 6: where we'd have basic tracks, and all Rudy would be
Speaker 6: willing to give me was this rough of two track
Speaker 6: from the basic sessions, and I would take that home
Speaker 6: and listen to that to make my arrangements mix on
Speaker 6: those roughs that he sent me with the worst, most
Speaker 6: crude o reverb, no ambious, nothing, because he didn't want
Speaker 6: to let anything out of his studio that could even
Speaker 6: possibly be released. And so I have that memory of
Speaker 6: his mixing is so completely different from the way anybody
Speaker 6: else work.
Speaker 3: Wait, do you have a dry Rudy flat mix in
Speaker 3: your possession?
Speaker 2: Well? I have many. If I could find a real
Speaker 2: real player that would play.
Speaker 3: The I'm begging you to make a compilation of just dry.
Speaker 3: Because the thing is is until like Steve really got
Speaker 3: me into like listening to Steve's obsession with CDI like,
Speaker 3: and I'm sorry for really car jacking his interview Steve,
Speaker 3: Like Steve is the CTI coologist. So the thing is
Speaker 3: is that when I started studying Rudy's mix, thing I
Speaker 3: never was a fan of compression because I never liked
Speaker 3: being squeezed. But somehow on your on your records, on
Speaker 3: Grover's records, like certain CTI product, there's there's kind of
Speaker 3: a I don't know, I can't I don't have the
Speaker 3: proper eloquence to say the right words that describe Rudy's
Speaker 3: texture and his relationship with reverb and compression. But like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's that's the secret sauce that I'm dying because I
Speaker 3: feel like that is the the apex of seventies production
Speaker 3: that I can't master just yet.
Speaker 4: To go to his studio. It's still open, let's.
Speaker 3: Go, and still unscathed and still yeah, it's it's exactly
Speaker 3: the same.
Speaker 6: I'm I'm in the same boat as you, even though
Speaker 6: I spent it was almost like a full time job.
Speaker 2: Being there every day.
Speaker 6: In a studio for five years, and I never learned
Speaker 6: much about the details of it either, because he wouldn't
Speaker 6: talk about it.
Speaker 2: He wouldn't share anything.
Speaker 6: Every one of his all of his gear, like his
Speaker 6: equalizers or compressors, anything like that.
Speaker 2: He had.
Speaker 6: He had taped over the manufacturers the names of him,
Speaker 6: so he didn't want you to know what they were.
Speaker 1: That's hip hop.
Speaker 3: See that's hip hop, that's hide in the labels, Like
Speaker 3: y'alln't even know that, y'all.
Speaker 1: Following a cycle.
Speaker 4: So yeah, hey guys, Bob James had one of the
Speaker 4: most iconic jazz labels of all time called Tap and
Speaker 4: Z Records, And yeah, I just wanted to I found
Speaker 4: it really interesting what artists you chose to have leader
Speaker 4: albums on Tap and Zee. Obviously you had so many
Speaker 4: of your own records on that label as well, But
Speaker 4: I want to just run some names by you that
Speaker 4: might not necessarily be household names for listeners or for
Speaker 4: or for us, and if maybe you could just give
Speaker 4: us just a brief, you know, blurb about them, because
Speaker 4: I'd be interested in Wilbert Longmire.
Speaker 6: Yeah. I found out about Wilbert through George Benson. Actually,
Speaker 6: he and George Benson were friends, and George had heard him,
Speaker 6: and yeah, he sang and played guitar, and to get
Speaker 6: a recommendation with George Benson's but good as you could
Speaker 6: vote for. So that's the main reason why I signed Wilbert.
Speaker 6: And it was at a time when I was very
Speaker 6: much in the heat of wanting to be a good
Speaker 6: follow up to the CTI sound, but my own version
Speaker 6: of it.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: And that's that was the end result.
Speaker 4: Of it, okay. Joe Anne Brakeen.
Speaker 6: Very very original pianist, amazing. She could not be produced
Speaker 6: in any kind of way like some of the other
Speaker 6: coversion artists that I I had a chance to work with.
Speaker 2: She was completely her own person.
Speaker 6: So my role with her in some ways was to
Speaker 6: try to be like what I would want a producer
Speaker 6: to be with me if I just had complete authority
Speaker 6: to do whatever I wanted to do. And I knew
Speaker 6: that it would be a kind of simple production because
Speaker 6: she just wanted to play jazz with a great rhythm
Speaker 6: session and make sure we have the best engineer for her,
Speaker 6: get the right sounds for her, and let her do
Speaker 6: her own thing. That was pretty much my goal with Joanne.
Speaker 4: There was an artist named Mark Colby that did a
Speaker 4: couple of records on Tappenzi.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He toured with me a lot, played my band, and.
Speaker 6: I've always loved power in his playing and I could
Speaker 6: treat him similarly to the way I tried to treat
Speaker 6: Grover Washington and for example, another sexophone player for that label.
Speaker 2: And very fond memories of those.
Speaker 4: Records, and Richard T the piano player, did a leader
Speaker 4: album or two on Tapaze as well.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, Richard being a member of that stuff rhythm
Speaker 6: section that had Eric Gill on guitar and Gordon Edward
Speaker 6: was the bass and Rob McDonald percussion. They were a
Speaker 6: kind of quintessential top, top of the line R and
Speaker 6: B based rhythm section and Richard T's unique kind of
Speaker 6: heavily Church influenced combination organ and sometimes Fender roads. I
Speaker 6: just loved everything about him. I'm trying to emulate some
Speaker 6: of his feel because I was alongside him on many
Speaker 6: sessions where some of the Quincy Jones States and a
Speaker 6: lot of New York studio days, Richard be on Oregon
Speaker 6: and I would be on piano or sometimes trade off
Speaker 6: or whatever. So getting to know him that way and
Speaker 6: realizing what a uniquely great artist he was, of course
Speaker 6: he was an obvious one for me to try to sign.
Speaker 4: And Steve Khan, the guitar player, I think that was
Speaker 4: the first tappan Zee record.
Speaker 2: Might have been.
Speaker 6: Steve was very determined that he wanted the Columbia identity
Speaker 6: on his album, also SOE logo on it.
Speaker 1: But but he wanted the Red label, not the Blue.
Speaker 6: Kind of like that I didn't have enough prestige and
Speaker 6: that he needed the big name.
Speaker 2: On there too. He and I were friends, and so
Speaker 2: he was and smaller budgets.
Speaker 6: I was somewhat limited to sign the people that were
Speaker 6: within my sphere that I either knew or that I
Speaker 6: knew that they were available.
Speaker 4: Just a couple more Mango Santa Maria.
Speaker 6: Well, yes, and he came through the bigger label as well.
Speaker 6: Particular kind of sound, the Latin American sound that I
Speaker 6: wasn't doing with anybody else, made it possible for us
Speaker 6: to make some pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Records with him.
Speaker 4: And where did you come across? Alan Harris came to.
Speaker 6: Me through Columbia, through just and the most unusual Tapenzy project,
Speaker 6: I guess, and the one that I had the least
Speaker 6: influence over.
Speaker 2: I don't remember.
Speaker 6: Doing anything musically on it other than making it possible
Speaker 6: for him to do his thing and trying to treat
Speaker 6: him the way I would have wanted to be treated
Speaker 6: as a producer, make it possible for him to create
Speaker 6: his music.
Speaker 4: Okay, last one and the one I wanted to know
Speaker 4: the most about. It seemed to be kind of your
Speaker 4: partner at the label, which is Jay Chadaway. Can you
Speaker 4: tell us who a little bit about him?
Speaker 6: Well, I think I had maybe originally found out about
Speaker 6: him through Maynard Ferguson because he had done a lot
Speaker 6: of arranging from Maynard, and I was in need of
Speaker 6: somebody that had the same kind of arranging background as
Speaker 6: me because I was not able to keep up with
Speaker 6: the request that I was getting into do arrangements.
Speaker 2: So I started working with him in that way.
Speaker 6: I got to know him a little bit and we
Speaker 6: hit it off, and I knew he had a similar
Speaker 6: approach to sound production. And yeah, we had some really
Speaker 6: very good years and have remained friends. I just he's
Speaker 6: a big sailor fan. He and his wife live on
Speaker 6: a boat. A lot of times of the year, they
Speaker 6: take their take their boat to various places and just
Speaker 6: take up residence for.
Speaker 2: A long time.
Speaker 6: He moved after he after Z stopped, he moved to
Speaker 6: la and had a very successful career as a movie
Speaker 6: composer and he was very involved in the Star Trek series.
Speaker 2: Very very talented guy.
Speaker 4: Let me just wrap up the tappan Zee thing, Amir.
Speaker 4: You did such an incredible job with that label. Really
Speaker 4: the best thing that a label can do, which is
Speaker 4: create this whole world onto itself with all the beautiful
Speaker 4: continuity with the album covers, the beautiful gatefold album covers,
Speaker 4: and really you really knocked it out of the park
Speaker 4: with the with tap and Z was. I mean, you're
Speaker 4: welcome for all the rabbit holes folks out there with
Speaker 4: all those names. But all those tappan Ze records are great. Yeah,
Speaker 4: short related maybe not the Alan Harris record.
Speaker 3: Well, I wasn't going to say that, you said it now.
Speaker 2: Short thing.
Speaker 6: Since you mentioned Joe Jordanson, I more and more think
Speaker 6: that there just aren't really any total coincidences in life,
Speaker 6: that some things just happened for a reason. Recently, I
Speaker 6: was contacted by Joe's son, Michael Jordanson, who is interested
Speaker 6: in doing a biography on me, and he works with
Speaker 6: a video production company and I've been starting up a
Speaker 6: project in which he's going to do biographical thing.
Speaker 2: He's a member of the group Wilco Who's that's true.
Speaker 6: But when he grew up, he was when he was
Speaker 6: I don't know, ten or twelve years old, his father,
Speaker 6: Joe would invite him into the studio where we were
Speaker 6: making all those records. During that period of time, and
Speaker 6: he formed his taste and everything else based upon listening
Speaker 6: to all those records. And so many many years later
Speaker 6: after he's gone into business as a keyboard player and
Speaker 6: has a lot of success with Will Go. Now we're
Speaker 6: meeting again, and it gives me a chance to pay
Speaker 6: my respects and have such fond memories of all those
Speaker 6: great records.
Speaker 2: That Joe did with.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you hear that stand good terms with your engineer
Speaker 4: could pay off.
Speaker 1: Yes, what Steve very important.
Speaker 4: But your very first production was on another Creed Tailor
Speaker 4: label called Salvation with Goborbo, the Hungarian guitar player. What
Speaker 4: was that like your first production and what was Zabo
Speaker 4: like nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 6: Unique aspect of that for me was it was the
Speaker 6: only time that I was able to actually produce and
Speaker 6: do something without Creed Taylor being there. It was his label,
Speaker 6: but he gave me the flexibility to just do that
Speaker 6: project on my own, and I went out and.
Speaker 2: To La and did it.
Speaker 6: And he was gobor was definitely a gypsy and he
Speaker 6: had his own style of approach, which I tried to
Speaker 6: keep that gypsy aspect, but to try to bring some
Speaker 6: of my own style into it. I wish I could
Speaker 6: have done more with him because he is kind of
Speaker 6: like an ideal artist for an arranger to produce, because
Speaker 6: I want to have the tapestry surrounding him, but I
Speaker 6: want him to be able to stay within his own style,
Speaker 6: and that's what I was trying to do.
Speaker 4: Wow, Gary McFarland worked a lot with him in that regards.
Speaker 2: Yes, definitely, I love Gary McFarland's work. In fact, I
Speaker 2: was very influenced.
Speaker 6: But I used to study his records to try to
Speaker 6: figure out how he made his choices.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Sign of the Times record.
Speaker 3: Now I get the film about to answer my own question,
Speaker 3: say Quincy Jones, but I'll ask you, how did you
Speaker 3: get involved with Rod Temperton working on that album?
Speaker 6: Quincy introduced me to Rod and he was in the
Speaker 6: studio and a couple of the records that I was
Speaker 6: involved with with Quincy, and I was a big fan
Speaker 6: admirer and Quence. He put us together because he thought
Speaker 6: that we might hit it off. And even though Rod
Speaker 6: specifically with his talent was not a classical music I
Speaker 6: didn't think that much of an influence, but as I
Speaker 6: was working with him, he just had a whole cinematic,
Speaker 6: classical way of talking to me, and we hit it
Speaker 6: off and I was trying to learn from him. I
Speaker 6: don't think Thriller had I can't remember where he was.
Speaker 3: And he just finished out The Wall and Thrillers about
Speaker 3: the kind of the next.
Speaker 2: Year, Yeah, so big.
Speaker 6: In other words, kind of out of my league, and
Speaker 6: I was kind of shocked that he was even willing
Speaker 6: to spend some time with me. But at least I
Speaker 6: had a chance to work in studio with him. He
Speaker 6: had his own complete language of how he talked and
Speaker 6: how he put together his vocals, and they were totally
Speaker 6: different from anything that I was aware of, So it
Speaker 6: was very much a learning process. And the difference, I
Speaker 6: guess the main difference in the success there was that
Speaker 6: when he worked with me, he had Bob James and
Speaker 6: when he worked with Michael Jackson he had Michael Jackson.
Speaker 2: That kind of says it all. That makes the difference
Speaker 2: in the success level.
Speaker 3: I guess you co scored one of my all time
Speaker 3: favorite films and I didn't realize it until maybe a
Speaker 3: year and a half ago during the pandemic that you
Speaker 3: created the King of Comedy score. So can you talk
Speaker 3: about working with Scorsese and.
Speaker 6: Well, you're crazy. Where do you get all these details?
Speaker 2: How do you feel? Well, you know more information than.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the pandemic happens, and trust me, the pandemic happens.
Speaker 1: You read all the fine print to keep yourself busy.
Speaker 6: Ash, I mean, I should have done a lot of
Speaker 6: homework before I did this.
Speaker 2: With you.
Speaker 6: Quest love you know so much. And I got to say,
Speaker 6: my memories of working on that are so vague in
Speaker 6: my mind now, I'm not sure that I even remember
Speaker 6: how to talk about it very much.
Speaker 1: You just threw it together and just gave it to him.
Speaker 6: Well, no, I mean I know that I was treating
Speaker 6: it very seriously at the time that I haven't listened
Speaker 6: back to it. But it's been twenty twenty five years ago,
Speaker 6: or at least forty, And when you reach my age,
Speaker 6: you know how hard it is to keep retaining a
Speaker 6: lot of those memories. You don't have much of a
Speaker 6: memory other than the way you described it as a
Speaker 6: weird film. Made a career assignment for me to make
Speaker 6: music for it. That's kind of about all I'd be
Speaker 6: able to say at this point.
Speaker 2: But do another zoom.
Speaker 6: I'll do some homework listen to it again and maybe
Speaker 6: I'll have something more intelligent to say.
Speaker 3: No, you know, I watch it like maybe five times
Speaker 3: a year, so for me, like I like when dark
Speaker 3: films have light music scores because it makes it even darker.
Speaker 6: So it contributes to the power, I think, rather than
Speaker 6: everything be dark as too obvious.
Speaker 3: Right, you're right, this is sort of on the same level.
Speaker 3: But so I used to work in a record store
Speaker 3: back in high school, and this is right when you
Speaker 3: and David Sanborn started your collaboration process. I think this
Speaker 3: was maybe this is the Double Vision album, but I
Speaker 3: just got to know this, you guys. Fade you guys,
Speaker 3: fade Algebra's voice right when he's about to start scatting
Speaker 3: like a madman on since I fail for you, and
Speaker 3: every time I hear it, like I'm now a collector
Speaker 3: of pro tools and whatnot, you know, Like I like
Speaker 3: hearing the original versions in its dry state and see
Speaker 3: what happens after the fate. But how long do you
Speaker 3: have any memory of how long that song goes on
Speaker 3: after the fade? Because right when the fade goes down,
Speaker 3: that's when like Algio just starts scatting out of his mind.
Speaker 3: And I always wanted to know what happens after that fad.
Speaker 6: Well, I can say that I was probably not there
Speaker 6: in the mix and the choice. I don't remember being there.
Speaker 6: I didn't produce that. I mean, it was my albums,
Speaker 6: my name on it, all right, but that fade. Usually
Speaker 6: I would have been very involved and very specifically with
Speaker 6: the last thing that you want people to hear, and
Speaker 6: you want it to be hot.
Speaker 2: You want it to be and I think the fade.
Speaker 6: Works just in the way you described it, because it
Speaker 6: left you wanting more, and it left it when it's
Speaker 6: at its most hot. What I would say about that
Speaker 6: record to you is that I'm very proud of the
Speaker 6: pre production and arranging and scoring that I did, which
Speaker 6: is would have been a conventional string orchestra and brass
Speaker 6: and whatever, but I chose to do it with my
Speaker 6: home studio equipment. And it's all the strings, all the horns,
Speaker 6: everything else are me synthesizers. And many people give me
Speaker 6: credit that when they hear it it sounds like a
Speaker 6: full large orchestra of production.
Speaker 2: But I had an otari a track.
Speaker 6: And this was in the era when you had the
Speaker 6: multi track studio or whatever in the studio and then
Speaker 6: you had to bounce down in order to do the overdub.
Speaker 6: So I took Bill say, I guess it was made
Speaker 6: a pre mix bouncing down and all of the basic
Speaker 6: tracks were on.
Speaker 2: He gave me four tracks or something like that to
Speaker 2: work with, and I.
Speaker 6: Created the woodwinds, the French horns and springs and all
Speaker 6: that were synthesized. And the part that I loved the
Speaker 6: most was in that exact section you're talking about, where
Speaker 6: he goes or something like that, and I scored it
Speaker 6: for the horns going in. The French horns echo that line.
Speaker 6: And because I had the rough mix that I was
Speaker 6: from that had his vocal already on it when I
Speaker 6: was working on my scoring, I was able to actually
Speaker 6: write the orchestration after the fact to make it sound
Speaker 6: like al was responding to the orchestra.
Speaker 1: So right, okay, but those.
Speaker 6: French horns were not there when he's sang it, so
Speaker 6: so I added the French horns before, so it make
Speaker 6: it sound like he was ad living to my orchestration.
Speaker 2: And if I do.
Speaker 3: This sort of like Steve Gadd's rumming. See now, now
Speaker 3: I realized the same exact approach. Yeah, the power the
Speaker 3: power of post production. Now that's that's the lesson I
Speaker 3: learned today. No, that was at the time when I
Speaker 3: was working at that record store. I think Moonlighting, Bruce
Speaker 3: Willison Sybil Shepherd's uh show, very popular show on ABC,
Speaker 3: had just started using that song. So suddenly a whole
Speaker 3: that was back in the day when like a show
Speaker 3: like that could feature a song, and then suddenly everybody's
Speaker 3: coming in requesting it. And yeah, when that that came out,
Speaker 3: just the whole world just started asking for Since I
Speaker 3: you know, fell for you that that uh that cover,
Speaker 3: so always want to do.
Speaker 6: That tables and ask you uh one question and yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 6: since I have the opportunity. Yeah, this is hypothetical only
Speaker 6: so since you nor I are kind of session players
Speaker 6: these days. But if we were in New York session players.
Speaker 1: Yes, let's do it.
Speaker 6: And there's a trio date that we were called upon
Speaker 6: to do, and you had me hell looking for a
Speaker 6: bass player. Who would you recommend do a trio date
Speaker 6: with with you on piano and me on drums?
Speaker 1: I mean the or we to do that? We I
Speaker 1: would actually let's.
Speaker 4: See who Derek hadge.
Speaker 8: I would say either Hajj or I would actually go
Speaker 8: with Pino of course, Yeah, I would go with Pino.
Speaker 8: Derek Hodge can go with Christian Mcbriene McBride. But Pino,
Speaker 8: you know, I like, I've worked.
Speaker 6: With you know a little bit many years ago, and
Speaker 6: Christian McBride I did an album with, so that could
Speaker 6: be that.
Speaker 2: But the Pino is more on your knowledge since you've
Speaker 2: worked with them. Let's go with that.
Speaker 1: Are you are you committed to a label right now?
Speaker 2: Top and Z I will do it.
Speaker 4: I got to say, I'm sorry, this is I have
Speaker 4: to cut in here because I have my own jazz
Speaker 4: label here as well. Uh thanks, thanks partially to my
Speaker 4: love for Tap and Z and and uh we can
Speaker 4: go co co on that if you're if you're interested.
Speaker 2: But I was only joking about Z. It's it's kind
Speaker 2: of let's.
Speaker 4: Bring it back, man, let's bring it back. JM I.
Speaker 1: I'm signed as d M I for all my jazz stuff.
Speaker 1: So I got to ask my label president right here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think we're good for We're good for a
Speaker 4: Bob James Pinal question. Yes, we'll sign on for that.
Speaker 1: We are absolutely going to do that. You and I'm
Speaker 1: not doing that like fake.
Speaker 3: You heard it here first, people No, we're making I'm
Speaker 3: telling you, I got so much envy when I saw
Speaker 3: that clip at Blue Mine, and then you know I
Speaker 3: was working all weeks. So but no, you're You're a
Speaker 3: favorite of mine, and you know I thank you for
Speaker 3: letting us nerd out on you for two hours.
Speaker 1: Yes, we will make this happen.
Speaker 2: Yay, yay, Okay, I hope that was recorded.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's absolutely recorded.
Speaker 3: You can sue me if I renigg on on on
Speaker 3: on this on this audio contract.
Speaker 6: Let's do it.
Speaker 2: Soon because of the age factor, so we don't.
Speaker 1: Yes, I don't know if I have much time left.
Speaker 1: So yes, I will do it.
Speaker 3: You will be here forever, trust me, Steve. I'll leave
Speaker 3: you with the last question. Then I'm signed out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, last question. Whose idea was it to name the
Speaker 4: first for Bob James albums one, two, three, four, because
Speaker 4: we're modeling Ray Angry's catalog after that on our label.
Speaker 4: But was that preconceived or did you just do that
Speaker 4: as it went on?
Speaker 6: I think Cree Taylor's idea and the way he explained
Speaker 6: it to me at that time, because we were very
Speaker 6: aware of Chicago, the group Chicago had done talk about
Speaker 6: it a lot and the way I remember Creed thinking
Speaker 6: about it strategically was that. And this was nice that
Speaker 6: he was thinking that I might have longevity. But if
Speaker 6: you name if, if you name it that way, you
Speaker 6: get to your album five and the people are fans,
Speaker 6: they know that they got four that they have to.
Speaker 4: Collect, so collect the.
Speaker 2: More records you make, and I did have.
Speaker 6: It happened to me that after I got up to
Speaker 6: ten or whatever, that the avid fans know what they
Speaker 6: have to look for that, oh I don't have eight
Speaker 6: or I don't have And I heard him talking about that,
Speaker 6: but that was that was what was in his mind.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, thank you, thank you for it.
Speaker 6: Do you have time for me to tell you one
Speaker 6: more little thing, because yes, you and I encountered each
Speaker 6: other when I came in the middle of your back
Speaker 6: and forth thing that you had going with Bis Marquis
Speaker 6: about the bells.
Speaker 1: Damn, I forgot about the bells.
Speaker 3: Sure that he's no longer with us, can you just
Speaker 3: release a copy of PI Peter Piper without the bells?
Speaker 2: Well, here's what I wanted to tell you.
Speaker 6: I did a little round table at the Blue Note
Speaker 6: with some hip hop guys and we had a surprise
Speaker 6: for them because my engineer, David, we had gone out
Speaker 6: to Iron Mountain to check out my master recordings, the
Speaker 6: multi tracks and so, and got the multi tracks from
Speaker 6: those sessions for that album Take Me to Marti Gras,
Speaker 6: And we have an outtake of a different take of
Speaker 6: Taking Me to the Marti Gras that David made a
Speaker 6: rough mix that played it for these guys at the
Speaker 6: roundtable that nobody had heard before, and it's got the
Speaker 6: bells on there. But I have the multi tracks and
Speaker 6: I could do whatever I want. And when I went
Speaker 6: to Iron Mountain to check them out to make sure
Speaker 6: that the multi tracks were still in good shape, I
Speaker 6: was able to sit at the console and push a
Speaker 6: solo button and hear.
Speaker 2: Boom boom boom boom boom.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Uh. And it's a different a little bit different groove
Speaker 2: and play.
Speaker 6: I played the melody differently, different keyboard solo in the middle,
Speaker 6: and of course it doesn't have any other production than
Speaker 6: any of the strings all that other stuff.
Speaker 2: Because he's out.
Speaker 1: I do have a question, but just a bonus question.
Speaker 3: You you have a tendency to use a lot of
Speaker 3: sound effects on your What's the purpose of that, because
Speaker 3: even with take Me to the Mani Gras, and even
Speaker 3: with Alley of the Shadows, Like, what was the purpose
Speaker 3: in using those like sound effect records on top of
Speaker 3: the music cinematic?
Speaker 6: I don't know that we were even that specific about it.
Speaker 6: But the atmosphere with Take Me to the Marti grad
Speaker 6: we were trying to create the party in New Orleans
Speaker 6: kind of an atmosphere. So that was that one was
Speaker 6: pretty clear.
Speaker 1: But which animal sounds No, I don't know. It just
Speaker 1: like this sounds like a bunch of sheep in the
Speaker 1: background or something.
Speaker 4: But it sounds it sounds like they were just having fun,
Speaker 4: is what. It sounds like a lot On Chapanzee, they
Speaker 4: use a lot of sound effects on tap and z
Speaker 4: and it's just you know, you can tell they're just
Speaker 4: having a blast.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're gonna have new sound effects that we'll be able.
Speaker 4: To do with it.
Speaker 1: Let's make it happen.
Speaker 4: We're all analog though, so bring your analog thoughts.
Speaker 1: Yes, we'll do this.
Speaker 3: So on Behalf of Sick Steve Laya fon Diicgelo and
Speaker 3: on Paid Bill. This is Quest Love talking to the
Speaker 3: great Immortal Bob James, my my future collaborator. Yeah, We're gon,
Speaker 3: We're gonna do this project and up your grammy count.
Speaker 3: I'm calling it right now. This is Quest Love Supreme,
Speaker 3: one of the dude. This NERD's paradise right now and
Speaker 3: I'm happy and I'll see you guys on the next.
Speaker 1: West Love Supreme Zeo. West Love Supreme is a production
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