Questlove Supreme: Bob James

April is Jazz Appreciation Month, and Questlove Supreme sits down with a genre legend. Bob James recalls his incredible journey and working with Sarah Vaughan, Creed Taylor, Idris Muhammad, and others. Bob speaks about becoming a beacon for Hip Hop and samplers, and how he has gone from a source to a collaborator with artist like RZA, Talib Kweli, and soon...Questlove. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
West Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. Wait a minute,
is that a d X seven.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
That is a I know chorus patch on my montage?

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Okay, we got it.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Nice, Nice, ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to another episode of
West Love Supreme. I don't know Steve and why we
might need another superlative, like, you know, like James Brown
has the famous Flames. I think we should be like
the legendary Supreme or you know, something some even more exciting. Yeah,

(00:50):
you know, because I feel like every episode has yet
another kind of bucket list that we didn't know that
we wanted to check off. Steve, I feel like this
is going to be the Yeah, this is the Steve
MVP episode. Not to put any pressure on.

Speaker 4 (01:11):
You, I've handled some episodes. I think I had one
of the top five episodes of last year if you
want to check the numbers.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
Like this, this is sort of like, you know, we
had expectations for Lebron to be the guy back when
in high school and.

Speaker 4 (01:26):
All right, well, I want you to do your intro.
But but yeah, I was just telling honestly before the
before we started the show, was telling Bob and Sonny
that I do have a radio show on WKCR, Columbia
University's radio station, and the show that we do is
about jazz labels, and each episode we cover a different label,

(01:47):
and quite recently a couple months ago, we did a
three hour episode about tappan Zee Records, which is Bob's
label under Columbia in the late seventies and eighties and
into the nineties, I believe, well as part of Warner
But Tappansz went on for a bit, and I'm dying
to talk directly to the man who started the label
and who was it was such an influential label and

(02:09):
it's getting a little lost. So I want to refresh
our listeners with some like it said in like twenty episodes.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
No, this is amazing, This is amazing. I might I
might just skip the intro anyway. Fante laya, you guys cool?

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're good.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
I'm living.

Speaker 4 (02:30):
What's going on?

Speaker 5 (02:30):
Man?

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Was that? So?

Speaker 3 (02:31):
I will basically say that our guest today, of course,
is a legendary jazz musician, but I don't think we
could just reduce him to jazz. Yeah, his music is smooth,
but we dare not call him smooth jazz. His music
is hip hop, but you know, we can't call him
hip hop. But I think probably the most unique character

(02:53):
trait of our guest today is probably my or not
my our inability to pinpoint what is he exactly? Is
he an avant garde artist, Is he a musical provocateur?
Is he the godfather smooth jazz?

Speaker 1 (03:11):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
I will say that probably when the smoke clears and
we start taking a toll of the artists that fall
under the jazz umbrella, and there's many categories under that,
I will say that as far as the scope of
hip hop, and yes, like we kind of come from
a hip hop scope because of our age and whatnot,

(03:33):
we get to know a lot of these artists through
the power of sampling, I will say that our guest
is probably at the top of the list.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Like I think, hands down he's the.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
King of textures, which is something that you don't necessarily
hear someone describe another musician, but listening under a hip
hop context, texture means everything. I also think that our
guest is probably one of the kings of the perfect
four bar capture, the ability to transform your new creation

(04:04):
into something else.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
That's just how adventures he is cut to cut to
cut to cut, from album to album.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
And I will say that probably one of the best
engineered artists under the contemporary jazz umbrella, just as sound
speaks to probably everyone in my generation and beyond, because
of course, a lot of his music is the foundation
for some of the best hip hop that I've ever known,

(04:33):
that we've ever known. And you the listener, you've heard
his music, whether you knew it or not. He is,
you know, multi nominated, underappreciated, loved, worship, always in demand,
an absolute legend. This is the Bob James episode of

(04:54):
Quest Love Supreme. Finally, Man, Yes.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
And I hope that was recorded so I can put.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
I cut it in half, like because I could really, yeah,
take this for eighteen minutes.

Speaker 4 (05:13):
You mentioned the best engineered. Did you mean engineered or
did you mean like him engineering at a concept? I mean,
I'm trying to bring up the name Joe Jorgenson, who
was George.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
Organ and Rudy Like for me, just it's the perfect
texture of compression and natural sounds to me that I
think is what attracts my generation to his music, because
you know, like there's two ways to take in music.
You know, we come from a generation where you go digging,

(05:46):
you take the records home. And I mean, with the
notable exception of Primo and Dyla, I don't know many
hip hop producers that actually listen and absorb the records,
like listen to it over and over and over again
until they actually absorb it. And you know, because a
lot of us just skip put it on forty five
no no, no oh, that's something you know you skip around.

(06:09):
But to me is one of some of the best
engineered music for the purpose of sampling. But you know, again,
it's like you can listen to his music under different scopes,
not just like from a sampling perspective. But that's the
thing you can't category.

Speaker 4 (06:25):
Is it one more thing before? Maybe we let the
guests speak.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
Right, Let's have a whole episode where he just doesn't
good thing.

Speaker 4 (06:35):
You watch Keyboard Bob, I've smiling.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
I'll just sit here and listen.

Speaker 4 (06:40):
So I think the word that you were missing in
your intro and why it's so hard to describe what
he did and what he does is fusion. I think
that what he did was basically just another version of
fusion jazz.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
But I feel like any description for jazz artist is
almost like a four letter word.

Speaker 4 (06:57):
Fusion. You know is includes obviously whatever many different things
that are being fused.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
Well, let's ask him, Bob James, welcome to the show. Finally,
nineteen minutes later. You know, I know we do it
if all is said and done and without sort of
you know, oftentimes artists will and I'm guilty of it,
like sort of ducking and dodging the accolades like what

(07:24):
would you like us to know you as? And describing
your artistry.

Speaker 6 (07:31):
I don't know that I'd probably be the right person
because so busy doing it, and I never could stay
in one category for very long. Maybe I was just
too restless or something. But at one point earlier in
my career, my wife advised me that we were having

(07:52):
a conversation about I thought I was spreading myself too
thin and I should focus more on one thing and
make up my mind whether I want to be in
a ranger or a pianist in what genre classical jazz
or whatever, And she said, stop worrying about it, just

(08:13):
do what you do, and that maybe what sets you
apart or makes you different from an other artist is
that you do a lot of stuff. And so I've
kind of stayed with that and not attempted to categorize
myself or go too far into one direction, because I
love the variety and the challenge of it. Right now,

(08:36):
trying to meet hip hop head on, rather than have
it happen off to the side, whether they take a
chunk of me while I'm not there in the room
to be able to defend myself, it might be good
to get in there and say, well, wait a minute,
wait a minute, before you chop me up, let's see
if we just go from beginning.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
To end every now, Okay, So Bob James does a
lot of stuff.

Speaker 4 (09:01):
The reason why said fusion though, Bob, is because I
feel like Tapanzee Records and a lot of what you've
done in your career was not only fusing different types
of music together, but also really incorporating the place and
the time period into your music. Like New York City
in the late seventies and early eighties, and and you know,

(09:22):
the city and the time period did that play a
lot into the music.

Speaker 6 (09:27):
I absolutely always have thought that one of the things
about jazz is it's improvised, so you're giving your feeling
right at that moment, on that day in that city,
wherever you are that it definitely does represent the time
period of what's going on. It should anyway, if we're
being honest, we're reflecting our time, and that changes. So

(09:52):
I've resisted when people try to make a definition of
what jazz is or because it changes. It changed along
with everything else that's going on around it.

Speaker 4 (10:03):
What was your first musical memory.

Speaker 6 (10:08):
Getting fired from being pianist at a tap dance class
in my hometown.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
I think I was twelve or something like that.

Speaker 6 (10:15):
And I couldn't keep the beat, so the tap dancers
were tripping and finally the well, actually, the reason why
I got hired in the first place is I think
I was the only pianist in the town that they
could use to play for this tap dance class. I
guess it's my earliest memory of trying to learn what

(10:36):
keeping the beat met.

Speaker 3 (10:38):
Still trying who would have the gumption to fire a
twelve year old?

Speaker 6 (10:43):
Yeah, that was pretty cold, and I don't exactly remember that,
but I may have defined that too harshly and they
may have.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
I actually told me to go home to my mom.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
Passive aggressive firing, Okay.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
You couldn't keep up? Was it with a simple kickball?
Change of it all. Is it one of those kind
of classes of beginners. I was just curious. I just
I mean, you know, I'm a Heines girl.

Speaker 4 (11:08):
Was there music around your house growing up?

Speaker 2 (11:10):
Not a whole lot.

Speaker 6 (11:12):
My father was a lawyer, and I lived in a
small town of Missouri where what I did here was
mostly country music, and my parents didn't really have that
many records that came close to jazz either. I started
hearing a little bit and getting intrigued high school baby,

(11:33):
and I remember kind of liking that, feeling that it
was improvised, as opposed to what I perceived classical music
being too much practicing, and jazz represented this at that time,
escape from practicing, so because you could just make it
up anything that came into your head. And it's only

(11:57):
been in more recent years that I decided that practicing,
even somewhere in the relationship to jazz was a good
thing and not a bad thing.

Speaker 4 (12:09):
So around what year was that when you discovered jazz.

Speaker 6 (12:14):
In the nineteen fifties, in the mid nineteen fifties, and
I do remember that that was pretty much the highlight
of the West Coast jazz because I do remember Chet Baker,
Jerry Mulligan, Dave bru Beck, those names formed or the

(12:34):
style of it, the West Coast style was intriguing to me.
Only in college did I kind of get more tried
to get more deep.

Speaker 4 (12:44):
I know, there's this famous story of was it a
town show or something some kind of competition where the
bands were being judged by Henry Mancini and Quincy Jones,
And how.

Speaker 6 (12:57):
About that for a panel to be judging. Yeah, it
was very pivotal time in my life. I was at
that time, I just graduated from the University of Michigan,
and there was a kind of big avant garde group
of musicians that I became associated with because they needed

(13:22):
performers who were willing to be really daring and do
crazy things. That the avant garde world was really out
at that time, and so I was incorporating some of
those avant garde things into my jazz trio. And I
decided to take the trio down to Notre Dame where
this jazz festival was being held, and it was very conventional.

(13:44):
We were expected to play bebop and I kind of
deliberately went up against that and started playing some crazy
stuff along with some bebop and Quincy's here especially. I
kind of don't remember whether Henry MENSI he was into
what we did, but Quincy definitely was, and they put

(14:06):
a smile on his face. Gave me a chance to
meet him, and we kind of prevailed at that in
the Winter Circle at the festival, and Quincy signed me
to record deal. So gave me confidence to move to
New York and go into the jazz business.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Did you been to school? Yep.

Speaker 6 (14:26):
I got a master's degree in composition, mostly classical training.
My jazz training was extracurricular. I'd go into Detroit from
ann Arburn, look around for a place to sit in.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (14:44):
And so Quincy signed you to was it Mercury?

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yes?

Speaker 6 (14:50):
And we recorded the album in Chicago. He was living there,
I think at that time.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
And that's where he was. The Mercury was based in Chicago.

Speaker 4 (14:59):
And so this is like the early sixties, right, Yes.

Speaker 2 (15:03):
Sixty three, sixty two, sixty two.

Speaker 4 (15:05):
Sixty three, And so I know that at the end
of this small part of the conversation, Quincy eventually recommends
you or lead you to Creed Taylor, and that gets
you to CTI. But what happens in between there in
the mid sixties.

Speaker 6 (15:24):
Another big pivotal time was when I got the job
with Saravon, her music director of Pianist nineteen sixty five.

Speaker 4 (15:32):
Wow.

Speaker 6 (15:33):
I had learned that her pianist ron L Bright had
left and she was looking around, and indirectly Quincy was
involved in that too, because where I learned that Sarah
was looking for pianists was at this music copy service
in Manhattan where I used to hang out and watch

(15:54):
all the arrangers come in with their charts that music
needed to be copied. This was before the computer era,
where the copyists were still copying out departs for the
musicians in ink. So anyway, uh, yeah, I learned about
this possible job. And I had actually met Sarah very

(16:18):
briefly once when I was playing with Maiden Ferguson's band
at Bergland in New York, and Sarah came in to
the club and made her ask her to come up
to sing, and of course she didn't have any arrangements
with her, so she couldn't do anything with a big band.
And that's when my nerves kicked in because the pianist

(16:40):
always kind of gets the responsibility to have to play,
and once once she calls out a song, you better
know it, because she wouldn't have come in with any music,
even for the pianist. I got really, really lucky that
that night because she said, do you know the Sweetest Sounds?

(17:03):
And I was able to say fairly quickly, yeah, well
key this in the jargon of that time. Lets the
person who asks you about it know that you're that
you're prepared.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
And at that time, there.

Speaker 6 (17:22):
Was a Broadway musical that had just opened up, and
the Sweetest Sounds was one of the songs in that musical.
It was a brand new song by Richard Rodgers. But anyway,
I was kind of a fan of musical theater, and
it's just complete coincidence that I knew this song just barely.

(17:43):
Shoe Sarah was one of the first cover artists sing
it out of the Broadway show, and so.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
It made an impression on her. And it was at
least a year or two.

Speaker 6 (17:54):
After that that I responded when she was looking for
a pianist, and she remembered that night and I got
to John, I have.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
To ask a real amateur jazz question. Now, you know,
my tenure in school was like in the eighties and nineties,
so of course I'm in a generation that grew up
with having access to what they would call a fake book.
Was there any sort of cheat sheety fake books of

(18:31):
that level back in well, you know those songs are
also being written in real time, But how does a
musician learn these repertoires, like you would just have to
go to the store and just buy all the sheet
music to everything? Or were their fake books out back then?

Speaker 6 (18:48):
Yeah, in my memory, there were fake books that kept
getting bigger as a as a tool. You know, we
have it in our phone. We could look up atty Saw.
I mean, the similar kind of a fake book thing
that we could do. But at that time, I'm reasonably
sure that this song was so new that it wouldn't

(19:09):
have been in a fake book anyway, because you jok
them out. And in Maynard's band, the only thing I
would have had on the piano was his charts that
I was playing with him, so that when she came
in unannounced and surprised that if I hadn't known, that
song might have changed my life and I probably wouldn't

(19:30):
have gotten the gig later.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
I see now every time we have a jazz artist
on the show, the first thing they want to do
is sort of dispel not only dispel the myth, but
sort of dispel it in a kind of a stick
to a pinataway. Now, in general, if you're moving to
New York City looking to make a living playing this music,

(19:56):
jazz in particular, you pretty much have to be a
wizard at reading music.

Speaker 1 (20:01):
Correct.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
I wouldn't say you have to what's that?

Speaker 1 (20:06):
What y'all?

Speaker 6 (20:07):
Well, you know, there were two different approaches to it.
In my case, I think I was pretty clearly thinking
that the more trending you had, the better, and that
just meant it increased your odds of getting a gig.
Some of the gigs were not necessarily going to be
a jazz gig. You might get a gig playing for
wedding or whatever, and certain kind of gigs, if you

(20:31):
couldn't read, you wouldn't get that gig, But certain jazz gigs,
it didn't make any difference whether you read or not,
because we all know that the greats that were not readers,
And that's just a particular way. And I felt also
to happen for me with Greed Taylor, he was a

(20:53):
very much his style with his label, had a lot
of production values and he was adding strings and woodwinds
and various things to start out with a basic jazz
group and then give it the same kind of production
details that pop artists had. So he needed arranger to

(21:15):
do that, and it turned out that he he learned
that I was qualified to do it after having been
introduced to him by Quincy. So I got that job
because of my training, and it helped me get the job.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
All right, let's take value of the shadows, which maybe
our audience might note that as a group homes the
realness now value of shadows, which has so much like
stop on a dime, you know, just like all this
arrangement stuff. So might I believe, like Steve gadd or
it's just mohammet, we're giving these charts and knew exactly

(21:56):
when the like the starts and stops were because I'm
imagining that you guys can't live in a studio like
I come from a place where like I've written complete
albums inside the studio, whereas like I'm assuming that jazz
musicians have to have this stuff prepared ahead of time.
You just go to studio and you knock it out
real quick. You don't waste time doing fifteen takes twenty

(22:20):
takes or whatnot, So like, do they just study the
music or do you give him a cassette the arrangement
ahead of time and they just committed to memory.

Speaker 6 (22:30):
It was all variations of that over many years. You
mentioned Idris Muhammad in my memory of working with Idris.
It's been a long time, but Idris may have been
able to read some simple chart, but he was not
what we would call reader, And so I was going
to hire Adrise. I wouldn't put a big complicated chart

(22:52):
in front of him because even if he did, it
would change his approach to playing, and what I wanted
from him was his his own own, loose, non obedient,
reading a chart kind of style. So in some cases
we were deliberately trying to move away from a kind

(23:17):
of written approach to the rhythm section at the basic tracks,
because we had started during that era of overdubbing and
not having everybody in the room at the same time.
So for the most part, most of those CTI records,
we would record the rhythm section first and the production
part of it would come afterwards. So I could work

(23:39):
with two different kind of musicians. I could go in
on the rhythm section date and do a very loose
with minimum kind of chart, and then once I had
that basic track, I'd take that home and score the
more complex stuff or the stuff for the larger orchestra.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
And so I guess we did it both ways.

Speaker 6 (24:04):
And for a piece like Value of the Shadows or
Night on Maull Mountain, some of those things that were
adaptations of classical music, it definitely required a chart and
a musician that could read, and I hired them on
the basis of that. And it wasn't categorical, because the
next day I might want to do something that was

(24:26):
totally loose and just play some blues or whatever, and
then reading would take that music in the wrong direction.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Got it?

Speaker 3 (24:35):
In developing your initial sound? Who were you idolizing?

Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah?

Speaker 6 (24:42):
I wasn't too different from most other aspiring jazz pianists
in that I listened a lot to Oscar Peterson and
Bill Eppens, maybe the two that I listened to the most.
Of course, I tried to listen to everybody, Gardner and
Artatam and on and on, but I I usually came
down to thinking that three of those pianists influenced me

(25:05):
the most. When I was trying to break into the field,
and I would add count Basie to Bill Evans and
Oscar Peterson count Basie just because his minimalism of playing
only a couple of notes eight measures, but he knew

(25:25):
exactly when played them, and I loved that economy of
not playing too. He was sort of the opposite of
Oscar Peterson, and Oscar Peterson had so much chops that
I could I knew I could never do that anywhere
close to the way he did it, so I better
try to find some other approach.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
Is Bill the Is he partly responsible for why the
Fender Rhodes became your signature sound?

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Or was just.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
No?

Speaker 6 (25:57):
As a matter of fact, I didn't like the way
either Bill Evans or Oscar Peterson played the Fender Rose
and they only played it occasionally, and it always seemed
to me that sounded like they either had to do
it or experimented with it and ended up not liking it.
If you look at their overall recorded repertoire, you won't

(26:21):
find very many Fender Rows tracks from Bill Evans or
Oscar Peterson. And when I heard them play it, both
of them, I hope I'm not being sacrilegious, but they
they hit it too hard, They hit the keys too hard.
They wouldn't change their technique.

Speaker 7 (26:37):
They played it like it was an acoustic piano.

Speaker 6 (26:40):
Yeah, you can't play that instrument that way because the
acoustic piano has so much more dynamic range. And I
don't know it formed my style at that time because
I was asked to do it. I hadn't gone out
and found Fender Rose on my own. Rudy Vank had

(27:00):
one in his studio and I started being asked to
play it, and to my ear, I had to change
my technique to make it sound good.

Speaker 3 (27:09):
Was it was it like now it's so commonplace, but
in the early sixties when they're when they're developing this instrument, Like,
was it foreign?

Speaker 1 (27:20):
Was it like?

Speaker 3 (27:21):
Like, I mean the way that we look at probably
the way that we're looking at AI technology right now,
Like was it sort of a thing to marvel or
something to master?

Speaker 2 (27:32):
Like?

Speaker 1 (27:33):
What were your feelings on it?

Speaker 2 (27:36):
It was? It was a gig.

Speaker 6 (27:39):
I've also even really I was playing it because because
I had to. That was my assignment on that particular gig,
because they wanted.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
To Okay Bros.

Speaker 6 (27:52):
When my heart was still with the acoustic panto until
I began to realize that I was getting identified with
it and that I had some kind of approach that
people were hearing. That almost forced me to take it
more seriously. When my album, the first solo album that

(28:13):
I made for CTI had feel like making Love on it,
and there was a sound that I had used vendor
Rose on ROBERTA Flex because I played piano for her
on her version two, so that sound became very much identified.
That was what nineteen seventy four, I guess in some

(28:33):
ways I felt limited by it because it just had
no matter what you did, there was only one way
that I could make it sound authentic for good.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
Okay, So I kind of was starting your discography.

Speaker 1 (28:52):
The period in between.

Speaker 3 (28:55):
The first album, The Bowld Conceptions that Quincy produced and
your second album Explosions, which really doesn't get discussed enough, and.

Speaker 6 (29:07):
It doesn't because if it got discussed too much, I
might not have a career.

Speaker 3 (29:14):
The night and day of those two records, I meant
in nineteen sixty five, like I know by you know,
I know, by like fifty nine sixty like there was
there is avant garde jazz and whatnot, but your version
of it is way beyond like you know, Coltrane's thing
was more spirituality, and then you know, like the stuff

(29:36):
with the shape of Jazz to Come and all those
things like which I think they're being avant garde with notes,
but you know you're kind of taking at least listening
to those records.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
I mean, if I could be bold to say, and
you know, notwithstanding the.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
The early like electric records of the sixties, which were
more like demonstration records or that sort of thing, but
like dare I say, like that might have been one
of the very first electronica records, like just in terms

(30:15):
of you using different frequencies and whatnot, Like what made
you go from Night and Day from like bold conceptions
to Explosions.

Speaker 6 (30:27):
Well, it actually, in my memory was not totally Night
and Day, because they were kind of all related, and
there were some elements in the Explosions album that I
had already been experimenting around and that had gotten Quincy's attention.
The two classical avant garde composers that participated in the

(30:51):
Explosions album were Robert Ashley and Gordon Muma, and they
were both exploring different versions of what at that time
was called electronic music, but it was It was a
combination of what was called music concrete, and that was
taking just natural sounds like a train engine or birds

(31:17):
or whatever, and then manipulating them with tape machines. There
was no personal computer. Digital way we look at electronic
music now didn't exist at that time. There was a
lot of tape manipulation, and they did have oscillators, so
there were some very very primitive what we now call
synthesizers that were just beginning.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
To be put together. And what I tried to do with.

Speaker 6 (31:44):
Explosions is is I guess you could say it was
similar to the way artists us backing track more recently.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
So this electronic tape of or samply something.

Speaker 6 (32:03):
Yes, so that's the sample plays or the backing try plays,
and then we would improvise over the top of it
in a more conventional jazz way. And so the two
different elements would clash with each other, and that created
the conflict or the gardeners. And it was all seemed

(32:26):
to be all about pushing boundaries. What are the limits
of what could be called music? A sound organized sound, chaos,
And different people used the different approach. Sometimes it was
anger and thumbing their nose at the audience. The idea

(32:49):
of making an audience happy in the conventional sense or
making them fall in love, they wanted to do the opposite.
They wanted to make them so angry that they'd walk
out of the theater with them. So there was all
variations of that and debate about it and what's meaningful
what isn't. So you had the people that loved it,

(33:11):
but you had as many or more people that hated
it and.

Speaker 2 (33:15):
Thought it was noise. And so.

Speaker 6 (33:18):
In my youth, I was fascinated by it. I actually
loved it sometimes that and I always felt during that
time that I had the power to change it because
I could play conventional.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Jazz.

Speaker 6 (33:35):
I liked to surprise my audience that just when they
thought we were just playing some conventional bebop, all of
a sudden, electric electronic sounds would come in and then
we were suddenly in a completely different world where I'd
be stroking the strings with my hand or getting a
mallet and playing beating on the side of the piano,

(33:55):
and we were part of the time seducing the audience
and part of the time confronting them with.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
Surprise and making him deal with it.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
At that point, were you familiar with like artists of
the time like a Raymond Scott or the Tonto guys
or just any of those experimental synthesizer records.

Speaker 6 (34:23):
Yes, I was those two names, I don't remember, but
I was more influenced by the people in the classical
avoc guard world like John Cage and Stockhausen and ghost
people that it was a different kind of experimentation in

(34:44):
the jazz world. Don Ellis, the trumpet player, was also
very involved on avac guarde music at that time, and
there were the mob guys. When the MoG's emphasiser came up,
came into being a little bit later. Actually, by that
time I was sort of using interest frankly, the idea
of making the audience hate me. It started to be

(35:07):
so ob severe that I thought, well, I'll never be
able to make a living if I make.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
My You're saying that you were going for more of
like a Stravinsky make the audience hate me thing, or just.

Speaker 6 (35:21):
No, because Scherenberg might be a better example. Because Stravinsky's
music people realized fairly quickly that it was just great,
and it was they also rioted, you know, and.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
Had a melody.

Speaker 6 (35:41):
It had all of the things and it's survived as
a as a real classic, even though the dissonance shocked
people a little bit at the time, but it was
cinematic it. I never never viewed him as av It
was more, we say about.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
A provocateur, musical provocateur.

Speaker 6 (36:05):
He had come out of the Impressionist area era when
when the Romantic era of the nineteenth centuries the gradually
they began to get tired of tonal music and the
tonal and conventional dissonance, and so the Impressionist era reveled WC.

(36:27):
It was a blur and where's where's the tonic? So
by Stravinsky's time, he was going further in that direction
and more dissonance and a less provincial tonality, but still
making the attempt to Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't

(36:50):
think he wanted his audience to hate him like we
were sort of doing at that time. It was it
was fun and a temporary interest for me, just trying
to learn what were the limits. And I learned just
for myself that the limits that I wanted to go

(37:11):
back to were far more conventional and I wasn't really
getting it wasn't reaching my heart. The avant guarde side
of that was a curiosity from my brain. But I
more and more started to like the romantic side, and
probably those four years I spent with Sara Van, she

(37:35):
certainly wouldn't have let me play in the avant guarde.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Kenna, right, Yeah, I was trying to imagine that.

Speaker 6 (37:40):
Yeah, I had to really play all the learned the
standards and not only learn and learned the great voicings
and everything so I could inspire her and that became
my life.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
So why did it take almost a decade for you
to get to your third album? Your run of your period,
which you know, for most collectors believe that one is
your They seem to think that's your first record, even
though it's not. But just as the Bob James as
we know, why did it take you to nineteen seventy

(38:17):
four to start?

Speaker 1 (38:19):
You're a part of the.

Speaker 6 (38:20):
Story from the after explosions and after I kind of
thinking that it was a dead end for me.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
It was immediately after that that I got the job
with Sarah Vong.

Speaker 6 (38:32):
That was a four year thing, and by that time
I had given up any notion of being a leader.
When I first came to New York, I sort of
came as the Bob James Trio.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
I've thought of.

Speaker 6 (38:44):
Myself as a jazz pianist and was thinking about trying
to make a solo career. But I really liked a
job with Sarah being an accompanist, and I started getting
arranging jobs as a result of it, and I liked
that provided a steadier income in New York, and I
was starting to get arranging jobs. And by the time

(39:06):
I got to nineteen seventy when I got the job
to play on Quincy's album Walking in Space, which was
my introduction to Creed Taylor. That gave me the opportunity
for Creed Taylor to see what I could do, that
I could write for large ensembles. And still by that time,

(39:27):
I was not thinking of myself as a solo artist,
and I didn't even think I was going to pursue it.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
How musical was Creed Taylor, Well.

Speaker 6 (39:35):
He definitely wasn't one going out in playing an instrument
or conducting or arranging. He did have some training that
I heard about only by reputation. I never saw him
do it. I think you could describe him as a visionary.
He had a definite idea of how he wanted his

(39:57):
label to have a style, a sound, and a look,
even his packaging and his choice of covers and everything
about it. He had a very strong producer vision and
so his the style of the one element of it

(40:19):
that he talked to me a lout because he wanted
me to be one of the ones helping him realize
his vision. He was a very very passionate fan of
the music and he had his favorites. He had his taste,
and that that form his choices that he made throughout
those years.

Speaker 3 (40:36):
But does he allow you to really have say, like
I know that you started producing after the four out,
like by yourself, but like, are you allowed to have
say in these first war records?

Speaker 2 (40:49):
Definitely did.

Speaker 6 (40:49):
I had a lot to say, And you mentioned value
of the shadows right off the bat, which was completely
me going as almost as avour guarde as I would
have a project of his where he was a producer.
But he gave me a lot of leeway and the arrangements.

(41:12):
The basic thing that gave me that job early on
working with him was one of his stylistic things was
to take a classical theme that he thought that people
would recognize that and then converted into having jazz performers reinterpreted,
and that became such a trademark for him almost And

(41:36):
when he saw that I was able to work with
classical music and rearrange it and all that, that's led
me down that path with him.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
Okay, So take something like A Night on Bald Mountain,
which you know, if you're a Disney fan, you know
that from Fantasia. I'll admit that I met Night on
Bald Mountain because it was on side three of Saturday
Night Fever.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
You know.

Speaker 1 (42:02):
I was also like seven years old when it came out.

Speaker 3 (42:04):
But when you're doing these interpolations of classical music into jazz, one,
are you doing all the arranging? And how many man
hours does it take for you to write each part?
Because you're you know, I'm assuming that you're doing these
arrangements for your brass section, your string sector, like for

(42:27):
one song, how many man hours does it take for
you to write these arrangements out a lot.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
I was fast, and you kind of had to be.
I grew up watching the Great Arrangers, and Quincy had
told me about that music copy service that I mentioned
about earlier, and I would go in there and watch
how they would work.

Speaker 6 (42:50):
And there were people like Billy buyer's and there were
the people that got a lot of the jobs, and
I saw how they did their scores and how they
set up the scores that would make it easier for
the copyists to copy the parts and well organized and everything,
because very often there were deadlines and we had to
deliver half a dozen charts overnight for the session the

(43:13):
next day. So I learned to be fast, and I
definitely wasn't the fastest, but I could put something together
pretty quickly. And I had studied in college, so the
part of that whole process was getting to know the
range of the instruments and the kind of ways that
you could write for an instrument that would make that

(43:35):
player sound better if you kept it in the right range.
Lots and lots of stuff like that, and the fact
that I could do it allowed pre Taylor to give
me directions depending upon what classical piece he wanted me
to reinterpret. He'd give me some ideas about it, but
then he'd leave me on my own to execute it.

(44:01):
And the nine on Mountain nine on ball Mountain chart
that I did, and Steve Gadd played the drum part,
it was all about featuring him at that time.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
I just kind of know him, and I knew he
could read whatever I.

Speaker 6 (44:15):
Put in front of him, but keep it in the
spirit of free flowing jazz playing. And even with that arrangement,
we went in first with the rhythm section. I recorded
that and I refined to my score after that, somewhat
based upon the fills that Steve would play. I used

(44:35):
to like to do the vert rather than give Steve
all them notes with all those hits on it, you know,
the sycopatient things. He would just play loose, and I
would him and yeah, and when he would hit those fills,
I would make that the brass you know, no, that

(44:57):
make it sound like he was he was answering the
brea arrangement when actually and some of that stuff he
wrote it and it was tight and in version end version,
because the way he was playing it was loose, you.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
Know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
I knew Steve Gadd was a monster, but in my mind, okay, now,
it makes total sense that you do your rhythm section first,
and then you build around what your rhythm section does and.

Speaker 5 (45:22):
Then yeah, in order that way, there had to be
a pretty specific chart too, because it wasn't just a
simple lead sheet for Steve and the bass player Gary King.

Speaker 6 (45:39):
All that I had on that particular piece, it was
a lot was written out, but within that, since we
didn't have a whole brass section in the studio, there
was a kind of flexibility that we could use to
get the groove happening and to make it so that
it wasn't too too tight and too conservative in the

(45:59):
way we played it. So my memory of what we
were trying to do was both have a be a
very specific chart but also the feel of a loose,
improvised jazz performance.

Speaker 3 (46:15):
Your personnel, you know, it reads like a just a
reads like a who's who of just monsters. Of course
you know they're monster musicians now, but back then I'm
assuming that they were just you know, dudes that played music.
How did you go about gathering the personnels for your record?

Speaker 4 (46:36):
Because like it's the cast, it's just and leading into
tap and z. It's just Yes, it's so much about
who's around you. So yeah, I ask you a question, please, sorry.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
Yes, So, how did how did you come across like
the Ralph McDonald's of the world, the Grover Washington genius
of the world, the Wayne Yeah, Steve Gary.

Speaker 6 (46:58):
I don't think it's any different from what you're world
is now. New York is a great place, and that's
where maybe not quite as dominant as it was in
the nineteen seventies when I was doing my thing, but
everybody comes to New York too, and that's where most

(47:18):
of the gigs were, and by word of mouth, you
start to learn who are the best people. Once I
got onto Retailer's list, he had his favorites, but the
everybody was available to you. You could get George Benson
to play guitar on you could get Ray Brown to

(47:40):
play bass, and you could get whoever you want because
it was New York. And then it just became a
matter of casting. And I loved that whole aspect all
through my life. I love the conversations about who's the
new guy or gal, who who's going to inspire you?

(48:04):
And so you keep searching, and every month we would
find some new name that got in the door, and
you'd want to use them, and the best of them
became the people that we're talking about now.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
As a result of that.

Speaker 7 (48:19):
Did you and David Matthews ever collaborate at any time?

Speaker 2 (48:23):
No, the other David Matthews.

Speaker 6 (48:26):
There there's the Man, but the arranger Dave. It was
one of those things, like Don Sebeski, I rarely was
around him. If he got the job, I didn't, and
I got the job he didn't, So there was usually
only one of us on any particular project. I did

(48:49):
get hired as a pianist for some of Don Sebeski's stuff,
so I got to know him. But the the other arrangers,
Robert Friedman I remember, and some of these other people
that I knew them by reputation, but rarely it had
a chance to be working on the same project.

Speaker 3 (49:09):
All right, just the sequencing of your first album is
just off the chain. And I gotta know whose idea
was it to make such a radical version of in
the Garden, Because you know, when I hear in the Garden,
it's either it's either used for wedding purposes, you know,

(49:31):
it's always the it's always the pre song that's played
right before here comes the Bride or whatever. So I
totally wasn't expecting. It's almost like three things in one,
like you know, it's part rockabillious bluegrass, but it's also
jazzy and it's avant garde, Like do you just tell

(49:55):
us the genesis of that or was it just like
roll the tape, I got an idea.

Speaker 6 (49:59):
Well, thank you for describing it that way, and even
thank you thank you for remembering it, because I do
sort of remember the day that I came into Cretaylor's
office and talked about wanting to do it, uh, to
do that composition. And we had already discussed a lot

(50:19):
about his basic theory that if if a jazz artist
took a classical theme, they would turn it into something else,
and that was part of his stylistic thing.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
So the real classical name, which is also.

Speaker 6 (50:33):
I'm darning in blank on it now, that I ended
up calling in the Garden came from a very well
known classical piece, And at that time I was using
humor Crackt a lot. The really great studio guitarist but
who had a.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
He did dueling banjos right.

Speaker 6 (50:55):
Yes, yeah, deliverance yeah. So he played bad joe guitar,
and he was very authentic in those styles. So I
knew that I could get a kind of raw, almost
country kind of sound out of him and make that

(51:18):
piece eclectic. We didn't know exactly where we were going
with there's a lot of experimentation in the studio and
crew Taylor gave me the flexibility to experiment with that
and to come up with something unique.

Speaker 3 (51:32):
It's almost like, you know what that in particular, if
a jazz artist had a public enemy, like that's the thing, like,
you're so hip hop without The only only person that
I could describe that way was Prince. Like before Prince
purposely started rapping, everything about Prince was hip hop in
terms of like drum programming and all that stuff. But

(51:55):
I mean just the fact that you're mixing all these
genres in one before it actually gets a home or
some sort of identity, is you know, is kind of
mind blowing.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
I mean, at the.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
Time, were you nervous or worried about what critics were
going to receive this as your downbeats your you know whatever?
The gods of critics of jazz critics were like, if
you're not following a certain mold of what is deemed

(52:29):
acceptable status quo, are you nervous about this or was
the shield of CTI enough to I think.

Speaker 6 (52:37):
I can safely say that I was not nervous about it.
If anything, I was not reluctant to be confrontational and
to not give critics any easy thing to talk about,
and I guess I always had a little bit of
love hate relationship with them, and I got more hate

(52:57):
than I did love times that so I ended up
saying who cares, and I go, it's my job to
do it at their job to say what they think
about it. And I was not concerned about that at
that time. Even forget about critics, I was not that
concerned about retailer. He was my boss, but I wanted

(53:20):
to confront him too and not necessarily come in with
exactly what he expected. Bravery, I guess, has always been
something that I feel like you have to stay with
your vision no matter whether people will agree with it
or not. And on the one album we were talking about,

(53:42):
I was not thinking at that time as that as
a solo career album for myself. I didn't think I
would have one, and Creed said it was time because
I'd done so many projects for him with Grover Washington
and various other artists. I felt my identity at CTI
was a ranger, and by doing a whole bunch of different,

(54:07):
eclectic kind of stuff, I was hoping to use that
as like an audition to get.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
More arranging jobs, and the more of a.

Speaker 6 (54:14):
Variety that I could show as an orchestrator, I could
present it to other clients, and it was my good
fortune that I had some commercial success with it that
I was almost forced into considering a solo career after that.
Can I share with you a little bit about Nautilus
on that same album? Yeah, next, talking so many people

(54:38):
about it and actually confronting with Wu Tank Clan guys
of various.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
People about why.

Speaker 6 (54:44):
You know, I kept asking the question why did Nautilists
get sampled by so many people?

Speaker 2 (54:49):
What was it?

Speaker 6 (54:51):
And I was able to share the story on that
same one album you asked about the sequencing US was
the last cut on side B kind of deliberately because
it was almost a throwaway and Pree Taylor knew that
the other cuts would get the attention at that time.

(55:12):
So traditionally with the LP you always made put your
weakest cuts on the center of the last cut on
the side of an album because the grooves were narrower.
You know, you've got your best bass sound on the
on the outside cuts. So nobody paid attention Nautilus and
then Upper ten or fifteen years later, I started hearing

(55:36):
back that that that the hip hop producers were grabbing
onto it and I could not. I knew it had
a good baseline, and Ice Muhammad playing drums of groove
was there, so I got that, but it just seemed
like there had to be something else about it that

(55:57):
it made it just keep showing up over and over
and still does even to this day. So in a
conversation with Rizza on an interview that he was doing,
suddenly something clicked in for me that I had kind
of not been paying attention to it at all. But
it wasn't just a simple rhythm section groove that Price

(56:22):
and Gary King were laying down. I had written a
pretty elaborate string arrangement for fun.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
Let Me do It. There was enough budget that.

Speaker 6 (56:32):
I could hire a string section and write the arrangement,
and there was this kind of mysterious, ethereal kind of
sound that permeated that track, And if anything, I would
have thought it would have made it less commercial because
it didn't fit in with the other standard funk type

(56:53):
of a string arrangement that I might have written. But
as I've recently talk to the people in the hip
hop community that that keep talking about that as being
one of the essential tracts that have been sampled the most.
I think it might be a combination of that groove

(57:16):
and this almost classical blurry orchestration that's over the top
of the texture.

Speaker 5 (57:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
Texture, it's that's why I say you're the king of textures.
Like and I can't describe it, but it's you know,
somehow you manage like I know, you don't intentionally say, Okay,
let me create a song that somehow in six years
will hit another generation, like no one thinks that. Like

(57:46):
maybe a musician like me now will think that, like, Okay,
what I do now, maybe twenty years from now it'll
be in vogue. But you know, I think at the
end of the day, you caught a compel selling performance
with musicians that just were tightly locked. And the fact
that you didn't plan it even makes it better because

(58:08):
some of the best success stories and music all come
from people that aren't calculating. Here's lightning in a bottle,
you know, like Michael Jackson trying to follow up thriller
like I'm gonna sell a hundred millionaires, Like you can't.
You can't capture lightning in the bottle that way. It
just happens or it doesn't happen.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
So yeah, I totally believe it. And that's why I've always.

Speaker 6 (58:30):
Tried to just enjoy the process of doing it and
let whatever comes out of that happen. If you're passionate
and if you're trying your best to get the best people,
write the best arrangement, play the best solo, just do
your best and keep trying to make the level higher.
In that way, then you're still enjoying that even if

(58:53):
it isn't successful, You've had that pleasure and privilege to
make music and uh, and go through that process.

Speaker 3 (59:07):
You know, around eighty seven when you know Peter Piper
is coming out the gate, which you know I'll probably
I mean, you say, Fante, that's probably one of the
first out the gate, uh, Bob Team samples, Yeah yeah yeah,

(59:27):
so eighties yeah yeah yeah. So when when this is
coming out in eighty six, eighty seven and whatnot, what
is your immediate thought of what's happening?

Speaker 6 (59:39):
I believe my first memory was Jesse Jeff and the
Fresh Prince.

Speaker 8 (59:43):
And they touch a jazz right.

Speaker 6 (59:47):
They took my son West yesterday and the way they
did it at that time, because I wasn't following what
was going on.

Speaker 2 (59:54):
In hip hop at all?

Speaker 6 (59:57):
But I found out about it after the fact and
I listened to it, and yes, I was shocked. What
the heck, you know, because it was just my record
that played. It wasn't it wasn't even a loop or
a chunk, right, and you could hear my melody, my composition.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
And suddenly I look at this album and it has
a new title.

Speaker 6 (01:00:17):
They made it into a new song and they call
it something else, and I'm thinking, wait, wait a minute,
you know this is not.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
Right, what's going on here?

Speaker 6 (01:00:26):
And one of the first things back then that came
into my mind is, hey, if they can do that,
if Jessie, Jeff and Will Smith could just wrap over
the top of my record, well I'll go out and
get myself a Frank Sinatra record and I'll play some
piano over the top of it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
And I'll change the time from you know, from I
left my.

Speaker 6 (01:00:51):
Heart, just go I'll call it Bob James something or
other whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
And I knew you couldst face does that, by the way, So.

Speaker 6 (01:01:02):
Times have changed, but that was my first reaction. And also, but.

Speaker 3 (01:01:08):
In your mind, you didn't think like some fourteen year
old or fifteen year old is hearing that and now
looking at their parents' record collection, like, wait, I have that,
and then now you have new fans not yet okay.

Speaker 6 (01:01:26):
Eventually, you know, there's a lot of conversation about it.
And if it had been just a fluke, I would
have considered it more as a legal matter. And because
throughout my sort of music business knowledge career, I have
felt that copyrights and the protection of them are our

(01:01:49):
most powerful.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):
Weapon against big business.

Speaker 6 (01:01:54):
The copyright itself, the ownership of it, the control of
it so that that you have some control.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Over your destiny. Is was a very big deal for me.

Speaker 6 (01:02:07):
I fought for it in all of my contracts, and
the only way that you can protect it is is
by going to bat for it and not let people
played your eyes or fraudulently steal it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:21):
So so that was really.

Speaker 6 (01:02:22):
Basic before I even was aware of what was going
on in the hip hop world, and the whole structure
of the legal thing hadn't happened yet where where you
could figure out a reasonableare way to license and all
those So, yeah, exactly, so you hear that happening, and

(01:02:46):
I owned my recording of Westchester Lady and I and
the compositions, so I had to fight for it, and
I did, and that sort of started me off and
world that at that time I thought it was a
one off thing and that I would just have to
try to do my best to be compensated properly and

(01:03:07):
then go on about my business. But it proved that
it wasn't an isolated thing, and not only did the
field get bigger and bigger, but simply my music kept happening.
So I had to make a decision about how to
handle that, and eventually, yes, it became a very amazing

(01:03:33):
deal that my own music got heard a lot more
as a result of my name being associated in the
hip hop community. So I ended up being very grateful
for it, but always mixed feelings.

Speaker 3 (01:03:47):
Did you notice an immediate paradigm shift and reaction? Whereas like,
if you start the intro to Nautilus back in nineteen
seventy four, it probably wouldn't elicit the screams of oh
shit like that. I'm certain that happened at Blue Note
last week when you played there.

Speaker 6 (01:04:08):
Yes, and as drastic change has happened, I have so
much appreciation and new respect, new desire to confront.

Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
This whole phenomenon.

Speaker 6 (01:04:25):
I want, as a copyright holder and as a composer
who has fought hard to keep the rights to my music,
I want to be one of the people in the
music community that educates young people to learn about that,
to learn about the business, to learn that these creations

(01:04:46):
need to be protected and they need to be identified
in the right way and entered into the legal part
of the music business in a legitimate way. So I've
kept fighting for that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Uh.

Speaker 6 (01:05:01):
But as I have learned more about the sample usage,
I confronted Rizza and I sort of actually confronted DJ
j Jeff too, And there was a new cut on
my album be coming out in the spring that is
a collaboration with djj Jeff where it's like let by

(01:05:26):
Gones be by Gones were.

Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
Never were in bed together with the track.

Speaker 6 (01:05:33):
You know, we collaborated, and I'm very happy that we're
able to do that, and it demonstrates that we're all
in the music business together. But in attempting to actually
confront this issue for me, which is when they took
Nautilus or take Me to the Marty Ground and redid

(01:05:54):
it or used it, it was my creativity that it
was in this chunk or in this recording, and I
was not in the studio to defend myself artistically.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
And as I began to hear my music being.

Speaker 6 (01:06:10):
Sample more and more the chunks of it were taken
in all kinds of different ways, manipulated more drastically, tempo chains,
speed sped up, slowed down the story.

Speaker 2 (01:06:24):
Only I didn't have any control over.

Speaker 1 (01:06:26):
The creativity right right.

Speaker 6 (01:06:28):
I'm not there, so they do whatever they want. So
I began to think if I could be in the
same room doing my thing while they did their thing,
a different result could come out of it, where I
would actually be at least be able to say, well,
wait a.

Speaker 2 (01:06:43):
Minute, don't change this, or something like that.

Speaker 6 (01:06:46):
So or five days, two weeks ago, I was in
Riz's studio and we did pretty much exactly that. He
did his thing and I did my thing, And a
couple of times I would do a kind of conventional
jazz melodic thing, or a bassline thing or something like that,

(01:07:07):
and he would hear some very small chunk of it
and he would ask his engineer, stops right there and
take just these two beats, And suddenly my conventional melody
had become some completely new rhythm that I wouldn't have

(01:07:27):
thought of in a million years.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
And now we're confronting each other.

Speaker 6 (01:07:32):
Either I have to be strong enough to say, you know,
stay away from that, or or go along with it.

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
Fante, are you thinking about the guitar center beat right now?

Speaker 7 (01:07:48):
I hope it's not that I think, but the guitars
that would beat that's a whole other, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:07:55):
For me, For me a person who takes that, it
makes I feel like someone's gonna flip it, like either
vitamin D or something.

Speaker 4 (01:08:04):
You make it hard.

Speaker 1 (01:08:06):
It's inside joke.

Speaker 3 (01:08:08):
It's one of his most like unorthodox creations I've ever
heard of my life. Ze When I when I heard
you two were collaborating, the first thing I thought about was, okay,
the guitar set beat, Bob.

Speaker 7 (01:08:21):
When you recall, do you remember the reasons why you
cleared Dayton off my puncher but you didn't clear the
Flowers record for ghost Face?

Speaker 2 (01:08:28):
Do you remember, uh, the reason for that? I do remember.

Speaker 6 (01:08:33):
In those days, we were trying to create a kind
of formula which almost never worked, because every new creation
is different and every circumstances different. But I tried to
identify it in the amount of my actual recording that
was used, and if it was just a little chunk

(01:08:54):
that only occupied, you know, ten percent. Tried to base
the licensing fee on the the prominence of my music
in the track, and if my baseline or my melody
was prominent all the way through the track. It's essentially
my composition that I have, that I own, and that

(01:09:16):
I own that copyright, and they're using it from beginning
to end. I always was pretty firm and rigid about no,
I'm not giving that up, and I don't. I don't
think any composer who's proud of the ownership.

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
Of their creation would ever want to give that up.
Just say I.

Speaker 7 (01:09:38):
When you say not giving it up, you mean not
giving up any publishing on it, or just not letting
them use it period.

Speaker 6 (01:09:44):
Well either version, yes, not using letting them use the
period unless they license it properly, if they license it,
and and to get a license to change my music
when they use it from beginning to end.

Speaker 2 (01:09:58):
U why why would I? Why would I? Why would
any of you agree to do that? So here here
you've got this.

Speaker 7 (01:10:12):
Understand Yeah, I think yeah, Well you asked the question,
whyle we any of us would do that?

Speaker 2 (01:10:16):
I think definitely, it has to be.

Speaker 7 (01:10:19):
It has to be you know, you have to be
compensated and the business has to be worked out. I
just know, for me as a hip hop fan, there
are so many records that I never would have listened
to if it were not for hip hop. Like I
never would have went and listened to you know, your
first Floor, Well not first for but your album's one, two.

Speaker 4 (01:10:37):
Three, and four.

Speaker 7 (01:10:38):
You know what I'm saying, Like, I never would have
went back to those records had I not heard them
in this context now, you know what I mean. So
for me now, I look at it as just you know,
kind of just planting that seed and putting it in
a context that we may not understand, but the generation
after us they may hear it, and you know it goes.
You know, it's pretty much I look at what sampling

(01:10:59):
was back for us back then.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
It's like what mean.

Speaker 2 (01:11:02):
Culture is now in the Internet, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:11:04):
What I'm saying.

Speaker 7 (01:11:05):
Like my son, you know, he you know, watched the
Wire and all because the gift there's a gift of
webade that's like being used as a meme a million times, right,
But to him.

Speaker 4 (01:11:17):
It was just oh my god.

Speaker 7 (01:11:19):
So that's where that came from, like, you know, this
is a year old.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
Old that's right it that is the new sampling. Yeah,
it's like that is crazy, you.

Speaker 6 (01:11:29):
Know, right in defense of the way this thing started
to come together in the legitimatizing of licensing and all that,
any of the biggest samples of my music, such as
Peter Piper, I didn't find out about until even two
three four years later, after the thing was too late

(01:11:49):
and I suffered even if I wanted to confront, the
statute of limitations prevented me from really being able to
do what I wanted to do in some of the
cases to protect my copyright.

Speaker 2 (01:12:01):
Couldn't couldn't do it.

Speaker 6 (01:12:04):
Quest I've just called it the Wild West, and yes
it was during that time. You fend for yourself and
you don't know the history of how it's going to
turn out. If I had known that, I would have
had so much respect from the whole hip hop community,
and they treat me with so much dignity. It makes
me so happy and proud that I'm a part of it.

(01:12:26):
And I know that I have gotten a lot from
the fact that it historically happened.

Speaker 2 (01:12:32):
But when it was the wild West, when all that
stuff was going on.

Speaker 6 (01:12:36):
I had no idea, and I was fighting for my
own image as a jazz artist and had enough time
with that, let alone have a hard time holding on
to my own composition.

Speaker 3 (01:12:48):
I understand are there certain songs that you favor of
your usage? Like for me, I feel like DJ Premiere
is probably the most ideal person to have utilized your
work where it's not just straight up jacking it, but

(01:13:08):
it's like the way he does it is amazing. But
like for you, do you have favorites of like, oh,
that was clever or that sort of thing.

Speaker 6 (01:13:16):
A little bit by the way. I really loved meeting
him last week. He had come a year ago, but
finally had a chance to meet him and talk with
him a little bit last week at the Blue No such.

Speaker 2 (01:13:28):
A cool guy, and.

Speaker 6 (01:13:32):
I am embarrassed in jum ways to admit that I
still don't listen to that much hip hop music.

Speaker 1 (01:13:39):
I don't guess what neither do.

Speaker 6 (01:13:42):
I'm not well versed to talk about it. But because
of the opportunity to be up on the stage with
Talib Khali and his other guests, finally I got some
very great insight into the performance of rap and hip
hop and the way it feels like jazz when I'm

(01:14:03):
on the stage, and the skill and that the spirit
of it that I had not paid attention to and
listening to the recordings, but being there with him was fantastic.

Speaker 3 (01:14:15):
Let me let me explain to our listeners. So basically,
mister James did a residency, a three night residency at
the Blue Note in New York City with to live
quality black thought was there, rock him was there? Yeah,
Like just basically, you know it, is this the first

(01:14:38):
time that you finally had a meeting of the minds
between yourself and and hip hop MC's and a band
that knew how to make this happen.

Speaker 6 (01:14:48):
I did the same thing with Talib last year. That
was only the other time, and I really liked that
in a way of getting and know in real time
the music's happening. The two starts and I'm playing right
along with him, and and when Rakiema was was playing

(01:15:12):
his UH version where he had set well my peak Shambouzi,
and it made me smile because I remember UH percussion
players that I used to work with all the time,
Doc Gibbs, and Doc Gibbs had given me the title shambousie,

(01:15:32):
which was the kind of part of his vocabulary, and
it just brought back a whole bunch of memories. And
this again, this, this, that was just the intro for me.
The melody or the main part of that song. Rackim
didn't use it at all. It was just those chords
of the intro. Nevertheless, I loved the way he performed

(01:15:55):
on stage with such confidence and charisma and and made
me proud, happy and smiling that he had chosen my
you know, as something to create a new piece out
of it.

Speaker 7 (01:16:11):
What were your thoughts on Everyday People or People every
Day by rest of development, because I thought that was
just a genie that taking that little piece, Like to me,
that was Jens, Well, we your thoughts on.

Speaker 6 (01:16:21):
It very very complicated from the business end of it,
and actually even from it was another example of something
that I was not paying attention to know that my
sample had even been used until way after the fact,
oh wow, way after it had become a big hit.

(01:16:41):
So it came to me late in the game. And
what had happened was People every Day had been released
as a single without my sample on it. The first
release out didn't have my recording on it and kind
of didn't go anywhere, and they kept working with it,

(01:17:03):
did a new mix which ended up being called a
metamorphosis mix, did add my sample, and that became a
big hit.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
And so quite clearly I knew that my.

Speaker 6 (01:17:16):
Sample had made a difference in that record, but what
we had did not know at the time and until
it got retigious and kind of got a little bit ugly,
shall we say, series. And this may or may not
have had anything to do with their management, but more
of the record company's management. When the royalties came in,

(01:17:42):
they somehow or other got channeled into the other version
of U did not have my sample in it, so
the royalties did not come my way and after a
long period of time, and it was a very significant difference.

Speaker 3 (01:17:59):
So that that's why they had to identify the metamorphosis
remix every time I see it used in public.

Speaker 2 (01:18:05):
But even though they did some.

Speaker 6 (01:18:09):
Unbeknownst to me and in the final I couldn't prove
it anyway. Uh, it got channeled wrong, and it took
us a long time before we figured out, well, why
is this statement for the other version so huge and
the statement for metamorphosis mixed nothing?

Speaker 3 (01:18:29):
Because no one wants to write Metamorphosis mix. I assure you, yeah,
I assure you, ninety nine percent of the time, if
someone's playing that song, they're they're definitely playing your version in.

Speaker 6 (01:18:42):
That TP appearances and everything else. That was the version
that became a hit. But I probably shouldn't even be
talking about details of this because there was a settlement
that we finally reached and it was.

Speaker 2 (01:18:58):
Not particularly good. But so I don't have good memories
about that, Let's put it that way.

Speaker 7 (01:19:03):
You have good memories about Taxi that Angela.

Speaker 6 (01:19:08):
Well, of course, that's all good news for me, you know,
kind of I could have never anticipated how that would
become such a signature piece for me, and I thank
the producers of that series, which is still in syndication.
But the most weird but it turns out to be
very celebratory. Simple usage of it turned out to be

(01:19:32):
Celo Green when he used it on a two called
Sign of the Times recently, and he just kind of
sang over it, redid it added a lyric to it.
And first, it was a little bit shocking when I
first found out about it, because they hadn't come to
me in advance about it either.

Speaker 2 (01:19:54):
But when I first heard it, I loved it so much.
I just couldn't be anything but.

Speaker 6 (01:20:01):
Happy about it, and we ended up the really fair
and nice licensing arrangement, and it has led to me
being able to meet him in person in a similar
way that I confronted Rizzard recently. But Celo and I
did some stuff together and we wrote a song together

(01:20:22):
that's going to be on the same new album of
the album You haven't heard Side of the Times by Celo.
It's my Taxi piece reinterpreted by him.

Speaker 3 (01:20:33):
Wow, okay, well wait, you mean the Sign of the
Times that Rod Timberton worked on that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
That's by Side of the Times.

Speaker 6 (01:20:40):
So the Times, Yeah, right, that Rod Timperton worked on
this on my album. The Selo version, which he called
Side of the Times, has his lyric that has Sign
of the Times in the lyric.

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):
I see it's you have another version another song called
Sign of the Times that's not.

Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
Right related to the tempert.

Speaker 6 (01:21:02):
Several Side of the Time songs, but but here his
side of the Times has my Taxi melody and a
very very cool but very specific reinterpretation of it that
It was a great opportunity for me to meet him
and collaborate.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
I want to ask about your gear.

Speaker 3 (01:21:30):
I know that as a creator who you know, since
the Explosion record, like you've been experimented with like electronic
sonics and whatnot. But I do know like a lot
of those early synthesizers that were available in the seventies
were monophonic, which kind of makes it limiting for you
to play chords or anything, like you got to play
one note. But I know, like around seventy six seventy

(01:21:53):
seven when they're making polyphonic synthesizers which allows you to
make chords. Are sort of manufacturers the Yamahas of the day,
the or the the electronic makers of the day.

Speaker 1 (01:22:07):
Are they courting you? Are you getting endorsements? Are you.

Speaker 3 (01:22:13):
Sort of in that Stevie wonder way where you know
they go to him and Herbie Hancock with all this
new gadgetry and like here like use our stuff. And
more specifically in the seventies early eighties, not now where
of course, now you know we use that every day,
but in the late seventies and eighties, like what was

(01:22:35):
the courting system like with keyboard makers and you.

Speaker 2 (01:22:41):
I don't remember.

Speaker 6 (01:22:41):
Exactly when I got endorsement from Yamaha, but I've been
affiliated with them for many many years now, specifically the
discal Vier, the acousticana that has many capability that I
use all the time. I love it, and I have
a montage and motif whatever. I use a lot of
Yamaha gear and I am affiliated with them. Most of

(01:23:05):
the rest of my gear throughout has been I pay
for it and I go to the music store and
buy it whatever. Ara, you were talking about the polyphonic synthesizers.
I can remember the early stages of that when it
was very primitive by today's standards, and Oberheim was the

(01:23:25):
company that I remember that had the polyphonic synthesizer that
had separate oscillators for each sound. So in the Oberheim
eight voice was the one I a lot that you
could play polyphonically on it, but each note in the
chord was going to it through a different oscillator and
manipulated very differently than the way the more recent polyphonic synthesizers.

Speaker 2 (01:23:50):
Are, so that gave it a character.

Speaker 6 (01:23:53):
Each oscillator you could kind of tweak it, and there
was a thickness about it that they gave that Oberheim
eight boys, where I made a lot of records using that,
and I remember that they were also funky in a
sense that yes, you could play four six eight no chords,

(01:24:17):
but it was the sensesizer was trying to catch up.
If you try to do anything too fancy or too
fast changing, it didn't behave like a.

Speaker 1 (01:24:28):
Yato.

Speaker 2 (01:24:31):
So if you held the.

Speaker 6 (01:24:32):
Notes down, you could do a string pad or something
like that, but if you tried to do something really
really technically fast with it, it was clumsy.

Speaker 7 (01:24:43):
I was just gonna ask. I wanted to make sure
we got in questions about four play. I used to
do my homework to those records in school in high school,
so I specifically I just wanted just the between the
sheets album and the lixer like those like I played
those records like you know, back and forth. I wanted

(01:25:03):
to ask one how did all you guys come together?
And specifically, if you have any memories of recording, why
can't it wait till morning?

Speaker 4 (01:25:11):
Phil Common, what that session was like?

Speaker 6 (01:25:15):
That's my shit, many many, many great memories from those years.
In nineteen ninety one, I think it was I was
headed out to Los Angeles working on an album of mine.
That album ended up being called Grand Panel Canyon, and
I had brought Harvey Mason to New York many many

(01:25:36):
times to play with me because most of my sessions
were being done in New York at that time.

Speaker 2 (01:25:42):
But I had also Lee Retnauer had used me on
the project of.

Speaker 6 (01:25:48):
His, and we were dealing with wanting to do reciprocal
So if I do something for you, play for you,
I want you to play on my album whatever. He
re owed me reciprocal, and since he was LA based,
I thought it might be more interesting for me to
go to LA and use bothly Written Hour and Harvey

(01:26:09):
Mason on my album. So I planned it and didn't
know who to hire on bass. Wasn't that familiar with
the LA scene. So I asked both Lee and Harvey
who try to use on bass, and separately both came
up at the same answer Nathan East, who I had
not met, never had worked with him before. And I

(01:26:31):
found myself in the studio with those three other guys, Nathan, Harvey,
and Lee, and something clicked and all four of us
could just feel it wasn't like a regular recording session.
The combinations of our backgrounds are things that we had
worked on.

Speaker 2 (01:26:52):
Different projects. Whatever, It just felt really special.

Speaker 6 (01:26:55):
And on a break we had a conversation about the
idea of how do groups get formed?

Speaker 2 (01:27:01):
When?

Speaker 6 (01:27:02):
How did Weather Report get formed? How did the modern
Judge portet get formed? When did they decide to put
a name on it and be a group rather than
an individual? And one thing I do another I had
at our job at Warner Brothers Records, and I was
able to go to a meeting there and say, will
you give us a budget to experiment and do a project,

(01:27:26):
never thinking about it becoming a full time long thing.
It was at that time maybe just one project was
all we were thinking about. But the first song of Restoration,
my composition on my album, was what we remember as

(01:27:49):
being kind of like the first idea of a four
place sound.

Speaker 3 (01:27:56):
Okay, so, speaking of warners, I always wanted to know this.
I'm not asking this because you're categorized in a certain
type of jazz, but I always wanted to know, you know.
In nineteen seventy seven, when Tommy Lapluna and George Benson
create The Breezing Record, which was such a breakthrough album

(01:28:18):
in terms of the multiple nominations that it got for
Grammys and whatnot, you know, people were pretty much ready
to dismiss George Benson, and not dismiss him, but you know,
even he said like, well, I'm at the end of
my room. Let me make this last record real quick
and then retire. And then suddenly Breezing blows up. But
did you see the embracing of that album as a

(01:28:41):
victory for the type of jazz that you were doing,
the type of instrumental music that you were doing. The
fact that that album was somewhat embraced by the mainstream
community and given all those accolades, all those Grammy nominations

(01:29:02):
and whatnot.

Speaker 6 (01:29:04):
Yes, I was experiencing it from a distance, having done
some collaborating with George when he was at CTI, and
I was a little bit familiar with the complicated exit
from CTI and when he went over to Warner Brothers
and the sort of transition from just being a guitar

(01:29:26):
player to a singer, and watched what was in George's
mind of what he really wanted to do. And somewhat
later after he went to Warner Brothers, I also got
the job of producing one of his records, and at
that time big bosses of Warner Brothers gave me the
assignment of wanting to him play more guitar, but as

(01:29:49):
I started to work with him, his heart was in
singing more, and I could see that that has always
been a conflict.

Speaker 2 (01:29:58):
And a lot of people, jazz.

Speaker 6 (01:30:00):
Fans just are aware of the genius that comes out
of his fingers when he plays guitar that nobody else
and do it.

Speaker 2 (01:30:08):
But uh, his.

Speaker 6 (01:30:12):
Whole other part of his personality felt that talent that
he had as a singer too, and in the In
a Breezing album, both were happy, both of course.

Speaker 2 (01:30:26):
Masquerade and.

Speaker 6 (01:30:29):
Every time I hear Breasons that tune, the same thing
happens to me. There's no bridge, which was for us
at that time. It's unusual. It's just the same. It's
it's the same key and it just keeps repeating. But
it was eight bars, uh, and it's just simple. He

(01:30:53):
never goes away from it. And some of us who
who have all these things, we think about stay with
the hook, you know, don't get away from the hook,
don't get too cute, don't get too complicated, because the
fans want to hear that melody. And the way that
that record was produced was so clearly on the on

(01:31:18):
the money in terms of drive home that hook drive
home uniqueness.

Speaker 2 (01:31:24):
It just made me want to go back to the
drawing boards. I want to try to do that.

Speaker 6 (01:31:28):
I want to try to do something similar, but then
you realize it's not easy to buy that matchic.

Speaker 3 (01:31:35):
I think a lot of our fan base might not
know that Reason was written by Bobby Womack. It's actually
a Bobby Womack cover, which I didn't know. I just
recently found the Bobby Womack original, And you know, I
tend to forget that Bob Womack was actually a good

(01:31:56):
guitar player, Like so you know, that was the instrumental
on one of his records in nineteen seventy one.

Speaker 6 (01:32:04):
And I know I'm getting to know quest love as
a musicologist.

Speaker 1 (01:32:10):
To music nerds man.

Speaker 2 (01:32:14):
Because I knew.

Speaker 6 (01:32:16):
That sort of in my district memory. But I don't
think I ever heard Bobby one Mac's version.

Speaker 3 (01:32:22):
Yeah, no, it's it's damn near the same song, just
with a harder Well when we say harder more like
a hip hop is that should jump on it like
it's it's actually amazing. The drums are more kracking on
the wool Mac version. We are you going to ask Steve.

Speaker 4 (01:32:41):
Well, we kind of reazed right over it the time
period that I wanted to talk about. I mean, Bob
James had the coolest, one of the most iconic jazz
labels of all the time with tappan Ze Records, and
I'm a little curious about the the timetable because you

(01:33:02):
were a and ring at Columbia. Was that during the
CTI years when you were arranging and also playing on
CTI records.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
I kind of had reached the end of my CTI.

Speaker 6 (01:33:16):
After my four solo albums that ended up around nineteen
seventy seven, and there were some problems with CTI in
the business world too, and then the lack of payment
of royalties, et cetera, which necessitated me litigating there. I'm

(01:33:37):
beginning to make it sound like a which I hope
I wasn't in the long version of that. But there
have been times when I've had to protect and in
this case, I'm glad I did because I ended up
with the ownership of my four records, which made it

(01:33:58):
possible for me.

Speaker 2 (01:33:59):
To make many many things happened.

Speaker 6 (01:34:01):
So I left in nineteen seventy seven, negotiated with Columbia
and signed there where Bruce Lenvall was the president.

Speaker 2 (01:34:09):
And he did give me the opportunity.

Speaker 6 (01:34:11):
To start a small custom label with the idea that
I could do a continuation of sort of the CTI approach,
in which I had done enough in this role of
a ranger conductor for pre Taylor that my intention was
to not do exactly what Greed Taylor did, but my

(01:34:33):
version of it and tried to develop my own style,
but influenced by him, and very early tonight you mentioned
Joe Jorgenson. For many, many memories, I wanted Joe Jorgenson
to be my Rudy van Gelder because Rudy Van Gelder
was a very unique engineer for Preed Taylor and his

(01:34:57):
style of engineering the sound of those records very different
from anything else was out there, and in my experience
of doing studio work in New York, Joe was the
guy that I thought had the most interesting ears that
the two of us could collaborate on trying to come
up with our own sound.

Speaker 3 (01:35:17):
Would Rudy pre mix the stuff or like, would you
guys track first then mix afterwards.

Speaker 6 (01:35:23):
That's a very good funny question because Rudy was extremely
secretive about any of his techniques and he did not
like sharing. He didn't not like anybody asking me any
questions about you.

Speaker 1 (01:35:37):
Knew what my next question was, like share the secrets.

Speaker 6 (01:35:41):
So I got the job of writing these arrangements on
where we'd have basic tracks, and all Rudy would be
willing to give me was this rough of two track
from the basic sessions, and I would take that home
and listen to that to make my arrangements mix on
those roughs that he sent me with the worst, most

(01:36:04):
crude o reverb, no ambious, nothing, because he didn't want
to let anything out of his studio that could even
possibly be released. And so I have that memory of
his mixing is so completely different from the way anybody
else work.

Speaker 3 (01:36:22):
Wait, do you have a dry Rudy flat mix in
your possession?

Speaker 2 (01:36:30):
Well? I have many. If I could find a real
real player that would play.

Speaker 3 (01:36:34):
The I'm begging you to make a compilation of just dry.
Because the thing is is until like Steve really got
me into like listening to Steve's obsession with CDI like,
and I'm sorry for really car jacking his interview Steve,
Like Steve is the CTI coologist. So the thing is

(01:36:56):
is that when I started studying Rudy's mix, thing I
never was a fan of compression because I never liked
being squeezed. But somehow on your on your records, on
Grover's records, like certain CTI product, there's there's kind of
a I don't know, I can't I don't have the

(01:37:19):
proper eloquence to say the right words that describe Rudy's
texture and his relationship with reverb and compression. But like, yeah,
that's that's the secret sauce that I'm dying because I
feel like that is the the apex of seventies production

(01:37:39):
that I can't master just yet.

Speaker 4 (01:37:42):
To go to his studio. It's still open, let's.

Speaker 3 (01:37:45):
Go, and still unscathed and still yeah, it's it's exactly
the same.

Speaker 6 (01:37:51):
I'm I'm in the same boat as you, even though
I spent it was almost like a full time job.

Speaker 2 (01:37:56):
Being there every day.

Speaker 6 (01:37:58):
In a studio for five years, and I never learned
much about the details of it either, because he wouldn't
talk about it.

Speaker 2 (01:38:05):
He wouldn't share anything.

Speaker 6 (01:38:06):
Every one of his all of his gear, like his
equalizers or compressors, anything like that.

Speaker 2 (01:38:14):
He had.

Speaker 6 (01:38:14):
He had taped over the manufacturers the names of him,
so he didn't want you to know what they were.

Speaker 1 (01:38:22):
That's hip hop.

Speaker 3 (01:38:23):
See that's hip hop, that's hide in the labels, Like
y'alln't even know that, y'all.

Speaker 1 (01:38:28):
Following a cycle.

Speaker 4 (01:38:34):
So yeah, hey guys, Bob James had one of the
most iconic jazz labels of all time called Tap and
Z Records, And yeah, I just wanted to I found
it really interesting what artists you chose to have leader
albums on Tap and Zee. Obviously you had so many
of your own records on that label as well, But
I want to just run some names by you that

(01:38:56):
might not necessarily be household names for listeners or for
or for us, and if maybe you could just give
us just a brief, you know, blurb about them, because
I'd be interested in Wilbert Longmire.

Speaker 6 (01:39:09):
Yeah. I found out about Wilbert through George Benson. Actually,
he and George Benson were friends, and George had heard him,
and yeah, he sang and played guitar, and to get
a recommendation with George Benson's but good as you could
vote for. So that's the main reason why I signed Wilbert.
And it was at a time when I was very

(01:39:32):
much in the heat of wanting to be a good
follow up to the CTI sound, but my own version
of it.

Speaker 4 (01:39:41):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:39:42):
And that's that was the end result.

Speaker 4 (01:39:45):
Of it, okay. Joe Anne Brakeen.

Speaker 6 (01:39:48):
Very very original pianist, amazing. She could not be produced
in any kind of way like some of the other
coversion artists that I I had a chance to work with.

Speaker 2 (01:40:01):
She was completely her own person.

Speaker 6 (01:40:06):
So my role with her in some ways was to
try to be like what I would want a producer
to be with me if I just had complete authority
to do whatever I wanted to do. And I knew
that it would be a kind of simple production because
she just wanted to play jazz with a great rhythm

(01:40:27):
session and make sure we have the best engineer for her,
get the right sounds for her, and let her do
her own thing. That was pretty much my goal with Joanne.

Speaker 4 (01:40:40):
There was an artist named Mark Colby that did a
couple of records on Tappenzi.

Speaker 2 (01:40:45):
Yeah. He toured with me a lot, played my band, and.

Speaker 6 (01:40:49):
I've always loved power in his playing and I could
treat him similarly to the way I tried to treat
Grover Washington and for example, another sexophone player for that label.

Speaker 2 (01:41:03):
And very fond memories of those.

Speaker 4 (01:41:07):
Records, and Richard T the piano player, did a leader
album or two on Tapaze as well.

Speaker 6 (01:41:15):
Yeah, well, Richard being a member of that stuff rhythm
section that had Eric Gill on guitar and Gordon Edward
was the bass and Rob McDonald percussion. They were a
kind of quintessential top, top of the line R and
B based rhythm section and Richard T's unique kind of

(01:41:41):
heavily Church influenced combination organ and sometimes Fender roads. I
just loved everything about him. I'm trying to emulate some
of his feel because I was alongside him on many
sessions where some of the Quincy Jones States and a

(01:42:03):
lot of New York studio days, Richard be on Oregon
and I would be on piano or sometimes trade off
or whatever. So getting to know him that way and
realizing what a uniquely great artist he was, of course
he was an obvious one for me to try to sign.

Speaker 4 (01:42:19):
And Steve Khan, the guitar player, I think that was
the first tappan Zee record.

Speaker 2 (01:42:25):
Might have been.

Speaker 6 (01:42:26):
Steve was very determined that he wanted the Columbia identity
on his album, also SOE logo on it.

Speaker 1 (01:42:38):
But but he wanted the Red label, not the Blue.

Speaker 6 (01:42:41):
Kind of like that I didn't have enough prestige and
that he needed the big name.

Speaker 2 (01:42:49):
On there too. He and I were friends, and so
he was and smaller budgets.

Speaker 6 (01:42:56):
I was somewhat limited to sign the people that were
within my sphere that I either knew or that I
knew that they were available.

Speaker 4 (01:43:05):
Just a couple more Mango Santa Maria.

Speaker 6 (01:43:09):
Well, yes, and he came through the bigger label as well.
Particular kind of sound, the Latin American sound that I
wasn't doing with anybody else, made it possible for us
to make some pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (01:43:23):
Records with him.

Speaker 4 (01:43:24):
And where did you come across? Alan Harris came to.

Speaker 6 (01:43:29):
Me through Columbia, through just and the most unusual Tapenzy project,
I guess, and the one that I had the least
influence over.

Speaker 2 (01:43:40):
I don't remember.

Speaker 6 (01:43:42):
Doing anything musically on it other than making it possible
for him to do his thing and trying to treat
him the way I would have wanted to be treated
as a producer, make it possible for him to create
his music.

Speaker 4 (01:43:56):
Okay, last one and the one I wanted to know
the most about. It seemed to be kind of your
partner at the label, which is Jay Chadaway. Can you
tell us who a little bit about him?

Speaker 6 (01:44:07):
Well, I think I had maybe originally found out about
him through Maynard Ferguson because he had done a lot
of arranging from Maynard, and I was in need of
somebody that had the same kind of arranging background as
me because I was not able to keep up with
the request that I was getting into do arrangements.

Speaker 2 (01:44:28):
So I started working with him in that way.

Speaker 6 (01:44:31):
I got to know him a little bit and we
hit it off, and I knew he had a similar
approach to sound production. And yeah, we had some really
very good years and have remained friends. I just he's
a big sailor fan. He and his wife live on
a boat. A lot of times of the year, they

(01:44:52):
take their take their boat to various places and just
take up residence for.

Speaker 2 (01:44:57):
A long time.

Speaker 6 (01:44:58):
He moved after he after Z stopped, he moved to
la and had a very successful career as a movie
composer and he was very involved in the Star Trek series.

Speaker 2 (01:45:11):
Very very talented guy.

Speaker 4 (01:45:13):
Let me just wrap up the tappan Zee thing, Amir.
You did such an incredible job with that label. Really
the best thing that a label can do, which is
create this whole world onto itself with all the beautiful
continuity with the album covers, the beautiful gatefold album covers,
and really you really knocked it out of the park
with the with tap and Z was. I mean, you're

(01:45:35):
welcome for all the rabbit holes folks out there with
all those names. But all those tappan Ze records are great. Yeah,
short related maybe not the Alan Harris record.

Speaker 3 (01:45:47):
Well, I wasn't going to say that, you said it now.

Speaker 2 (01:45:52):
Short thing.

Speaker 6 (01:45:53):
Since you mentioned Joe Jordanson, I more and more think
that there just aren't really any total coincidences in life,
that some things just happened for a reason. Recently, I
was contacted by Joe's son, Michael Jordanson, who is interested
in doing a biography on me, and he works with

(01:46:14):
a video production company and I've been starting up a
project in which he's going to do biographical thing.

Speaker 2 (01:46:25):
He's a member of the group Wilco Who's that's true.

Speaker 6 (01:46:30):
But when he grew up, he was when he was
I don't know, ten or twelve years old, his father,
Joe would invite him into the studio where we were
making all those records. During that period of time, and
he formed his taste and everything else based upon listening
to all those records. And so many many years later

(01:46:50):
after he's gone into business as a keyboard player and
has a lot of success with Will Go. Now we're
meeting again, and it gives me a chance to pay
my respects and have such fond memories of all those
great records.

Speaker 2 (01:47:03):
That Joe did with.

Speaker 4 (01:47:05):
Yeah, you hear that stand good terms with your engineer
could pay off.

Speaker 1 (01:47:09):
Yes, what Steve very important.

Speaker 4 (01:47:13):
But your very first production was on another Creed Tailor
label called Salvation with Goborbo, the Hungarian guitar player. What
was that like your first production and what was Zabo
like nineteen seventy five.

Speaker 6 (01:47:28):
Unique aspect of that for me was it was the
only time that I was able to actually produce and
do something without Creed Taylor being there. It was his label,
but he gave me the flexibility to just do that
project on my own, and I went out and.

Speaker 2 (01:47:43):
To La and did it.

Speaker 6 (01:47:46):
And he was gobor was definitely a gypsy and he
had his own style of approach, which I tried to
keep that gypsy aspect, but to try to bring some
of my own style into it. I wish I could
have done more with him because he is kind of

(01:48:07):
like an ideal artist for an arranger to produce, because
I want to have the tapestry surrounding him, but I
want him to be able to stay within his own style,
and that's what I was trying to do.

Speaker 4 (01:48:20):
Wow, Gary McFarland worked a lot with him in that regards.

Speaker 2 (01:48:24):
Yes, definitely, I love Gary McFarland's work. In fact, I
was very influenced.

Speaker 6 (01:48:28):
But I used to study his records to try to
figure out how he made his choices.

Speaker 1 (01:48:34):
Yeah, the Sign of the Times record.

Speaker 3 (01:48:37):
Now I get the film about to answer my own question,
say Quincy Jones, but I'll ask you, how did you
get involved with Rod Temperton working on that album?

Speaker 6 (01:48:48):
Quincy introduced me to Rod and he was in the
studio and a couple of the records that I was
involved with with Quincy, and I was a big fan
admirer and Quence. He put us together because he thought
that we might hit it off. And even though Rod
specifically with his talent was not a classical music I

(01:49:14):
didn't think that much of an influence, but as I
was working with him, he just had a whole cinematic,
classical way of talking to me, and we hit it
off and I was trying to learn from him. I

(01:49:38):
don't think Thriller had I can't remember where he was.

Speaker 3 (01:49:41):
And he just finished out The Wall and Thrillers about
the kind of the next.

Speaker 2 (01:49:45):
Year, Yeah, so big.

Speaker 6 (01:49:47):
In other words, kind of out of my league, and
I was kind of shocked that he was even willing
to spend some time with me. But at least I
had a chance to work in studio with him. He
had his own complete language of how he talked and
how he put together his vocals, and they were totally
different from anything that I was aware of, So it

(01:50:07):
was very much a learning process. And the difference, I
guess the main difference in the success there was that
when he worked with me, he had Bob James and
when he worked with Michael Jackson he had Michael Jackson.

Speaker 2 (01:50:29):
That kind of says it all. That makes the difference
in the success level.

Speaker 3 (01:50:33):
I guess you co scored one of my all time
favorite films and I didn't realize it until maybe a
year and a half ago during the pandemic that you
created the King of Comedy score. So can you talk
about working with Scorsese and.

Speaker 6 (01:50:55):
Well, you're crazy. Where do you get all these details?

Speaker 2 (01:50:59):
How do you feel? Well, you know more information than.

Speaker 3 (01:51:02):
Yeah, the pandemic happens, and trust me, the pandemic happens.

Speaker 1 (01:51:07):
You read all the fine print to keep yourself busy.

Speaker 6 (01:51:10):
Ash, I mean, I should have done a lot of
homework before I did this.

Speaker 2 (01:51:16):
With you.

Speaker 6 (01:51:17):
Quest love you know so much. And I got to say,
my memories of working on that are so vague in
my mind now, I'm not sure that I even remember
how to talk about it very much.

Speaker 1 (01:51:29):
You just threw it together and just gave it to him.

Speaker 6 (01:51:32):
Well, no, I mean I know that I was treating
it very seriously at the time that I haven't listened
back to it. But it's been twenty twenty five years ago,
or at least forty, And when you reach my age,
you know how hard it is to keep retaining a

(01:51:52):
lot of those memories. You don't have much of a
memory other than the way you described it as a
weird film. Made a career assignment for me to make
music for it. That's kind of about all I'd be
able to say at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:52:08):
But do another zoom.

Speaker 6 (01:52:09):
I'll do some homework listen to it again and maybe
I'll have something more intelligent to say.

Speaker 3 (01:52:14):
No, you know, I watch it like maybe five times
a year, so for me, like I like when dark
films have light music scores because it makes it even darker.

Speaker 6 (01:52:24):
So it contributes to the power, I think, rather than
everything be dark as too obvious.

Speaker 3 (01:52:33):
Right, you're right, this is sort of on the same level.
But so I used to work in a record store
back in high school, and this is right when you
and David Sanborn started your collaboration process. I think this
was maybe this is the Double Vision album, but I

(01:52:54):
just got to know this, you guys. Fade you guys,
fade Algebra's voice right when he's about to start scatting
like a madman on since I fail for you, and
every time I hear it, like I'm now a collector
of pro tools and whatnot, you know, Like I like

(01:53:15):
hearing the original versions in its dry state and see
what happens after the fate. But how long do you
have any memory of how long that song goes on
after the fade? Because right when the fade goes down,
that's when like Algio just starts scatting out of his mind.
And I always wanted to know what happens after that fad.

Speaker 6 (01:53:37):
Well, I can say that I was probably not there
in the mix and the choice. I don't remember being there.
I didn't produce that. I mean, it was my albums,
my name on it, all right, but that fade. Usually
I would have been very involved and very specifically with

(01:53:59):
the last thing that you want people to hear, and
you want it to be hot.

Speaker 2 (01:54:03):
You want it to be and I think the fade.

Speaker 6 (01:54:06):
Works just in the way you described it, because it
left you wanting more, and it left it when it's
at its most hot. What I would say about that
record to you is that I'm very proud of the
pre production and arranging and scoring that I did, which

(01:54:27):
is would have been a conventional string orchestra and brass
and whatever, but I chose to do it with my
home studio equipment. And it's all the strings, all the horns,
everything else are me synthesizers. And many people give me

(01:54:50):
credit that when they hear it it sounds like a
full large orchestra of production.

Speaker 2 (01:54:56):
But I had an otari a track.

Speaker 6 (01:54:59):
And this was in the era when you had the
multi track studio or whatever in the studio and then
you had to bounce down in order to do the overdub.
So I took Bill say, I guess it was made
a pre mix bouncing down and all of the basic
tracks were on.

Speaker 2 (01:55:18):
He gave me four tracks or something like that to
work with, and I.

Speaker 6 (01:55:22):
Created the woodwinds, the French horns and springs and all
that were synthesized. And the part that I loved the
most was in that exact section you're talking about, where
he goes or something like that, and I scored it
for the horns going in. The French horns echo that line.

(01:55:45):
And because I had the rough mix that I was
from that had his vocal already on it when I
was working on my scoring, I was able to actually
write the orchestration after the fact to make it sound
like al was responding to the orchestra.

Speaker 1 (01:56:01):
So right, okay, but those.

Speaker 6 (01:56:03):
French horns were not there when he's sang it, so
so I added the French horns before, so it make
it sound like he was ad living to my orchestration.

Speaker 2 (01:56:14):
And if I do.

Speaker 3 (01:56:15):
This sort of like Steve Gadd's rumming. See now, now
I realized the same exact approach. Yeah, the power the
power of post production. Now that's that's the lesson I
learned today. No, that was at the time when I
was working at that record store. I think Moonlighting, Bruce
Willison Sybil Shepherd's uh show, very popular show on ABC,

(01:56:36):
had just started using that song. So suddenly a whole
that was back in the day when like a show
like that could feature a song, and then suddenly everybody's
coming in requesting it. And yeah, when that that came out,
just the whole world just started asking for Since I
you know, fell for you that that uh that cover,

(01:56:56):
so always want to do.

Speaker 6 (01:56:58):
That tables and ask you uh one question and yeah, absolutely,
since I have the opportunity. Yeah, this is hypothetical only
so since you nor I are kind of session players
these days. But if we were in New York session players.

Speaker 1 (01:57:19):
Yes, let's do it.

Speaker 6 (01:57:20):
And there's a trio date that we were called upon
to do, and you had me hell looking for a
bass player. Who would you recommend do a trio date
with with you on piano and me on drums?

Speaker 1 (01:57:38):
I mean the or we to do that? We I
would actually let's.

Speaker 4 (01:57:44):
See who Derek hadge.

Speaker 8 (01:57:48):
I would say either Hajj or I would actually go
with Pino of course, Yeah, I would go with Pino.
Derek Hodge can go with Christian Mcbriene McBride. But Pino,
you know, I like, I've worked.

Speaker 6 (01:58:05):
With you know a little bit many years ago, and
Christian McBride I did an album with, so that could
be that.

Speaker 2 (01:58:11):
But the Pino is more on your knowledge since you've
worked with them. Let's go with that.

Speaker 1 (01:58:16):
Are you are you committed to a label right now?

Speaker 2 (01:58:18):
Top and Z I will do it.

Speaker 4 (01:58:21):
I got to say, I'm sorry, this is I have
to cut in here because I have my own jazz
label here as well. Uh thanks, thanks partially to my
love for Tap and Z and and uh we can
go co co on that if you're if you're interested.

Speaker 2 (01:58:38):
But I was only joking about Z. It's it's kind
of let's.

Speaker 4 (01:58:42):
Bring it back, man, let's bring it back. JM I.

Speaker 1 (01:58:46):
I'm signed as d M I for all my jazz stuff.
So I got to ask my label president right here.

Speaker 4 (01:58:51):
Yeah, I think we're good for We're good for a
Bob James Pinal question. Yes, we'll sign on for that.

Speaker 1 (01:58:57):
We are absolutely going to do that. You and I'm
not doing that like fake.

Speaker 3 (01:59:01):
You heard it here first, people No, we're making I'm
telling you, I got so much envy when I saw
that clip at Blue Mine, and then you know I
was working all weeks. So but no, you're You're a
favorite of mine, and you know I thank you for
letting us nerd out on you for two hours.

Speaker 1 (01:59:21):
Yes, we will make this happen.

Speaker 2 (01:59:24):
Yay, yay, Okay, I hope that was recorded.

Speaker 1 (01:59:27):
Yes, it's absolutely recorded.

Speaker 3 (01:59:29):
You can sue me if I renigg on on on
on this on this audio contract.

Speaker 6 (01:59:36):
Let's do it.

Speaker 2 (01:59:36):
Soon because of the age factor, so we don't.

Speaker 1 (01:59:39):
Yes, I don't know if I have much time left.
So yes, I will do it.

Speaker 3 (01:59:43):
You will be here forever, trust me, Steve. I'll leave
you with the last question. Then I'm signed out.

Speaker 4 (01:59:47):
Yeah, last question. Whose idea was it to name the
first for Bob James albums one, two, three, four, because
we're modeling Ray Angry's catalog after that on our label.
But was that preconceived or did you just do that
as it went on?

Speaker 6 (02:00:00):
I think Cree Taylor's idea and the way he explained
it to me at that time, because we were very
aware of Chicago, the group Chicago had done talk about
it a lot and the way I remember Creed thinking
about it strategically was that. And this was nice that
he was thinking that I might have longevity. But if

(02:00:22):
you name if, if you name it that way, you
get to your album five and the people are fans,
they know that they got four that they have to.

Speaker 4 (02:00:30):
Collect, so collect the.

Speaker 2 (02:00:33):
More records you make, and I did have.

Speaker 6 (02:00:35):
It happened to me that after I got up to
ten or whatever, that the avid fans know what they
have to look for that, oh I don't have eight
or I don't have And I heard him talking about that,
but that was that was what was in his mind.

Speaker 4 (02:00:50):
Oh my gosh, thank you, thank you for it.

Speaker 6 (02:00:53):
Do you have time for me to tell you one
more little thing, because yes, you and I encountered each
other when I came in the middle of your back
and forth thing that you had going with Bis Marquis
about the bells.

Speaker 1 (02:01:05):
Damn, I forgot about the bells.

Speaker 3 (02:01:07):
Sure that he's no longer with us, can you just
release a copy of PI Peter Piper without the bells?

Speaker 2 (02:01:13):
Well, here's what I wanted to tell you.

Speaker 6 (02:01:15):
I did a little round table at the Blue Note
with some hip hop guys and we had a surprise
for them because my engineer, David, we had gone out
to Iron Mountain to check out my master recordings, the
multi tracks and so, and got the multi tracks from

(02:01:36):
those sessions for that album Take Me to Marti Gras,
And we have an outtake of a different take of
Taking Me to the Marti Gras that David made a
rough mix that played it for these guys at the
roundtable that nobody had heard before, and it's got the
bells on there. But I have the multi tracks and

(02:01:58):
I could do whatever I want. And when I went
to Iron Mountain to check them out to make sure
that the multi tracks were still in good shape, I
was able to sit at the console and push a
solo button and hear.

Speaker 2 (02:02:10):
Boom boom boom boom boom.

Speaker 1 (02:02:13):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (02:02:15):
Uh. And it's a different a little bit different groove
and play.

Speaker 6 (02:02:19):
I played the melody differently, different keyboard solo in the middle,
and of course it doesn't have any other production than
any of the strings all that other stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:02:27):
Because he's out.

Speaker 1 (02:02:28):
I do have a question, but just a bonus question.

Speaker 3 (02:02:32):
You you have a tendency to use a lot of
sound effects on your What's the purpose of that, because
even with take Me to the Mani Gras, and even
with Alley of the Shadows, Like, what was the purpose
in using those like sound effect records on top of
the music cinematic?

Speaker 6 (02:02:52):
I don't know that we were even that specific about it.
But the atmosphere with Take Me to the Marti grad
we were trying to create the party in New Orleans
kind of an atmosphere. So that was that one was
pretty clear.

Speaker 1 (02:03:05):
But which animal sounds No, I don't know. It just
like this sounds like a bunch of sheep in the
background or something.

Speaker 4 (02:03:13):
But it sounds it sounds like they were just having fun,
is what. It sounds like a lot On Chapanzee, they
use a lot of sound effects on tap and z
and it's just you know, you can tell they're just
having a blast.

Speaker 6 (02:03:23):
Yeah, we're gonna have new sound effects that we'll be able.

Speaker 4 (02:03:27):
To do with it.

Speaker 1 (02:03:28):
Let's make it happen.

Speaker 4 (02:03:30):
We're all analog though, so bring your analog thoughts.

Speaker 1 (02:03:34):
Yes, we'll do this.

Speaker 3 (02:03:35):
So on Behalf of Sick Steve Laya fon Diicgelo and
on Paid Bill. This is Quest Love talking to the
great Immortal Bob James, my my future collaborator. Yeah, We're gon,
We're gonna do this project and up your grammy count.
I'm calling it right now. This is Quest Love Supreme,
one of the dude. This NERD's paradise right now and

(02:03:57):
I'm happy and I'll see you guys on the next.

Speaker 1 (02:04:00):
West Love Supreme Zeo. West Love Supreme is a production
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (02:04:17):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.