Bob James

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeart Radio. Wait
a minute, is that a d X seven That is
a chorus patch on my uh montage? Okay, we got it. Nice,

(00:26):
Nice ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to another episode of Questlove 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 some some even more right, yeah, you know,

(00:50):
because I feel like, uh, every episode as you had
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 this is the
Steve MVP episode. Not to put any pressure on you,

(01:11):
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, say like this, this is sort
of like, you know, we had expectations for Lebron to
be the guy back when in high school and all right, well,
I want you to do your intro. But but yeah,
I was just telling honestly before the before we started

(01:32):
the show, was telling Bob and Sonny that I do
have a radio show on w KCR, Columbia University's radio station,
and we the show that we do is about jazz labels,
and each episode we cover a different label, and quite
recently a couple months ago, we did a three hour
episode about tappan Zee Records, which is Bob's label under

(01:53):
Columbia in the late seventies and eighties and into the nineties,
I believe well as part of one of the tappan
Zee 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 it's
getting a little lost. So I want to refresh our

(02:14):
listeners with some said in like twenty episodes, amazing, this
is amazing. I might I might just skip the intro anyway,
Fante Layah, you guys cool, Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I
will basically say that our guest today, of course, as

(02:35):
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 we can't call
him hip hop. But I think probably the most unique
character trait of our Guest today is probably my or

(02:59):
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? I don't know. I
will say that probably when the smoke clears and we
start taking a toll of the artist that fall under

(03:22):
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, we get
to know a lot of these artists through the power
of sampling. I will say that Our Guests is probably
at the top of the list. Like I think, hands
down he's he's the king of textures, which is something

(03:43):
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 Guests is probably one of the
kings of the perfect four bar capture, the ability to
transform your new creation into something else. That's just how

(04:06):
adventurous he is. Cut to cut to cut to cut
from album the album, 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

(04:28):
is the foundation for some of the best hip hop
that I've ever known, 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

(04:53):
James episode of Quest Love Supplin Finally Man, And I
hope that was recorded so I can I cut it
in half? Like because I could really yeah this for
eighteen minutes. You mentioned the best engineered. Did you mean

(05:15):
engineered or did you mean like him engineering at a concept?
I mean, I'm trying to make up the name Joe Jorgensen,
who was George Jordan 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

(05:38):
his music, because you know, like there's two ways to
take him music. You know, we come from a generation
where you go digging, you take the records home, and
I mean, with the notable exception of Primo and Dilla,
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

(06:03):
you know, because a lot of us just skip put
it on forty five no no, no, no, oh, that's
something you know you skip around. But to me, it
is one of the some of the best engineered music
for for the purpose of sampling. But you know, again,
it's like you can listen to his music under different scopes,
not just like, oh, from a sampling perspective. But that's

(06:23):
the thing you can't category. Is it one more thing
before maybe we let the guests speak, right, Well, let's
have a whole episode where he just doesn't talk. Good
thing you brought keyboard, Bob, 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

(06:45):
does is fusion. I think that what he did was
basically just another version of fusion jazz. But I feel
like any description for jazz artists is almost like a
four letter word. But fusion, you know, is includes a
obviously whatever many different things that are being fused. Well,
let's ask him, Bob James, Welcome to the show. Finally,

(07:09):
nineteen minutes later, you know that, sew, 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
would you like us to know you as? And describing
your artistry? Yeah, I don't know that I'd probably be

(07:33):
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 a conversation about I thought I was

(07:55):
spreading myself too thin and I should focus more on
one thing and making my mind whether I want to
be an arranger or a pianist and what genre classical
jazz or whatever, And she she said, stop worrying about it,
just do what you do, and that maybe what sets

(08:16):
you apart or makes you differ from another 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 or go too far into one direction, because
I love the variety and the challenge of it. And
right now I'm trying to meet hip hop head on,

(08:38):
rather than have it happened 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, and wait a minute before you chop
me up. Let's see if we just go from beginning
to end every night. Okay, So Bob Jeames does a

(09:00):
lot of stuff. The reason why I 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, the city and the and the

(09:24):
time period. Did that play a lot into into the music.
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

(09:45):
being honest, We're reflecting our time, and that changes. So
I've resisted when people try to make a definition of
what jazz is or because it changes, it changes along
with everything else that's going on around it. Bob, what
was your first musical memory? Getting fired from being pianist

(10:09):
at a tap dance class in my hometown. I think
I was twelve or something like that, 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

(10:32):
earliest memory of trying to learn what keeping the beat
metow still trying who who would have it gums into
fire a twelve year old? Yeah, that was pretty cold,
and I don't exactly remember that, but I have defined
that too harshly and they may have actually told me

(10:53):
to go home to my mom. Passive aggressive firing. Okay,
you couldn't keep up? Was it? With the slibble kickball change?
Of at all. Is it one of those kind of
classes of beginners. I was just curious. I just I mean,
I'm a Hindes girl. Was there music around your house
growing up? Not a whole lot. My father was a

(11:13):
lawyer and I lived in a small town of Missouri
where what I did here was mostly country music, and
my parents didn't even really have that many records that
came close to jazz either. I started hearing a little
bit and getting intrigue high school baby, and I remember

(11:35):
kind of like it, that feeling that it was improvised,
as opposed to what I perceived classical music being too
much practicing, and jazz representatives at that time escape from practicing,
so because you could just make it up anything that
came into your head. And it's only been in more

(11:58):
recent years that I decided that practicing, even somewhere in
relationship to jazz was a good thing and bad thing.
So around what year was that when you discovered jazz
in the nineteen fifties, mid nineteen fifties, And I do

(12:19):
remember that that was pretty much the highlight of the
West Coast jazz because I do remember CHEDD Baker, Jerry Milligan,
Dave Brubeck, those names formed or the style of it,
the West Coast style was intriguing to me. Only in

(12:39):
college did I kind of get more tried to get
more deep. I know, there's this famous story of was
it a talent show or something some kind of competition
where the bands were being judged by Henry Mancini and
Quincy Jones, and it's not about that for a panel
to be judging. Yeah, it was very pivotal time in

(13:05):
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 performers who were willing to
be really daring and do crazy things that the avant

(13:27):
garde world was really out at that time, and so
I was incorporating some of those guard 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. We were expected to play
bebop and I kind of deliberately went up against that

(13:51):
and started playing some crazy stuff along with some bebop,
and they caught Quincy's here especially. I kind of don't
remember whether Henry Mension he was into what we did,
but Quincy definitely was, and they put a smile on
his face. Gave me a chance to meet him, and
we kind of prevailed at that in the Winter Circle

(14:14):
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. Did you get into school, Yeah,
I got a master degree in composition, mostly classical training.
My jazz training was extracurricular. I'd go into Detroit from

(14:39):
ann Arborn, look around for place to sit in. Yeah.
And so Quincy signed you to was it Mercury? Yes,
it was, and we recorded the album in Chicago. He
was living there, I think at that time, and that's
where he would Mercury was based in Chicago. And so

(15:00):
this is like the early sixties, right, yes, sixty three,
sixty two, sixty two, 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 Cree Taylor,
and that gets you to CTI. But what happens in

(15:20):
between there in the in the mid sixties. Another big
pivotal time was when I got the job with serav On,
her music director pianist nineteen sixty five. Wow. I had
learned that her pianist ron Elbright had left and she
was looking around, and indirectly Quincy was involved in that too,

(15:42):
because where I learned that that Sarah was looking for
pianists was at this music copy service in Manhattan where
I used to hang out and watch 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, yeah,

(16:10):
I learned about this possible job. And I had actually
met Sarah very briefly once when I was playing with
Madard Ferguson's band at Birdland 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

(16:31):
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 always kind of gets the responsibility
to have to play, and once she calls out a
song you'd better know it, because she wouldn't have come
in with any music, even for the pianist. And I

(16:54):
got really, really lucky that that night, because she said,
do you know the Sweetest Sounds? And I was able
to say fairly quickly, yeah, Well, Keith, this in the
jargon of that time. Let the person who asked you

(17:17):
about it know that you're that you're prepared. And at
that time, there was a Broadway musical that had just
opened up, and the Sweetest Sounds was one of the
songs in that musical, a brand new song by Richard Rodgers.
And but anyway, I was kind of a fan of
musical theater, and it's just complete coincidence that I knew

(17:41):
this song just bearlesshoo. Sarah was one of the first
cover artists sing it out of the Broadway show, and
so it made an impression on her. And it was
at least a year or two after that that I
responded when she was looking for a pianist, and she

(18:01):
remembered that night, and I got to John, I have
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

(18:22):
with having access to what they would call a fake book.
Was there any sort of cheet cheety fake books of
that level back in well, you know, those songs were
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

(18:43):
music to everything? Or were their fake books out back then? Yeah,
and 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 look up pretty song.
I mean, similar kind of a fakebook thing that we
could do. But at that time, I'm reasonably sure that

(19:08):
this song was so new there wouldn't have been in
the fakebook anyway, because him out and in Maynards band,
the only thing I would have had on the piano
was his charts that I was playing with him. So
when she came in unannounced and surprised that if I
hadn't known, that song might have changed my life and

(19:29):
I probably wouldn't have gotten the gig later. 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

(19:52):
to make a living playing this music, jazz in particular,
you pretty much have to be a wizard at reading music. Correct.
I wouldn't say you have to go what's what? All? Well,
you know, there were two different approaches to it. In
my case, I think I was pretty clearly thinking that

(20:16):
the more trending you had, better and that just may
increase your odds of getting a gig. And some of
the gigs were not necessarily going to be a jazz gig.
You might get a gig plant for wedding or whatever,
and certain kind of gigs if you couldn't read, you
wouldn't get that gig. But certain jazz gigs that didn't

(20:36):
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 very
much his style with his label, had a lot of

(20:58):
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 a ranger to
do that, and it turned out that he he learned

(21:19):
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.
All right, let's take value of the shadows, which maybe
our audience might note that as a group homes the

(21:40):
realness now value of shadows, which has so much like
stop on a dime, you know, just like all this
arrangement stuff. So a mind, I believe, like Steve gad
or it's just Muhammed, we're giving these charts and knew
exactly when the like the starts and stops were because
I'm imagining that you guys can't live in a studio

(22:04):
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 the 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
takes or whatnot, So like do they just study the
music or do you give him a cassette the arrangement

(22:26):
ahead of time and they just committed to memory. It
was all variations of that over many years. You mentioned
DRIs Mohammad. In my memory of working with drisa has
been a long time, but may have been able to
read some simple chart, but he was not what we

(22:46):
would call reader. So I was going to hire Dries.
I wouldn't put a big complicated chart in front of
him because even if he did, it would change his
approach to playing, and what I wanted from him was
his own, loose, non obedient, reading a chart kind of style.

(23:08):
So in some cases we were deliberately trying to move
away from a kind 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,

(23:30):
most of those CPI records, we would record the rhythm
section first and the production part of it would come afterwards.
So I could I could work with two different kind
of musicians. I could go in on the rhythm section
day and do it very loose, with minimum kind of chart,
and then once I had that basic track, I'd take

(23:52):
that home and score the more complex stuff or the
stuff for the larger chestra. And so I guess we
did it both ways. And for a piece like Valuing
the Shadows or Night on Ball Mountain, some of those
things that were adaptations of classical music, it definitely required

(24:16):
a chart and a musician that could read. 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 totally loose and just play some blues or whatever,
and then reading would take that music in the wrong direction.
In developing your initial sound, who were you idolizing? Yeah,

(24:42):
I wasn't too different from most other aspiring jazz pianists
in that I listened a lot to Oscar Peterson and
Bill Evans, maybe the two that I listened to the most.
Of course, I tried to listen to everybody here, or
Garner and Artatum and on and on and on. But
but I I usually came down to thinking that three

(25:03):
of those pianists influenced me 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 every eight measures, but he knew exactly when played them,

(25:27):
and I love that economy of not playing two. 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'd better try to find some
other approach. Is build the Is he partly responsible for

(25:51):
why the Finder Rhodes became your signature sound? Or was
just no? As a matter of fact, I didn't like
the way either Bill Evans or Oscar Peterson played the
Fender Roads, and they only played it occasionally, and it
always seemed to me to sound like they either had
to do it or experimented with it and ended up

(26:16):
not liking it. If you look at their overall recorded repertoire,
you won't find very many Fender Rods 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. They played it

(26:38):
like it was an acoustic piano. 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 Roads

(26:58):
on my own. Rudy Van gel Or had 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. Was it was it? Uh?
Like now it's so commonplace, But um, in the early
sixties when they're when they're developing this instrument, Like, was
it foreign? Was it like? Like, I mean the way

(27:22):
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? Like? What
were your feelings on it? It was? It was a gig.
I wasn't even really um I was playing it, uh

(27:45):
because of because I had to. That was my assignment
on that particular gig, because they wanted Okay Bros. When
my heart was still with the Acoustic Kettle, until I
began to realize that I was getting identify with it
and that I had some kind of approach that people
were hearing that that almost forced me to take it

(28:06):
more seriously. When my album, the first solo album that
I made for CT, I had feel like making Love
on it, and there was a sound that I had
used Fender Rose on ROBERTA Flex because I played piano
for her on her version two, so that sound became

(28:27):
very much identified. That was on nineteen seventy four. I
guess in some ways I felt limited by it because
it just had no matter what you did, there was
only one way that I could make is sound authentic
or good? Okay, So um, I kind of was starting

(28:47):
your discography the period in between the first album, The
Bowl Conceptions that Quincy produced and your second album, Um Explosions,
which really doesn't get discussed enough, discussed too much. I

(29:09):
might not have a career the night and day of
those two records. I mean 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,

(29:31):
Like you know, Coltrane's thing was more spirituality and then
you know, like the stuff of the shape of jazz
to come and all those things like which I think
they're being an avant garde with notes, but you know
you're kind of taken at least listening to those records, Um,
I mean, if I could be bold to say, and

(29:54):
you know, notwithstanding the 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,

(30:14):
like just in terms of you using different frequencies and whatnot,
Like what made you go from night and day, from
like bowl Conceptions to Explosions. Well, it actually, in my
memory was that totally Night and Day, because they were
kind of all related, and there were some elements in

(30:36):
the Explosions album that I had already been experimenting around
and that had gotten Quincy's attention. The two classical of
Our Guard composers that participated in the Explosions album were
Robert Ashley and Gordon Muma, and they were both exploring

(31:00):
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 or whatever, and then
manipulating them with tape machines. There was no personal computer.

(31:24):
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 to be put together. And what I tried to
do with explosions is I guess you could say it

(31:49):
was similar to the way artists us backing tract more recently,
so the this electronic tape of for exampling or sampling
where something yes, so that's that the sample plays or
the backing tribe plays, and then we would improvise over

(32:12):
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 gardeness or and
it was It was all seemed to be all about
pushing boundaries. What are the limits of what could be
called music as a sound? Organized sound chaos, and different

(32:37):
people use the different approach. Sometimes it was anger and
thumbing their nose at the audience. The idea 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

(32:58):
of the theater and with them. So there was all
variations of that and debate about it and what's what's
meaningful what isn't. So you had the people that loved it,
but you had as many or more people that hated
it and thought it was noise. And so we in

(33:19):
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 jazz. I liked to surprise my audience
that just when they thought we were just playing some

(33:40):
conventional bebop, all of a sudden, electric electronic sounds would
come in and then we were suddenly in a completely
different world where where I'd be stroking the strings with
my hand or getting a mallet and playing beating on
the side of the piano, And we were part of

(34:00):
the time seducing the audience and part of the time
confronting them with surprise and making him deal with it
at that point. Were you familiar with like artists at
the time, like like a Raymond Scott or the Tanto
guys or just any of those experimental synthesizer records. Yes,

(34:23):
I was those two names, I don't remember, but but
I was more influenced by the people in the classical
of our Guard world, like John Cage and Stockhausen and
ghost people that were there was a different kind of
experimentation in the jazz world. Don Ellis, the trumpet player,

(34:46):
was also very involved of Our Guard music at that time,
and there were the mo guys. When the Mobe syntheciser
came up, came into being a little bit later. Actually,
by that time I was sort of lo using interest. Frankly,
the idea of making the audience hate me. It started

(35:06):
to be so secure that I thought, well, I'll never
be able to make a living if I make you
see that you were going for more of like a
Stravinsky make the audience hate me thing, or just no,
because Scherenberg might be a better example example. Because Stravinsky's

(35:30):
music people realized fairly quickly that it was just great
and it was they also rioted, you know, and had melody.
It had all of the things that it's survived as
a as a real classic, even though the dissonance shocked
people a little bit at the time, but it was

(35:50):
cinematic it. Uh. I never never viewed him as avantan.
It was more we say about the provocateur, musical provocateur.
He had come out of the Impressionist area era when
when the Romantic era of the nineteenth centuries gradually they

(36:14):
began to get tired of tonal music and the tonal
and conventional dissonance, and so the Impressionist era revelant wc.
It was a blur and where's where's the tonic? So
by Stravinsky's time, he was going further in that direction

(36:37):
and more dissonance and a less conventional tonality, but still
making the attempt to um. Maybe I'm wrong, but I
don't think he won his audience to hate him like
we were we were sort of doing at that time.
It was it was fun and a temporary interest for me,

(37:03):
just trying to learn what were the limits. And I
learned just for myself that the limits that I wanted
to go back to were far more conventional and I
wasn't really getting it wasn't reaching my heart. The avant
guard side of that was a curiosity from my brain,

(37:25):
but I more and more started to like the romantic side.
And probably those four years I spent with Sarah Van,
she certainly wouldn't have let me play any avant guard candle, right, Yeah,
I was trying to imagine that. Yeah, I had really
play all the learned the standards, and not only learn

(37:45):
I'm learned the great voicings and everything so I could
inspire her and that became my life. 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

(38:09):
to think that's your first record, even though it's not.
But just as the Bob James as we know, why
why did it take you to the nineteen seventy four
to start You're You're a part of the story from
from the after explosions and after I kind of thinking
that it was a dead end for me. It was
immediately after that that I got the job with Sarah Bong.

(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. I've thought of myself
as a jazz pianist and was thinking about trying to
make a solo career. But I really liked a job

(38:52):
with Sarah being an accompanished, and I started getting arranging
jobs as a result of it, and I liked that,
and it provided a steadier income in New York, and
I was starting to get arranging jobs. And by the
time I got to nineteen seventy, when I got the
job to play on Quincy's album Walking in Space, which

(39:14):
was my introduction to Creed Taylor, that gave me the
opportunity for cretailor tips see what I could do that
I could write for large ensembles. And still by that time,
I was not thinking of myself as a solo artist,
and I didn't even think I was going to pursue it.
How musical was Cree Taylor, Well, he definitely wasn't one

(39:36):
going out and 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 to He wanted his label to

(39:58):
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 the
style of the one element of it that he talked

(40:19):
to me a lot 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 favors, he had his paste, and that
formed his choices that he made throughout those years. But
does he allow you to really have say, like I

(40:40):
know that you started producing after the four app like
by yourself, but like, are you allowed to have saying
these first four records? Definitely did. I had a lot
of say and you you mentioned value of the Shadows
right off the bat, which was completely me going as
almost as off our guard as I would have a

(41:03):
project of his where he was a producer. But he
gave me a lot of leeway and the arrangements. The
basic thing that gave me that job early on working
with him was that 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,

(41:30):
and that became such a trademark for him almost And
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. Okay, So take something
like A Night on Bald Mountain, which you know, if

(41:51):
you're a Disney fan, you know that from Fantasia. I'll
admit that I met Night on Mountain because it was
on side three of Saturday Night Fever. You know. I
was also like seven years old when it came out.
But when you're doing these interpretations of classical music into jazz, one,
are you doing all the arranging? And how many man

(42:13):
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 sect, like for
one song, how many man hours does it take for
you to write these arrangements out a lot? I was fast,

(42:35):
and you kind of had to be. I grew up
watching The Great Arrangers and Quincy had told me about
that music copying service that I've mentioned about earlier, and
I would go in there and watch how they would work.
And there were people like Billy Buyers, and there were
the people that got a lot of the jobs. And
I saw how they did their scores and how they

(42:58):
set up the scores so 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 and for
the session the next day. So I learned to be fast,
and I definitely wasn't the fastest, but I could put

(43:20):
something together pretty quickly. And I had studied in college
so that the part of that whole process was getting
to know the range or the instruments, and the kind
of ways that you could write for an instrument that
would make that player sound better if you kept it
in the right range. Lots and lots of stuff like that,

(43:42):
and I was the fact that I could do it
allowed pre tailor 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. UM and on mountain night,

(44:03):
on ball mountain chart that I did UM and Steve
Goad played the drum part. It was all about featuring him.
At that time. I just kind of know him and
I knew he could read whatever I put in front
of him, but keep it in the spirit of free
flowing jazz playing. And even with that arrangement, we went

(44:25):
in first with the rhythm section and recorded that, and
I refined to my score after that, somewhat based upon
the fills that Steve would play. I used to like
to do rather than give Steve all the notes with
all those hits on it, you know, the syc of
patient things. He would just play loose, and I would

(44:48):
I would build around him and yeah, and then when
he would hit those fills, I would make that the
brass you knows, that make it sound like he was
he was answering the brea as arrangement when actually and
some of that stuff he wrote it and it was
tight and inversion in version because the way he was

(45:10):
playing it was loose, you know what I mean. I
knew Steve Gad was a monster, but in my mind, okay,
now makes total sense that you do your rhythm section first,
and then you build around what your rhythm section does,
and then yeah, in order that way there had to
be a pretty specific chart too, because it wasn't just

(45:33):
a simple lead sheet for Steve and the bass player
Gerry King all that I had on that particular piece.
It was a lot was written out, but within that,
since we didn't have the whole brass section to the studio,
there was a kind of flexibility that we could use

(45:53):
to get the groove happening and to make so that
it wasn't too too tight and too conservative in the
way we played it. So my memory of what we
were trying to do was both have it be a
very specific chart but also the feel of a loose,
improvised jazz performance. Your personnel, you know, it reads like

(46:17):
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
personnel's for your record, because like it's the cast, it's

(46:38):
just and leading into tappan Zee, it's just Yes, it's
so much about who's around you. So do you ask
you a question? Please? Sorry? Yes? So, how did how
did you come across like the Ralph McDonald's of the world,
the Grover Washington Juniors of the world. Yeah, Steve, I
don't think it's any different from what you're world is now.

(47:01):
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 to and that's where most of the
gigs were, and by word of mouth you start to

(47:21):
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 your day, you could get Ray Brown to
play bass, and you could get whoever you want because

(47:44):
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 the
who's the new guy and or gal and who who's
going to inspire you? And so you keep searching, and

(48:06):
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 who were talking
about Now. As a result of that, did you and
David Matthews ever collaborate at any time. No U, the
other David Matthews. There's Yeah Matthews, but the arranger Dave Matthew.

(48:34):
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 get hired as a pianist for some of Don
Sebeski stuff, so I got to know him. But the

(48:56):
the other arrangers, Robert Friedman I remember, and some of
these other people that I knew them by reputation, but
rarely had a chance to be working on the same project.
All right, just the sequencing of your first album is
just off the chain. And I gotta know whose idea

(49:20):
was it to make such a radical version of in
the Garden, because you know, when I here in the Garden,
it's either it's either used for wedding purposes. You know,
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 it's almost like three things in one,

(49:44):
like you know, it's it's part rockabillious blue grass, but
it's also jazzy and it's avant garde, Like, do you
just tell us the genesis of that or was it
just like roll the tape, I got an idea. Well,
thank you for describing it that way, and even thank
you thank you for remembering it, because I do sort

(50:07):
of remember the day that I came into Retailer's office
and talked about wanting to do it, to do that composition,
and we had already discussed a lot about his basic
theory that if if a jazz artist took a classical theme,
they would turn it into something else, and that was

(50:28):
part of his stylistic thing. So the real classical name,
which is also I'm darling 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 Hugh McCracken a lot, the really great studio guitarist.

(50:51):
But who had he did dueling Banjos right, yes, yeah,
from doing Differ 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

(51:17):
make that piece eclectic. We didn't know exactly where we
were going with a slot of experimentation in the studio,
and Cree Taylor gave me the flexibility to experiment with
that and to come up with something unique. It's almost
like you know what that in particular, if a jazz

(51:38):
artist had a public enemy, like, that's the thing, like,
you're still hip hop without The only one person 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 I mean,
just the fact that you're mixing all these genres in

(51:58):
one before it actually gets a home or some sort
of identity, is you know, is kind of mind blowing.
I mean, at the 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

(52:21):
jazz Critics were like, if you're not following a certain
mold of what is deemed acceptable status quo? Are you
nervous about this or was the shield of CTI enough
to think you can safely say that I was not
nervous about it. If anything, I was not reluctant to

(52:43):
be confrontational and to not give critics any easy thing
to talk about. And I guess I always had a
little bit love hate relationship with them, and I got
more hate than I did love times that saw I
ended up saying who cares, and I go, it's my

(53:05):
job to do it and 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 to confront him too and not necessarily come
in with exactly what he expected. Bravery, I guess, has

(53:28):
always been something that I feel like you have to
have stay with your vision no matter whether people will
agree with it or not. And on the one album
we were talking about, I was not thinking at that
time as that as a solo career album for myself.

(53:49):
I didn't think I would have one, and Creed said
it was time because I'd done up so many projects
for him with Grover Washington and various other artists. I
felt my identity at CTI was a arranger and by
doing a whole bunch of different, eclectic kind of stuff.
I was hoping to use that as like an audition

(54:11):
to get more arranging jobs, and the more of a
variety that I could show as an orchestrator, I could
to 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

(54:32):
about Nautilus on that same album? Yeah, it was next
Lady talking to so many people about it and actually
confronting with Wootank client guys of various people about why.
You know, I kept asking a question, why did Natilus
get sampled by so many people? What was it? And

(54:52):
I was able to share the story on that same
one album. You asked about the sequencing, not us was
the last cut outside b kind of deliberately because it
was almost a throwaway and retailer knew that the other
cuts would get the attention at that time. So traditionally

(55:14):
with the LP you always may but your weakest cuts
on the center, 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 to the Nautilus and then Uppermany
ten or fifteen years later, I started hearing back that

(55:37):
that that the hip hop producers were grabbing onto it,
and I could not. I knew it had a good
baseline and Drews Muhammad playing drums A groove was there,
so I got that, but it just seemed like there
had to be something else about it that it made.

(55:57):
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 Greece and Gary

(56:22):
King were laying down. I had written a pretty elaborate
string arrangement for fun Let Me do It. There was
enough budget that 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,

(56:47):
I would have thought it would have made it less
commercial because it didn't fit in with the other standard
funk type 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 tracks that have been sampled

(57:10):
the most, I think it might be a combination of
that groove and this almost classical blurry orchestration that's over
the top of the texture. Yeah, it's that's why I
say you're the king of textures. Like and I can't

(57:30):
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 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

(57:54):
you know, I think at the end of the day,
you caught a compel performance with musicians that just were
tightly locked, and the fact that you didn't plan it
even makes it better because some of the best success
stories in music all come from people that aren't calculating.

(58:15):
Here's lightning in a bottle, you know, like Michael Jackson
trying to follow up thriller like I'm gonna sell one
hundred million outs, Like you can't. You can't capture lightning
in the bottle that way. It just happens or it
doesn't happen. So yeah, I totally believe it. And that's
why I've always tried to just enjoy the process of
doing it and let whatever comes out of that happen.

(58:36):
If you're passionate and if you're trying your best to
get the best people, write the best arrangement, play the
best just do your best and keep trying to make
the level higher. In that way, then you're still enjoying that.
Even if it isn't successful, You've you've had that pleasure

(58:57):
and privilege to make music and uh go through that process.
You know, around eighty seven, when you know Peter Piper
is coming out the Gate, which you know I'll probably

(59:17):
I mean, you would say, Frante that's probably one of
the first out the gate, uh bomb team samples. Yeah yeah, yeah,
so yeah, So when when this is coming out in
eighty six, eighty seven and whatnot, what is your immediate
thought of what's happening? I believe my first memory was

(59:41):
Jesse Jeff and the Fresh Prince and they touch Ja.
They took by westability and the way they did it
at that time, because I wasn't following what was going
on in hip hop at all. But I found out
about it after the fact and I listened to it,
and yes, I was shocked. What the heck, you know,

(01:00:05):
because it was just my record that played. It wasn't
it wasn't even a loop or a trunk, and you
could hear my melody, my composition. And suddenly I look
at this album and it has a new title. They
made it into a new song and they called it
something else, and I'm thinking, wait, wait a minute, you
know this is not right. What's going on here? And

(01:00:26):
one of the first things back then that came into
my mind is, hey, if they can do that, if Jessy,
Jeff and 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 and I'll chase from you know,

(01:00:50):
from I left my Heart Francisco. I'll call it Bob
James something or other whatever. And I knew you could
do that, by the way, So times have changed but
that was my first reaction. And also but in your
mind you didn't think like some fourteen year old or

(01:01:13):
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, eventually
you know there's a lot of conversation about it, and
if it if it had been just a fluke, I
would have considered it more as a legal matter. And

(01:01:37):
because throughout my sort of music business knowledge career, I
have felt that copyrights and the protection of them are
our most powerful weapon against big business. If the copyright itself,
the ownership of it, the control of it so that

(01:02:00):
that you have some control over your destiny is was
a very big deal for me. I fought for it
and all of my contracts. And the only way that
you can protect it is by is by going to
bad for it and not let people play your eye
or fraudulently steal it. So so that was really basic

(01:02:23):
before I even was aware of what was going on
in the hip hop world, okay, and the whole structure
of the legal thing hadn't happened yet, where where you
can figure out a reasonable bear way to license and
all those while west So yeah, exactly, so you hear

(01:02:45):
that happening. And 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 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

(01:03:06):
properly and 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 the simply
on my music kept happening. So I had to make
a decision about how to handle that, and eventually, yes,

(01:03:30):
it became a very amazing 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.
Did you notice an immediate paradigm shift in reaction? Whereas like,

(01:03:53):
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, Yes, and it's drastic
change has happened. I have so much appreciation and new respect,

(01:04:18):
new desire to confront this whole phenomenon of I wants
as a copyright holder, 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

(01:04:41):
about the business, to learn that these creations 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. But as I have learned more about the

(01:05:05):
sampled usage, I confronted Riza and I sort of actually
confronted DJ j Jeff two and there was a new
cut on my album be coming out in the spring
that is a collaboration with DJ j Jeff where it's
like let by Gones be by Godes. We're we're not

(01:05:31):
only friends, were in bed together with a track. You know,
we collaborated, and I'm very happy that we're able to
do that. You know, 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

(01:05:51):
or take me to the Marty ground and redid it
or used it. It was my creativity that was in
this chunk or in this recording, and I was not
in the studio to defend myself artistically. And as I
began to hear my music being sample more and more,

(01:06:12):
the chunks of it were taken in all kinds of
different ways, manipulated more drastically, temple chained, speed, sped up,
slow down, destroyed, kind of like explosion, only I didn't
have any control over the creativity right right, I'm not there,
so they do whatever they want. So I began to
think if I could be in the same room doing

(01:06:35):
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 minute,
don't change this, or something like that. So or five days,
two weeks ago, I was in ris a studio and
we did pretty much exactly that. He did his thing

(01:06:57):
and I did my thing. And a couple of times
I would do a kind of conventional jazz melodic thing
or a baseline thing or something like that, and 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

(01:07:21):
become some completely new rhythm that I wouldn't have thought
of in a million years. And now we're confronting each other.
Either I have to be strong enough to say, you know,
stay away from that, or or go along with it. Yeah, fante,
are you thinking about the guitar center beat right now? Oh? Man,

(01:07:48):
I hope it's not done. Yeah, that's a whole yeah
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 make it hard. Yeah, it's inside joke.
It's one of its most like unorthodox creases I've ever

(01:08:12):
heard of my life. CEP. When I when I heard
YouTube are collaborating, the first thing I thought about was Okay.
The guitar said, if you recall, do you remember the
reasons why he cleared Dayton? If I puncher, but you
didn't clear the Flowers record for those face, do you
remember the reason for that? I do remember. In those days,

(01:08:34):
we were trying to create a kind of formula, which
almost never worked, because every new creation is different and
ever 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 that only occupied,

(01:08:55):
you know, ten percent. I tried to base the licensing
fee on the the prominence of my music and 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, that I own that copyright,

(01:09:17):
and they're using it from beginning to end. I always
was pretty firm and rigid about no, I'm not giving
that up. That don't I don't think any composer who's
proud of the ownership of their creation would ever want
to give that up. And just say, would you say

(01:09:38):
not giving it up you mean not giving up any
publishing on it, or just not let them use it period?
Well either versaid, yes, not use the letium music period
unless they license it properly. If they license and to
get a license to change my music when they use
it from beginning to end. U why why would I?

(01:10:04):
Why would I? Why would any of you agreed to
do that? So here here you got to understand. Yeah,
I think, yeah, Well you asked the question, why would
any of us if you do that? I think definitely
it has to be. 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

(01:10:25):
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 four or not first four,
but your album's one, two, three, and four. 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

(01:10:46):
now I look at it, it's just you know, kind
of just planting that seed and putting it in the
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
was back for us back then. It's like what meme
culture is now in the Internet. You know what I'm saying.
Like my son, you know, he you know, watched the

(01:11:09):
Wire and all because the gift there's a gift of
we Bade. It's like being used as a meme a
million times, right, But to him it was just, oh
my god, So that's where that came from, Like, you know,
that's right, it that is the new sampling. Yeah, it's
like that is crazy, right. In defense of the way

(01:11:31):
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
fact was too late, and I suffered. Even if I

(01:11:52):
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. Couldn't
do it. Question, I've just called it the wild West,
and yes it was during that time. You you fend
for yourself and you don't know the history of how

(01:12:13):
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, and I know that I have gotten
a lot from the fact that it historically happened, But
when when it was the Wild West, when all that

(01:12:35):
stuff was going on, 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. I understand.
Are there certain songs that you favor of your usage?

(01:12:56):
Like for me, I feel like DJ Premier is probably
the most ideal person to have utilized your work where
it's not just straight up jacking it, but it's like
the way he does it is is amazing. But like
for you, do you have favorites of like, oh that
was clever or that sort of thing A little bit

(01:13:18):
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 Dome. Yeah. Such a
cool guy. And I am embarrassed in some ways to
admit that I still don't listen to that much if
IP music, I don't guess what neither do with. I'm

(01:13:42):
not well versed to talk about it, okay, 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 up

(01:14:03):
on the stage, and the skill and the spirit of
it that I had not paid attention to listening to
the recordings, but being there with them was fantastic. What
let me let me explain to our listeners. So um, basically,
mister James did a residency, a three night residency at

(01:14:24):
the Blue Note in New York City with talive quality,
Black Thought was there, rock Him was there. Yeah, Like
just basically, you know it, is this the first time
that you finally had a meeting of the minds between
yourself and and hip hop mcs and a band that

(01:14:45):
knew how to make this happen. I did the same
thing with Tali last year. That was the only other time,
and I really liked that in a way of getting
and no in real time, the music is happening the
two starts, and I'm playing right along with him, and

(01:15:09):
and when rockym was was playing his version where he
had sat my peach SHAMBOOZI, Yeah, and it made me
smile because I remember um percussion player that I used
to work with all the time, Doc Gibbs, And yeah,

(01:15:29):
Doc Gibbs had given me the title Shamboozi, which was
kind of part of his vocabulary, and it just brought
back a whole bunch of memories. And this again, this
that was just an intro for me. The melody or
the main part of that song Rockim didn't use it
at all. It was just those chords of the intro. Nevertheless,

(01:15:52):
I loved the way he performed on stage with such
confidence of charisma and and made me proud, happy and
smiling that he had chosen my you know, as something
to read a new piece out of it. What were
your thoughts on everyday people or people every day by

(01:16:14):
rested Development, Because I thought that was just a genie
that taken that little piece, Like, to me, that was genius.
What were your thoughts on 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

(01:16:36):
until way after the fact. Oh wow, they after it
had become a big hit. 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

(01:17:00):
they kept working with it, did a new mix which
ended up being called a metamorphosis mix, did add the
sample my sample, and that became a big hit. And
so quite clearly I knew that my sample had made
a difference in that record, but what we had did

(01:17:21):
not know at the time, and until it got litigious
and kind of got a little bit ugly, shall we say,
series right, And this may or may not have had
anything to do with their management, but more the record
company's management. When the royalties came in, they somehow or

(01:17:43):
other got channeled into the other version of did not
have my sample in it, so the ROI did not
come my way and after a long period of time,
and it was a very significant difference, so that that's
why they had to identify it the metamorphosis remix every
time I see it used in public. But even though

(01:18:06):
they did some unbeknownst to me and in the final house,
couldn't prove it anyway. It got channeled wrong, and it
took us a long time before we were figured out, well,
why is this statement for the other version so huge
and the statement for metamorphosis mixed? Nothing? Because no one

(01:18:30):
wants to write metamorphosis, I assure you, yeah, I assure
you ninety percent of the ninety nine percent at the time,
if someone's playing that song, they're they're definitely playing your version.
And the GP appearances and everything else. That that was
a version that became a hit. But I probably shouldn't

(01:18:51):
even be talking about details of this because there was
a settlement that we finally reached and it was not
particularly good. But so I don't have good memories about that,
Let's put it that way, Passion. You have good memories
about Taxi that Angela Angela think, Well, of course, that's
all good news for me, you know, kind of I

(01:19:13):
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. Sample
usage of it turned out to VC Lo Green when

(01:19:33):
he used it on a tun call sign at 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 shocky when I first found out
about it because they hadn't come to me in advance
about it either. But it when I first heard it,

(01:19:56):
I loved it so much. I just couldn't be anything
but 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 Rizzar recently. But Celo and

(01:20:16):
I did some stuff together and we wrote a song
together that's going to be on the same new album
of the album you haven't heard Side of the Times
by Cilo. It's my Taxi Beast reinterpreted by him. Wow, okay,
well you mean the Sign of the Times that Rod

(01:20:37):
timbersdon't work on that by Side of the Times. So
at the Times, yeah, right, that Rod Timber did work
worked on it is on my album. Celo version which
he called Side of the Times has his lyric that
has Sign of the Times in the lyric. I see
it's you have another version another song called Sign of

(01:20:58):
the Times that's not related to the temper version several
Side of the Time songs, but but his Side of
the Times as my tracty melody and a very very
cool but very specific reinterpretation of it. That it was

(01:21:19):
a great opportunity for me to meet him and collaborate.
I want to ask about your gear. I know that
as a creator who you know since the Explosion record,
like you've been experimented with like electronic sonics and whatnot.

(01:21:39):
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 s seventy seven when they're
making polyphonic synthesizers which allows you to make chords. Are

(01:22:01):
sort of manufacturers the Yamahas of the day, or the
or the the electronic makers of the day. Are they
courting you? Are you getting endorsements? Are you sort of
in at Stevie Wonderway where you know they go to
him and Herbie Hancock with all this new gadget reading
like here like use our stuff, and more specifically in

(01:22:24):
the seventies early eighties, not now where of course now
you know we use that every day, but in the
in the late seventies and eighties, like what was the
the courting system like with keyboard makers and you. I
don't remember exactly when I got endorsement from Yamaha, but

(01:22:44):
I've been affiliated with them for many many years now,
specifically the discoverer the acoustic piano that has mini 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.

(01:23:04):
Most of the rest of my gear throughout has been
I paid for it, and I go to the music
store and buy it. Whatever 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

(01:23:25):
was the company that I remember that had the polyphonic
synthesizers that had separate oscillators for each sound. So in
the Oberheim eight voice was the one I e a
lot that 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

(01:23:48):
the more recent polyphonic synthesizers are, so that gave it
a character. 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

(01:24:10):
funky in a sense that yes, you could play four
six eight chords, but it was the sensiz was trying
to catch up. If you try to do anything too
fancy or too fast changing, it didn't behave like a
yeah know what. Okay, so if you held the notes down,

(01:24:32):
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. I was just gonna ask.
I wanted to make sure we got any questions about
four play. I used to do my homework to those
records in school in high school, so I specifically I

(01:24:55):
just wanted just the between the sheets album and the
litter like those like I played those records like you know,
back and forth. I wanted to ask one how did
all you guys come together? And specifically do you have
any memories of recording? Why can't it wait? The morning?
Will feel common? But that session was like that's my ship.

(01:25:16):
Many many many great memories from those years, and 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 Graham Panel Canyon, and
I had brought Harvey Masson 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. But
I had also Lee Ritnauer had used me on the
project of his, and we were dealing with wanting to
do reciprocal So if if I do something for you
to play for you, I want you to play on

(01:25:56):
my album. Whatever reowed me a reciprocal and since he
was LA based, I thought it might be more interesting
for me to go to LA and use both Lee
written Hour and Harvey Mason on my album. So I
planned it and didn't know who to hire on base.
Wasn't that familiar with the LA scene. So I asked

(01:26:19):
both Lee and Harvey who trying to use on basse,
and separately both came up at the same answer in
Nathan East, who I had not had never had worked
with him before, And I found myself in the studio
with those three other guys. Nathan Harvey and Lee, and

(01:26:39):
something clicked and all four of us could just feel
it wasn't like a regular recording session. The combination of
our backgrounds are things that we had worked on different projects. Whatever,
it just felt really special. And on a break we
had a conversation about the idea of how do groups

(01:27:00):
get formed? When? When? How did weather Report get formed?
How did the modern judge porteg get formed? When did
they decide to put a name on it and be
a group rather than an individual? And one thing went
to 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

(01:27:24):
and do a project? 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,

(01:27:47):
was what we remember as being kind of like the
first idea of a four place sound. 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

(01:28:07):
seventy seven, when Tommy Lapluna and George Benson create the
Breason Record, which was such a breakthrough album 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 I'm not dismiss him, but you know, even he

(01:28:29):
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 Breason blows up. But did you see
the embracing of that album as a 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

(01:28:59):
all those accolades, all those Grammy nominations and whatnot. 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

(01:29:21):
the sort of transition from just being a guitar 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 Brothers, I also got the job
of producing one of his records, and at that time

(01:29:42):
big bosses of Warner Brothers gave me the assignment of
wanting to him play more guitar. But as I started
to work with him, his heart was in singing more,
and I could see that has always been a conflict
in a lot of people. Jazz fans just are aware

(01:30:02):
of the genius that comes out of his fingers when
he plays guitar, that nobody else can do it. But
Uh is the whole other part of his personality felt
that talent that he had as a singer too, and
in the Breezing album both were happy both of course,

(01:30:24):
um masquerade and and every time I hear breezons a
tune right, 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 up. But it was eight bars,

(01:30:48):
uh and and it's just simple. He 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 go away from the hook, don't get too cute,
don't get too complicated, because the fans want to hear

(01:31:09):
that melody. And the way that that record was produced
was so clearly on the on the money in terms
of drive home that hook, drive home uniqueness. It just
made me want to go back to the drawing boards.
I want to try to do that. I want to

(01:31:29):
try to do something similar, but then you realize it's
not easy to buy that magic. I think a lot
of our fan base might not know that Breason was
written by Bobby Woomac. It's actually a Bobby Womack cover,
which I did know. I just recently found the Bobby

(01:31:50):
Woomack original, And you know, I tend to forget that
boy Woomac was actually a good guitar player, like so
you know that was an instrumental on one of his
records in nineteen seventy one. Um. And I'm getting to
know quest Love as a musicologist music man, because I

(01:32:16):
knew that sort of in my district memory. But I
don't think I ever heard Bobby max version. Yeah, no,
it's it's damn near the same song, just with our
harder Well when we say harder, more like a hip
hops should jump on it like it's it's actually amazing.
The drums are more cracking on the Womack version. Were

(01:32:39):
you gonna ask Steve uh Well, we kind of reazed
right over it. The time period that I wanted to
talk about the I mean, Bob James had the coolest,
one of the most iconic jazz labels of all time
with Tapanzee Records, and I'm I'm a little I'm curious
about the the timetable because you were a and ring

(01:33:03):
at Columbia. Was that during the CTI years when you
were arranging and also playing on CTI records. I kind
of had reached the end of my CTI after my
four solo albums that ended up around nineteen seventy seven,
and there were some problems with CTI in the business

(01:33:25):
world two and in the lack of payment of royalties, etc.
Which necessitated me litigating there. I'm beginning to make it
sound like a little but I hope I wasn't in

(01:33:47):
the long version of that. But there have been times
when I've had to protect it. In this case, I've
got I did because I ended up with the ownership
of my four records, which which made it possible for
me to make many Many things happened. So I left
in nineteen seventy seven, negotiated with Columbia and signed there
where Bruce Lunvall was the president, and he did give

(01:34:10):
me the opportunity 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 Kree

(01:34:31):
Taylor did, but my version of it and try to
develop my own style, but influenced by him, and very
early tonight you mentioned Joe Jorgensen, but many many memories,
I wanted Joe Jorgensen to be my Rudy van Gelder
because Rudy Van Gelder was a very unique engineer for

(01:34:54):
Kree Taylor and his style of engineering this 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. Would Rudy

(01:35:18):
pre mix the stuff or like, would you guys track
first then mix afterwards. That's a very good, funny question
because Rudy was extremely secretive about any of his techniques
and he did not like sharing. He did not like
anybody asking him any questions about You knew when my
next question was set. So I got the job of

(01:35:44):
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 that I
would take that home and listen to that to make
my arrangements. And the mix on those roughs that he
sent me with the worst, most crude, old reverb, no ambious, nothing,

(01:36:08):
because he didn't want to let anything out of his
studio that could even possibly be released. So that memory
of his mixing is so completely different from the way
anybody else work. Wait, do you have a dry Rudy
flat mix in your possession? Well? I have many, really,

(01:36:32):
if I could find a real real players that would play,
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,
you know, I'm sorry for really card jacking his interviewed Steve,

(01:36:53):
Like Steve is the CTI coologist. So the thing is
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

(01:37:15):
a U. I don't know, I can't I don't have
a 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. Go to his studio.
It's still open. Let's go and still unscathed and still yeah,
I'm in the same boat as you. Even though I
spent it was almost like a full time job, being
there every day in a studio for five years, and

(01:38:01):
I never learned much about the details of it either,
because he wouldn't talk about it. He wouldn't share anything.
Every one of his all of his gear, like his equalizers,
or compressor, anything like that that he had. He had
taped over the manufacturers the names of them, so he
didn't you didn't want you to know what they were.

(01:38:22):
That's hip hop. See, that's hip hop. That's hiding the
labels like you don't even know that, y'all if you're
following a cycle. So yeah, hey guys, Bob James had
one of the most iconic jazz labels of all time
called tappan Zee Records, And yeah, I just wanted to

(01:38:43):
I found it really interesting what artists you chose to
have leader albums on tap and Ze. Obviously you had
so many of your own records on that label as well.
But I want to just run some names, Bobby that
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

(01:39:06):
I'd be interested in Wilbert Longmeyer. Yeah, yeah, I found
out about Wilburt through George Benson. Actually he and George
Benson were friends, and George had heard him, and yeah,
he sang and play guitar, and to get a recommendation
with George Benson as about as good as you could
hope for. So that's the main reason why I signed

(01:39:27):
Wilburt And it was at a time when I was
very much in the heat of wanting to be a
good follow up to the CPI Sound, but my own
version of it wow, And that's that was the end
result of it. Okay. Joe An brack Keen very very

(01:39:49):
original pianist, amazing. She could not be produced in any
kind of a way like some of the other Vision
artists that I I had a chance to work with.
She was completely her own person. So my role with
her in some ways was to try to be like

(01:40:12):
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 section and make sure
we had the best engineer for her, get the right
sounds for her, and let her do her own thing.

(01:40:35):
That was pretty much my goal with Joan. There was
an artist named Mark Colby that did a couple of
records Once Happens. Yeah, he toured with me a lot,
played my band, and I've always loved Power in his playing,
and I could treat him similarly to the way I

(01:40:58):
tried to treat Grover Washington and for example, another saxophone
player for that label. Very fond members of those records,
and Richard T the piano player did a leader album
or two on tapan Zee as well. Yeah, well, Richard
being a member of that stuff rhythm section that had

(01:41:21):
Eric Gail on guitar and Gordon Edwards bass and Ralph
McDonald percussion. They were a kind of may of quintessential top,
top of the line R and B based rhythm section
and Richard T's unique kind of heavily church influenced combination

(01:41:44):
organ and sometimes Spender Rhodes. I just loved everything about him.
I was trying to emulate some of his feel because
I was alongside him on many sessions where some of
the Quincy Jones States and a lot of New York
studio days, Richard be on Oregon and I would be

(01:42:06):
on piano or sometimes trade off or whatever. So getting
to know him that way and realizing what a uniquely
great artists he was, of course he was an obvious
one for me to try to sign. And Steve Kahn,
the guitar player I think that was the first Tappanzee
record might have been. Steve was very determined that he

(01:42:29):
wanted the Columbia identity on his album, also so se
logo on it, but he wanted the red label, not
the blue, kind of like that I didn't have enough
prestige and that he needed a big name on their two.
He and I were friends and so he was he

(01:42:53):
was and smaller budgets. 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. Just
a couple more Mango Santa Maria Well, yes, and he
came through the bigger label as well. Particular kind of sound,

(01:43:16):
the Latin American sound that I wasn't doing with anybody else,
made it possible for us to make some pretty cool
records with him. And where did you come across? Alan
Harris came to me through Columbia, through just and the
most unusual Tapanzy project, I guess, and the one that

(01:43:38):
I had the least influence over. I don't remember 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. Okay,
the last one and the one I wanted to know

(01:43:58):
the most about it seemed to be kind of your
partner at the label, which was Jay Chadaway. Can you
tell us who a little bit about him? 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

(01:44:20):
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. So I started
working with him in that way. I got to know
him a little bit and we hit it off, and
I knew he had a similar approach to sound of production.

(01:44:41):
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 and they take their take
their boat to various places and just take up residence
for a long time. He moved after he after typ
he stopped, he moved to la and had a very

(01:45:04):
successful career as a movie composer, and he was very
involved in the Star Trek series. Very very talented guy.
Let me just wrap up the tappan Zee thing a mirror.
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

(01:45:25):
continuity with the album cover as a beautiful gatefold album covers.
And really you really knocked out of the park with
the with tappan Zee. Was I mean, you're welcome for
all the rabbit holes folks out there with all those names.
But all those Tappanzee records are great. Yeah, maybe not
the Alan Harrish record. Well, I wasn't gonna say that,

(01:45:50):
you said now, short thing. Since you mentioned George Jorgants,
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 Jorgensen, who was interested in doing a biography on me,

(01:46:13):
and he works with a video production company and they've
been starting up a project in which he's going to
do a biographical thing. He's a member of the group
Wilco Who's yeah, yeah, that's a little true. But when
he grew up, he was when he was I don't know,

(01:46:34):
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 of
those records. And so many many years later after he's
gone into business as a keyboard player and has a
lot of successful loco Now we're meeting again, and it

(01:46:58):
gives me a chance to pay my respects and have
such fond memories of all those great records that Joe
did with you. Hear that a mare stand good terms
with your engineer could pay off whatever. Steve, But your
very first production was on another Creed Taylor label called
Salvation with Gobor Zabo, the Hungarian guitar player. What was

(01:47:22):
that like your first production and what was Zambo like?
Nineteen seventy five. The 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 to La and did it, and he

(01:47:47):
was Gabor 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's kind of like an ideal

(01:48:07):
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. Wow, Gary McFarlane worked
a lot with him in that regards. Yes, definitely, I
love Gary McFarland's work. In fact, I was very influenced,

(01:48:28):
but I used to study his records to try to
figure out how he made his choices. Yeah, the Sign
of the Times record. Now I get the feeling I'm
about to answer my own questions see Quincy Jones. But
I'll ask you, how did you get involved with Rod
Temperton working on that album? Quincy introduced me to Rod

(01:48:51):
and he was in the studio a couple of the
records that I was involved with with Quincy, and I
was a big fan admirer, and once he put us
together because he thought that we might hit it off.
And even though Rod specifically with his talent was not
classical music, but I didn't think that much of an influence.

(01:49:17):
But as he 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 don't think Thriller had I can't

(01:49:39):
remember where he was, and he he just finished off
The Wall and Thrillers about to come the next year. Yeah,
so big in other rooms, 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

(01:50:00):
and how he put together his vocals, and they were
totally different from anything that I was aware of. So
it 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,

(01:50:23):
and when he worked with Michael Jackson he had Michael Jackson.
That kind of says at all that makes the difference
in the success level. I guess you co scored one
of my all time favorite films and I didn't. I
didn't realize it until maybe a year and a half ago,

(01:50:45):
during the pandemic that you created the King of Comedy score.
So can you talk about working with Scorsese? And well,
you're crazy? And where do you get all these details?
How do you know you know more information? The pandemic happens,
And trust me, the pandemic happens. You read all the

(01:51:08):
fine print to keep itself busy. I mean, I should
have done a lot of homework before I did this
with you. Questlove you know so much. And I gotta say,
my memories of working on that were so vague in
my mind now I'm not sure that I even remember
how to talk about it very much. You just threw

(01:51:30):
it together and just gave it to him. Well, no,
I mean I know that I was treating it very
seriously at the time that I haven't listened back to it.
And it's been twenty through twenty five years ago, or
at least it's half forty. And when you reach my
eye at my age, you know how hard it is

(01:51:51):
to keep retaining a lot of those membories. I don't
have much of a memory other than the way you
described it as a weird film, made a weird assignment
for me to make music for it. That's That's kind
of about all I'd be able to say at this point.
But do another zoom. I'll do some homework, listen to
it again, and maybe I'll have something more intelligent to say. No,

(01:52:15):
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. So
it contributes to the power I think, rather than everything
be dark it's too obvious. Right, You're right, this is
sort of on the same level. But um so, I

(01:52:38):
used to work in a record store back in high school,
and this is right when you and David Samborne started
your collaboration process. I think this was maybe this is
the double Vision album, but I just gotta know this.
You guys, fade you guys, fade algre voice right when

(01:53:02):
he's about to start scatting like a madman, or since
I fail for you, and every time I hear it,
like I'm I'm now a collector of pro tools and whatnot.
You know, like I like hearing the original versions in
its dry state and see what happens after the fade,
But how long do you have any remember of how

(01:53:24):
long that song goes on after the fade? Because right
when the fade goes down, that's when like Algaro just
starts scatting out of his mind. And I always wanted
to know what happens after that fade. Well, I couldn't
say that. I was probably not there in the mix
and the choice. I don't remember being there. I didn't

(01:53:46):
produce it. I mean, it was my album's name on it,
all right, but that fade usually and I would have
been very involved and very specifically with the last thing
that you want people to hear, and you want it
to be hot you wanted to be. And I think
the fade works just in the way you described it,

(01:54:08):
because it left you wanting more, and it left it
it said it's most hot. What I would say about
that record to you is that I'm very proud of
the pre production of arranging and scoring that I did,
which is would have been a conventional string orchestra and

(01:54:33):
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 I and
many people give me credit that when they hear it,
it sounds like a full, large orchestra of production. But

(01:54:56):
I had an Otari eight track in This was in
the era when you had the multi track stood or
whatever in studio and then you had to bounce down
in order overdub. So I took Bill snay, I guess
it was made a pre mix bouncing down and all
of the basic tracks were on. He gave me four

(01:55:18):
tracks or something like that to work with, and I
created the woodwinds, the French horns, and springs of 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

(01:55:41):
for torns going in. The French horns echo that line.
And because I had the rough mix that I 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. So right, okay, But

(01:56:03):
those 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 added living to my orchestration.
And if I do sort of like Steve Gad's drumming.
See now now I realized the approach. Yeah, the power
of the power of post production. Now that's that's the
lesson I learned today. Now that was at the time

(01:56:26):
when I was working at that record store. I think, um,
Moonlighting h Bruce Willison Sybil Shepherds show, very popular show
on ABC, had just started using that song. Um, so
suddenly a whole that was back in the day when
like a show like that could feature a song and
then selling everybody's coming in requesting it. And yeah, when

(01:56:49):
that that came out, just the whole world to started
asking for since I you know, fell for you that
that that covers so always tables and ask you, uh
sure one question and yeah, absolutely, that's I have the opportunity. Yeah,
this is a hypothetical only so since you nor I

(01:57:12):
are kind of session players these days, but if we
were in New York session players, yes, let's do it.
And there's a trio date that we were called upon
to do. And um, you had me at Hello looking
for a bass player, who would you recommend do a

(01:57:33):
trio date with with you on piano and me on drums?
I mean the opposite, or we could do that, um
we I would actually let's see who Derek Hoige, I
would say either hoij or I would actually go with
Pino po of course, yeah, I would go with Pino

(01:57:58):
Derek Hoije. We can go with Christian McBride McBride, but Peano,
you know, I like, I've worked with you know a
little bit many years ago. And Christian McBride I did
an album with, so that could be that. But the
Pino is more on your and since you've worked with them,
let's go with that. Are you are you committed to
a label right now? Tapan Zee, We'll do it. I

(01:58:22):
gotta 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
tapan Zee. And um and uh we can go co
co on that if you're if you're interested. But I'm
only joking about tapan Zee. It's it's kind of let's
bring it back, man, Let's bring it back JMI. I'm

(01:58:46):
signed a JM I for all my jazz stuff, so
I gotta ask my label president right here. Yeah, I
think we're good for We're good for Bob James pino Quest. Yes,
we'll sign on for that. We are absolutely going to
do that. You. I'm not doing that like fake. You
heard it here first people. No, we're making I'm telling you,
I got so much envy when I saw that clip

(01:59:09):
at Blue and then you know I'm working all week,
so but nah, you're You're a favorite of mine, and
you know I thank you for letting us nerd out
on you for two hours. Yes, we will make this happen. Yeah, yeah, Okay,
I hope that was recorded. Yes, it's absolutely recorded. You
can sue me if I renigg on on this this

(01:59:33):
audio contract. Let's do it soon because of the age factor,
so we don't Yes, I don't know if I have
a most time left. So yes, I will do it.
You will be here forever, trust me, Steve. I'll leave
you with the last question. Then I'm signing out. 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

(01:59:58):
was that preconceived or did you just do that as
it went along. Definitely 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
talking 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.

(02:00:21):
But if 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 collect,
so collect the more records you make, and I did have.
It happened to me that after I got up to
ten or whatever, that the avid fans know what they

(02:00:42):
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.
Oh my gosh, thank you, thank you for it. 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

(02:01:04):
the bells. Damn, I forgot about the bells. Sure, now
that he's no longer with us, can you just release
a copy of Peter Piper without the bells. Well, here's
what I wanted to tell you. 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,

(02:01:25):
we had gone out to Iron Mountain to check out
my master recordings, the multi tracks and so, and got
the multi tracks from those sessions for that album Take
Me to Marti Gras, And we have an outtake of
a different take of Taking to the Marty Gras that

(02:01:47):
David made a rough mix that played it for these
guys at the round table that nobody had heard before,
and it's it's got the bells on there. But I
have the multi tracks and I could do whatever I want.
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

(02:02:07):
and push a solo button and hear uh and it's
a different, a little bit different groove and played 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 the other stuff, because it

(02:02:28):
was out. I do have a question, just a bonus question.
You you have a tendency to use a lot of
sound effects on You're right, what's the purpose of that?
Because even with Take Me to the Monty Grad and
even with Allie of the Shadows, Like, what was the
purpose in using those like sound effect records on top

(02:02:49):
of the music cinematic? I don't know that we were
even that specific about it, but the atmosphere with with
Taking to the Marty Grad, we were trying to create
the party in New Orleans kind of an atmosphere, So
that was that one was pretty clear. Which animal sounds No,
I don't know. It's like sounds like a bunch of

(02:03:11):
sheep in the background and something. But it sounds it
sounds like they were just having fun, is what. It
sounds like a lot on tappan Zee. They use a
lot of sound effects on tappan Zee and it's just
you know, you can tell they're just having a blast. Yeah,
we're gonna have new sound effects that we'll be able
to do. Let's make it happen. We're all analog though,
so bring your analog thoughts. Yes, we'll do this so

(02:03:35):
on behalf of Sugar, Steve Layah, Fan Tigelo and m
paid Bill. This is Quest Love talking to the great
immortal Bob James, my my future collaborator. Yeah, we're gonna
do this project and up your Gramm account. I'm calling
it right now. This is quest Love Supreme, one of
the dude This nerds paradise right now and I'm happy

(02:03:58):
and I'll see you guys on the next Cots Love
Supreme zeo us Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(02:04:22):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Questlove

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