QLS Classic: Bob James

One of our most-played and most-beloved episodes of 2023. For Jazz Appreciation Month, Questlove and Team Supreme sat down with a living legend of the genre. Bob James recalls his incredible journey and his intersections with Sarah Vaughan, Creed Taylor, Idris Muhammad, and others. He also discusses becoming a beacon for hip-hop DJs and sample-based producers—and how he went from being a source to a collaborator with artists such as RZA, Talib Kweli, and, yes, still, Questlove. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Questlove Supreme is a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  People, people, what's up? It's Questlove giving you another classic episode of Questlove Supreme. This one is from April 2023. We talked to the great Bob James. We talked about his incredible career in jazz, some of the records that became keystones of hip hop, Bob's relationship with sampling, and his work with foreplay. Since this interview, Bob has continued to release music and tour, and yes, I still want to do something together with him. I love his energy, his wisdom, and of course, his incredible groove. This was a great episode of QLS, and I'm pleased to put it back atop your podcast feed. So I want you to enjoy Bob James on Questlove Supreme. Classic.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Wait a minute, is that a DX7?

• 2:47Speaker 03

  That is a dino chorus patch on my montage.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  We got it. Nice, nice.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of Questlove Supreme. I don't know, Steve, and why, we might need another superlatives, like, you know, like James Brown has the famous flames. I think we should be like the legendary Supreme, or you know, something, something even more exciting.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  He's dropping legend. That's right.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, because I feel like every episode is yet another kind of bucket list that we didn't know that we wanted to check off. Steve?

• 3:35Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  I feel like this is going to be the-

• 3:37Speaker 04

  Your time to shine, bruh.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is the Steve MVP episode, not to put any pressure on you.

• 3:43Speaker 05

  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.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Nah, I'm just saying, like, this is sort of like, you know, we had expectations for LeBron to be the guy back when in high school and-

• 3:58Speaker 05

  All right, well, I want you to do your intro, but, but yeah, I was just telling, honestly, before the, before we started the show, I was telling Bob and Sonny that I do have a radio show on WKCR, 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 of months ago, we did a three-hour episode about Tappan Z Records, which is Bob's label under Columbia in the late 70s and 80s and into the 90s, I believe. Well, as part of Warner, but Tappan Z went on for a bit, and I'm dying to talk directly to the man who started the label, and it was, it was such an influential label,

• 4:41Speaker 05

  and it's getting a little lost. So I want to refresh our listeners with some-

• 4:47Speaker 04

  It's like the most even said in like 20 episodes.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  I know, this is amazing. This is amazing. I might, I might just skip the intro. Anyway, Fonte, Laya, you guys cool? Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we good.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  Living the dream.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  What's happening? What's going on, man? What's happening? So I will basically say that our guest today, of course, is a legendary jazz musician, but I don't think we could just reduce him to jazz. Yeah, his music is smooth, but we dare not call him smooth jazz. His music is hip hop, but you know, we, we can't call him hip hop, but I think probably the most unique character trait of our guest today is probably my, or not my, our inability to pinpoint what is he exactly? Is he an avant-garde artist? Is he a musical provocateur?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Is he the godfather of smooth jazz? I don't know. I will say that probably when the smoke clears and we start taking a toll of the artists that fall under the jazz umbrella, and there's many categories under that, I will say that as far as the scope of hip hop, and yes, like, we kind of come from a hip hop scope because of our age and whatnot. We get to know a lot of these artists through the power of sampling. I will say that our guest is probably at the top of the list. Like, I think hands down, he's one, he's the king of textures, which is something that you don't necessarily hear someone describe another musician, but listening under a hip hop context,

• 6:23Speaker 00

  texture means everything. I also think that our guest is probably one of the kings of the perfect four-bar capture, the ability to transform your new creation into something else. That's just how adventurous he is, cut to cut to cut to cut from album to album. And I will say that probably one of the best engineered

• 6:49Speaker 00

  artists under the contemporary jazz umbrella. Just his sound speaks to probably everyone in my generation and beyond, because of course, a lot of his music is the foundation for some of the best hip hop that I've ever known, that we've ever known. And you, the listener, you've heard his music, whether you knew it or not. He is, you know, multi-nominated, underappreciated, loved, worship, always in demand, an absolute legend. This is the Bob James episode of Questlove Supreme, finally. Man.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  I hope that was recorded so I can put it in retrospect.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  I cut it in half, like, because I could really do this for 18 minutes.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  You mentioned the best engineered. Did you mean engineered, or did you mean like him engineering a concept? I mean, I'm trying to bring up the name Joe Jorgensen, who was-

• 7:56Speaker 00

  No, George Jorgensen and Rudy. Like, for me, just, it's the perfect texture of compression and, and natural sounds to me that I think is what attracts my generation to his music. Because, you know, like, there's two ways to take in music. You know, we come from a generation where you go digging, 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, you know, because a lot of us just skip, put it on 45, nope, nope, nope, nope, oh, that's something, you know, and you skip around.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  But to me, it's 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 the thing, you can't categorize it.

• 8:58Speaker 05

  One more thing before maybe we let the guest speak.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Right. Well, let's have a whole episode where he just doesn't talk.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  Good thing you brought your keyboard, Bob.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  I'm smiling, I'll just sit here and listen.

• 9:12Speaker 05

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

• 9:24Speaker 00

  But I feel like any description for a jazz artist is almost like a four-letter word.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Fusion, you know, includes obviously whatever, many different things that are being fused.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Well, let's ask him, Bob James. Welcome to the show, finally. Nineteen minutes later.

• 9:44Speaker 05

  You know that's how we do it.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  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 in describing your artistry?

• 10:03Speaker 03

  I don't know that I'd probably be the right person because so busy doing it, and I never could stay in one category for very long. Maybe I was just too restless or something. But at one point earlier in my career, my wife advised me that, we were having a conversation about, I thought I was spreading myself too thin, and I should focus more on one thing and make up my mind whether I wanted to be an arranger or a pianist, and then what genre, classical jazz or whatever. And she said, "Stop worrying about it. Just

• 10:45Speaker 03

  do what you do." And that may be what sets you apart or makes you different 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 go too far into one direction because I love the variety and the challenge of it. Right now, I'm trying to meet hip-hop head-on rather than have it happen off to the side where they take a chunk of me while I'm not there in the room to be able to defend myself. It might be good to get in there and say, "Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Before you chop me up, let's see if we can go from beginning to end every now and then."

• 11:30Speaker 00

  Okay, so Bob James, he does a lot of stuff.

• 11:33Speaker 05

  The reason why I said fusion, though, Bob, is because I feel like Tappan Zee 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 70s and early 80s, and, you know, the city and the time period, did that play a lot into the music?

• 11:59Speaker 03

  I absolutely always have thought that one of the things about jazz is it's improvised. So you're giving your feeling right at that moment on that day in that city, wherever you are, that it definitely does represent the time period of what's going on. It should, anyway, if we're being honest, we're reflecting our time, and that changes. So I've resisted when people try to make a definition of what jazz is, because it changes. It changes along with everything else that's going on around it.

• 12:35Speaker 05

  Bob, what was your first musical memory?

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Getting fired from being pianist at a tap dance class in my hometown. I think I was 12 or something like that, and I couldn't keep the beat. So the tap dancers were tripping, and finally, well, actually, the reason why I got hired in the first place is that I think I was the only pianist in the town that they could use to play for this tap dance class. I guess it's my earliest memory of trying to learn what keeping the beat meant.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Who would have the gumption to fire a 12-year-old?

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was pretty cold. And I don't exactly remember that, but I may have defined that too harshly. They may have nicely told me to go home to my mom.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Passive-aggressive firing, okay.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  You couldn't keep up? Was it with the simple kickball change of it all? Is it one of those kind of classes of beginners? I was just curious.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Damn, you're with the ten terms.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  I just, I mean, come on, you know I'm a Heinz girl.

• 13:40Speaker 05

  Was there music around your house growing up?

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Not a whole lot. My father was a lawyer, and I lived in a small town in Missouri, where what I did hear 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 intrigued, high school baby. And I remember kind of liking that feeling that it was improvised as opposed to what I perceived classical music being too much practicing. And jazz represented, at that time, escape from practicing, because you

• 14:24Speaker 03

  could just make it up, anything that came into your head. And it's only been in more recent years that I decided that practicing even somewhere in relationship to jazz was a good thing and not a bad thing.

• 14:41Speaker 05

  So around what year was that, when you discovered jazz?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  The 1950s, mid 1950s. And I do remember that that was pretty much the highlight of the West Coast jazz, because I do remember Chuck Baker, Jerry Meligan, Dave Brubeck, those names formed, or the style of it, the West Coast style, was intriguing to me. Only in college did I kind of get more, tried to get more deep.

• 15:16Speaker 05

  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?

• 15:28Speaker 03

  How about that for a panel to be judging? Yeah, it was a very pivotal time in my life. I was, at that time, I'd 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. The avant-garde world was really out at that time. And so I was incorporating some of those avant-garde things into my jazz trio. And I decided to take the trio down to Notre Dame, where

• 16:12Speaker 03

  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 and started playing some crazy stuff, along with some bebop. And Quincy's here especially. I kind of don't remember whether Henry Mancini was into what we did, but Quincy definitely was, and it put a smile on his face, gave me a chance to meet him. And we kind of prevailed at that, in the winner's circle at the festival, and Quincy signed me to a record deal. So it gave me confidence to move to New York and go into the jazz business.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Did you finish school?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Yep, I got a master's degree in composition, mostly classical training. My jazz training was extracurricular. I'd go into Detroit from Ann Arbor, look around for a place to sit in. Yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  And so Quincy signed you to, was it Mercury?

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Yes. And we recorded the album in Chicago. He was living there, I think, at that time. And that's where Mercury was based, in Chicago.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  And so this is like the early 60s, right?

• 17:34Speaker 03

  Yes, 63, 62, 62, 63.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  And so, I know that at the end of this small part of the conversation, Quincy eventually recommends you or leads you to Creed Taylor, and that gets you to CTI. But what happens in between there and the mid 60s?

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Another big pivotal time was when I got the job with Sarah Vaughan, her music director, pianist, 1965.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  I had learned that her pianist, Ron L. Bright, had left, and she was looking around. And indirectly, Quincy was involved in that, too, because where I learned that Sarah was looking for a pianist 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 copies were still copying out the parts for the musicians in ink. So anyway, yeah, I learned about this possible job.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  And I had actually met Sarah very briefly once when I was playing with Maynard Ferguson's band at Burland in New York. And Sarah came in to the club and Maynard asked her to come up to sing. And of course, she didn't have any arrangements with her, so she couldn't do anything with the big band. And that's when my nerves kicked in because the pianist always kind of gets the responsibility to have to play.

• 19:17Speaker 06

  The chords and...

• 19:18Speaker 03

  And once she, once she calls out a song, you better know it because she, she wouldn't have come in with any music even for the pianist.

• 19:25Speaker 06

  Right.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  And I 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, key, this in the jargon of, of that time lets the person who asks you 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, and The Sweetest Sounds was one of the songs in that musical, a brand new song by Richard Rogers. And, um, but anyway, I was kind of a fan of musical theater and it's just a complete

• 20:11Speaker 03

  coincidence that I knew this song. Just barely, she, Sarah was one of the first cover artists to sing it out of the Broadway show. And so, uh, it made an impression on her. And it was at least a year or two after that, that, that I responded when she was looking for a pianist and she remembered that night and I got the job.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 21:00Speaker 06

  I had this dream of being a musician and everyone I had known was kind of like, you're not good at music, you know, you should probably have other things, a backup plan, whatever. Felt like I didn't have anyone close to me and my wife had flown out to visit and she found out I was sleeping in a car, she didn't know. And she was like, let's do it. And she slept in a car with me. And for the first time in my life, I realized that in a life full of what I thought was things happening to me, something was finally happening for me.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Dude, that's like the most romantic shit I've ever heard.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  It's the coolest thing ever.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 22:18Speaker 00

  Behind every chart-topping hit, you know by heart, there's an original. Writing it someplace where nobody was listening, some basement, some bedroom, somebody with headphones on at three in the morning chasing a thing they couldn't even name yet. Behind the culture that marks a generation, there's an original. Already moving, already shaking things up, already looping that one bar, already off tempo, on purpose, because on purpose was the point. Behind every night that changed the room, somebody had to walk in first, not knowing it would land, but doing it anyway. Originals are out there, living stories worth telling. What's yours?

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Behind every original, live in Levi's. 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 with having access to what they would call a fake book. Was there any sort of cheat sheet-y 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 music to everything? Or were there fake books out back then?

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, in my memory, there were fake books. That, that kept getting bigger as a, as a tool, you know? Now we, we have it in our phone, you know? We could look, look up any song and similar kind of a fake book thing that we could do. But at, at that time, I'm reasonably sure that this song was so new that it wouldn't have been in the fake book anyway, because it had just come out. And in Maynard's band, the only thing I would have had on the piano was his charts that I was playing with him. And so when she came in unannounced and was surprised that, that if I hadn't known that song, might have changed my life and I probably wouldn't have gotten the gig later.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  I see. Now, every time we have a, a jazz artist on the show, uh, 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, a stick-to-a-pinata way. Now, in general, if you're moving to New York City, looking to make a living, playing this music, jazz in particular, you pretty much have to be a wizard at reading music, correct?

• 25:03Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say you have to.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Oh my God, what's up with y'all?

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Well, you know, there were two different approaches to it. In my case, I, I think I was pretty clearly thinking that the more training you had, the better. And that just meant it increased 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 playing for wedding or whatever. And certain kind of gigs, if you couldn't read, you wouldn't get that gig. But certain jazz gigs, it didn't make any difference whether you read or not, because it, it, we all know that the, the greats that were not readers.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  And that's just a particular way. And I, I felt also to happen for me with Creed Taylor, he was a very much, his style with his label had a lot of production values. And he was adding strings and woodwinds and various things to, to start out with a basic jazz group and then give it the same kind of production details that pop artists have. So he needed an arranger to do that. And it's, it turned out that he, he learned that I was qualified to do it after having been introduced to him by Quincy Jones.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  So I got that job because of my training and, uh, and it helped me get the job.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  All right, let's take Valley of the Shadows, which maybe our audience might know that as a group home's, uh, the realness. Now, Valley of the Shadows, which has so much like stop on a dime, you know, just like all this arrangement stuff. So am I to believe like Steve Gadd or Idris Muhammad were given these charts and knew exactly when the, the, like the, the starts and stops were? Because I'm imagining that you guys can't live in a studio. Like I come from a place where like I've written complete albums inside the studio. Whereas like I'm assuming that jazz musicians have to have this stuff prepared ahead of time. You just go to studio and you knock it out real quick.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  You don't waste time doing 15 takes, 20 takes or whatnot. So like, do they just study the music or do you give them a cassette of the arrangement ahead of time and they just commit it to memory?

• 27:30Speaker 03

  It was all variations of that. Over many years, you mentioned Idris Muhammad. In my memory of working with Idris, it's been a long time, but Idris may have been able to read some simple chart, but he was what we would call reader. And so I was gonna hire Idris. 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, his own loose, non obedient, reading a chart kind of style.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  So in some cases, we, we were deliberately trying to move away from a kind of written approach to the rhythm section, the basic tracks. Because we had started during that era of overdubbing and not having everybody in the room at the same time. So for the most part, most of those CTI records, we would record the rhythm section first. And the production part of it would come afterwards. So I could, I could work with two different kind of musicians. I could go in on the rhythm section date and do a very loose with minimum kind of chart.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  And then once I had that basic track, I'd take that home and, and score the more complex stuff, or the stuff for the larger orchestra. And so I guess we, we did it both ways. And, and for a piece like Valley of the Shadows, or Night on Bald Mountain, some of those things that were adaptations of classical music, it definitely required a chart and a musician that could read. So 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.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Got it. In, in developing your initial sound, who were you idolizing?

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, 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, Errol Garner and Art Tatum and on and on and on. But, but I, I usually came down to thinking that three 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.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  But he knew exactly when to play them. And I love that economy of not playing too much. He was sort of the opposite of Oscar Peterson. And Oscar Peterson had so much chops that I could, I knew I could never do that anywhere close to the way he did it. So I better try to find some other approach.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Is, is Bill the, is he partly responsible for why the Fender Rhodes became your signature sound, or was just?

• 30:57Speaker 03

  No, as a matter of fact, I didn't like the way either Bill Evans or Oscar Peterson played the Fender Rhodes. 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 not liking it. If, if you look at their overall recorded repertoire, you won't find very many Fender Rhodes 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, they wouldn't change their technique.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  They played it like it was an acoustic piano.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can't play that instrument that way, because it, the acoustic piano has so much more dynamic range. And I, I don't know, it, it formed my style at that time, because I was asked to do it. I hadn't gone out and found Fender Rhodes on my own. Rudy Van Gelder 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.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Was it, was it, like now it's so commonplace, but

• 32:14Speaker 00

  in the early 60s, when they're, when they're developing this instrument, like was it foreign? Was it like, like, I mean, the way that we look at probably the way that we're looking at AI technology right now? Like, was it sort of a thing to marvel, or something to master? Like, what were your feelings on it?

• 32:36Speaker 03

  It was, it was a gig. I wasn't even really, I was playing it

• 32:46Speaker 03

  because, because I had to, that was my assignment on that particular gig, because they wanted Rhodes. When my heart was still with the acoustic piano, until I began to realize that I was getting identified with it. And that I had some kind of approach that people were hearing that, that almost forced me to take it more seriously. When my album, the, the first solo album that I made for CTI had Feel Like Making Love on it. And there was a sound that I had used Fender Rhodes on Roberta Flax, because I played piano for her on, on her version too. So that sound became very much identified.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  That was what, 1974, I guess. In, 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 it sound authentic or good.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Okay. So I kind of want to start in your discography.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  The, the period in between the first album, The Bold Conceptions, that Quincy produced, and your second album, Explosions, which really doesn't get discussed enough.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  And it doesn't because if it got discussed too much, I might not have a career.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  The night and day of those two records. I mean, in 1965, like I know by, you know, I know by like 59, 60, like there was, there was avant garde jazz and whatnot. But your version of it is way beyond like, you know, Coltrane's thing was more spirituality. And then, you know, like the stuff of the Shape of Jazz to Come and all those things like, which I think they're being avant garde with notes. But, you know, you're kind of taking, at least, listening to those records.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  I mean, if I could be bold to say, and you know, notwithstanding the, the the early, like, electronic records of the 60s, which were more like demonstration records, or that sort of thing, but like, dare I say, like, that might have been one of the very first electronica records? Like, just in terms of you using different frequencies and, and whatnot? Like, what made you go from night and day, from like Bold Conceptions to Explosions?

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Well, it, it, it actually, in my memory, was that totally night and day, because they were kind of all related. And there were some elements in the Explosions album that I had already been experimenting around and that had gotten Quincy's attention. The, the two classical avant garde composers that participated in the Explosions album were Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma. And they were both exploring different versions of what, at that time, was called electronic music. But it was, it was a combination of what was called music concret.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  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. 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, 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, is I guess you could say it was similar to the way artists use backing track more recently.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  So the, this electronic tape of

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Or sampling.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Or sampling.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Wink.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Something, yes, yes. So that's the sample plays, or the, the backing track plays. And then we would improvise over the top of it in a more conventional jazz way. And so the two different elements would clash with each other. And that created the conflict, or the avant garde-ness.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  And it was, it was all, seemed to be all about pushing boundaries. What are the limits of what could be called music?

• 37:33Speaker 03

  As a sound, organized sound, chaos. And different people used a different approach. Sometimes it was anger and thumbing their nose at the audience. The, the idea of making an audience happy in the conventional sense, or making them fall in love. They, they wanted to do the opposite. They wanted to make them so angry that they'd walk out of the theater. And with the, so there was all variations of that. And debate about it, and what's, what's meaningful, or 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.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  And so we, in my youth, I was fascinated by it. I actually loved it sometimes. And I always felt during that time that I had the power to change it, because I could play conventional.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  Jazz, I liked to surprise my audience that just when they thought we were just playing some conventional bebop, all of a sudden electronic sounds would come in and then we were suddenly in a completely different world where I'd be stroking the strings with my hand or getting a mallet and playing, beating on the side of the piano. So we were part of the time seducing the audience and part of the time confronting them with surprise and making them deal with it.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  At that point, were you familiar with like artists of the time, like a Raymond Scott or the Tonto guys, or just any of those experimental synthesizer records?

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Yes, I was. Those two names, I don't remember. But, but I was more influenced by the people in the classical avant-garde world, like John Cage and Stockhausen and those people. It was a different kind of experimentation. In the jazz world, Don Ellis, the trumpet player, was also very involved in avant-garde music at that time. And there were the Moog guys, when the Moog synthesizer came into being a little bit later. Actually, by that time, I was sort of losing interest, frankly. The idea of making the audience

• 40:05Speaker 03

  hate me started to be so severe that I thought, well, I'll never be able to make a living if I make my idea.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  You're saying that you were going for more of like a Stravinsky, make the audience hate me thing, or just?

• 40:19Speaker 03

  No, because Schoenberg might be a better example. Because Stravinsky's music, people realized fairly quickly that it was just great. And it was-

• 40:38Speaker 00

  They also rioted, you know?

• 40:39Speaker 03

  And it had melody, it had all of the things, and it's survived as a real classic, even though the dissonance shocked people a little bit at the time. But it was cinematic. I never, never viewed him as avant-garde. It was more, what do we say about it?

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Provocateur, musical provocateur?

• 41:05Speaker 03

  He had come out of the Impressionist era, when, when the Romantic era of the 19th centuries, gradually, they began to get tired of tonal music and the tonal and conventional dissonance. And so in the Impressionist era, Ravel and Debussy, it was a blur. And where's, where's the tonic? So by Stravinsky's time, he was going further in that direction and more dissonance and less conventional tonality, but still making the attempt to, maybe I'm

• 41:50Speaker 03

  wrong, but I don't think he wanted his audience to hate him, like we were, we were sort of doing at that time. It was fun and a temporary interest for me, just trying to learn. What were the limits? And I learned just for myself that the limits that I wanted to go back to were far more conventional and I wasn't really getting, it wasn't reaching my heart. The avant-garde side of it was curiosity for my brain, but I more and more started

• 42:30Speaker 03

  to like the Romantic side. And probably those four years I spent with Sarah Vaughan, she certainly wouldn't have let me play any avant-garde piano.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, I was trying to imagine that.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had to really play all the, learn the standards and not only learn them, learn the great voicings and everything so I could inspire her. And that became my life.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Nile Rodgers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 43:15Speaker 06

  I'm like a kid when I play music and I make music and I'm constantly asking questions. You know, whether it's an instrument I haven't played, or it's a melody that seems foreign. You know this, every night you play a show and it's the same set, but it's not the same show. At a certain point, your brain kind of goes on autopilot. When I'm in the studio or if I'm making music, that's where that curiosity kind of comes back, you know? I haven't lost it yet, but I'm also on my sophomore album. So, and you, you obviously are an expert here.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Timp. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today, and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Behind every chart-topping hit, you know by heart there's an original. Writing it someplace where nobody was listening. Some basement, some bedroom, somebody with headphones on at three in the morning, chasing a thing they couldn't even name yet. Behind the culture that marks a generation, there's an original. Already moving, already shaking things up, already looping that one bar, already off-tempo, on purpose, because on purpose was the point. Behind every night that changed the room, somebody had to walk in first. Not knowing it would land, but doing it anyway. Originals are out there.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Living stories worth telling. What's yours? Behind every original, live in Levi's. So why did it take almost a decade for you to get to your third album, your run of your period, which, you know, for most collectors, believe that one is your, they seem to think that's your first record, even though it's not. But just as the Bob James as we know, why, why did it take you till 1974 to start? You're, you're a part of the story.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  From, from the, after explosions and after I kind of was thinking that it was a dead end for me, it was immediately after that that I got the job with Sarah Vaughan. 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, I sort of came as the Bob James Trio. I thought of myself as a jazz pianist and was thinking about trying to make a solo career. But I really liked the job with Sarah, being an accompanist. And I started getting arranging jobs as a result of it, and I liked that. It provided a steadier income in New York,

• 46:19Speaker 03

  and I was starting to get arranging jobs. And by the time I got to 1970, when I got the job to play on Quincy's album Walking in Space, which was my introduction to Creed Taylor, that gave me the opportunity for Creed Taylor to see what I could do, that I could write for large ensembles. And, 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.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  How musical was Creed Taylor?

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Well, he definitely wasn't one 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, of how to, he wanted his label to have a style, a sound, and a look, even his packaging and his choice of covers. And everything about it, he had a very strong producer vision.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  And so his, the style of, the one element of it that he talked 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 favorites, he had his taste, and that, that formed his choices that he made throughout those years. But-

• 47:54Speaker 00

  But does he allow you to really have say? Like, I know that you started producing after the four, like by yourself, but like, are you allowed to have say in these first four records?

• 48:05Speaker 03

  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-

• 48:16Speaker 03

  As almost as avant garde as I would have a project of his where he was a producer. But he gave me a lot of leeway and the arrangements. He, 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 convert it into having jazz performers reinterpret it. 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

• 48:58Speaker 03

  that, that's led me down that path with, with him.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  Okay, so take something like Night on Bald Mountain, which, you know, if you're a Disney fan, you know that from Fantasia.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  I'll admit that I met Night on Bald 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 interpolations of, of classical music into jazz, one, are you doing all the arranging? And how many man hours does it take for you to write each part? Cause you're, you know, I'm assuming that you're doing these arrangements for your, your brass section, your string section, like for one song, how many man hours does it take for you to write these arrangements out?

• 49:50Speaker 03

  A lot. I was fast and you, 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 mentioned about earlier. And I would go in there and watch how they would work. And there were people like Billy Byers and there were the people that got a lot of the jobs and I saw how they did their scores and, and how they set up the scores so they 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.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  So I learned to be fast and I, I definitely wasn't the fastest, but I, I could put something together pretty quickly and I had studied in college. So I, I, that, the part of that whole process was getting to know the range of the instruments and the kind of ways that you could write for an instrument that would make that player sound better if, if you kept it in the right range. Lots and lots of stuff like that. And I, I was, uh, uh, the fact that I could do it allowed Creed Taylor to give me directions depending upon what classical piece he wanted me to reinterpret. He'd give me some ideas about it, but then he'd leave me on my own to execute it.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  And the Night on Mountain, Night on Bald Mountain chart that I did, uh, and Steve Gadd played the drum part, it was all about featuring him. At that time I just kind of know him and I, I knew he could read whatever I put in front of him, but keep it in the spirit of, uh, free flowing jazz playing. And even with that arrangement, we went in first with the rhythm section and recorded that. And I refined my score after that somewhat based upon the fills that Steve would play. I used to like to do the reverse. Rather than give Steve all the notes with all those hits on it, you know, the syncopation

• 52:01Speaker 03

  things, he would just play loose and then, and I would.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Did you build around him?

• 52:07Speaker 03

  And yeah. And when he, when he would hit those fills, I would make that the brass, you know, notes and make it sound like he was, he was answering the brass arrangement when actually, and, and some of that stuff, he, he wrote it and it was tight and inversion, end version because the way he was playing it was loose. You know what I mean?

• 52:30Speaker 00

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

• 52:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. And in order to do that arrangement that way, there had to be a pretty specific chart too, because, um, it, it wasn't just a, um, simple lead sheet for Steve and the bass player Gary King, all that. I, 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 in the studio, there was a kind of flexibility that we could use 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 I, my memory of what we were trying to do was have both, have it be a, a, a very

• 53:24Speaker 03

  specific chart, but also the feel of a loose improvised jazz performance.

• 53:31Speaker 00

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

• 53:54Speaker 05

  The cast, it's just, and leading into Tapping Z, it's just.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:58Speaker 05

  It's so much about who's around you. So yeah, ask your question, please. Sorry.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Yes. So how did, how did you come across like the Ralph McDonald's of the world, the Grover Washington juniors of the world, the, the Wayne Andre? Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 05

  Steve Gadd, Gary King.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think it's any different from what your world is now. New York is a great place and that's where, uh, maybe not quite as dominant as it was in the 1970s when I was doing my thing, but, um, everybody comes to New York to, and, and that's where the most of the gigs were. And by word of mouth, you start to learn who are the, the best people. Once I got onto Creed Taylor's list, he had his favorites, but the, everybody was available to you. You could get George Benson to play guitar on your day.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  You could get Ray Brown to play bass and you could get, uh, whoever you want because it was New York. And then it just became a matter of casting and I loved that whole aspect all through my life. I love the conversations about who the, who's the new guy and, or gal and, and who, who's gonna inspire you. And so you keep searching and every month we would find some new name that, uh, got in the door and you'd want to use them. And the best of them became the people that we're talking about now as a result of that. Did you and David Matthews ever collaborate at any time?

• 55:39Speaker 03

  No, uh, the, the, the other David Matthews, there's, there's. That doomed David Matthews.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  But the arranger David Matthews, uh, it was one of those things like Don Cebeski, I rarely was around him. If he got the job, I didn't. And if 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 Cebeski's stuff, so I got to know him. But, uh, the, the, the other arrangers, Robert Friedman, I remember, and some of these other people, uh, that I, I knew them by reputation, but rarely had a chance to be working on the same project.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  All right, just the, the sequencing of your first album is just off the chain. And I gotta know, whose idea was it to make such a radical version of In the Garden? Because, you know, when I hear In the Garden, it's either, it's either used for wedding purposes, you know, 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. Like, you know, it's, it's part rockabilious, bluegrass, but it's also jazzy and it's avant garde.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Like, can you just tell us the genesis of that or was it just like, roll the tape? I got an idea.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Well, thank you for describing it that way. And, and even thank you for, thank you for remembering it because I do sort of remember the day that I came into Creed Taylor's office and talked about wanting to do it, uh, to, to do that, uh, composition. And, 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 part of his stylistic thing. So the real classical name, which is also, I'm drawing a blank on it now, that I ended up calling In the Garden, came from a very well-known classical piece.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  And, and at that time I was using Hugh McCracken a lot, uh, the really great studio guitarist, but who had a.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  He did, um, dueling banjos, right?

• 58:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. From Deliverance, yeah.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Deliverance, yeah. So he played banjo, guitar, and he was very authentic in those styles. So I knew that I could get a kind of raw, uh, almost country kind of sound out of him and make that piece eclectic. We didn't know exactly where we were going with it. There's a lot of experimentation in the studio and Creed Taylor gave me the flexibility to experiment with that and to come up with something unique.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  It's almost like, you know, what, that in particular, if a jazz artist had a, a public enemy, like that's the thing, like you're so 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 one before.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  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, your downbeats, your, you know, whatever the, the, the gods of critics, of jazz critics were. Like if you're not following a, a certain mold of, of what is deemed acceptable status quo, are you nervous about this or was the shield of CTI enough to?

• 59:53Speaker 03

  I think I can safely say that I was not nervous about it. If anything, I was not reluctant to be confrontational and to not give critics any easy thing to talk about. And, and I guess I always had a little bit of love hate relationship with them and I, I got more hate than I did love.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Times that saw, I ended up saying, who cares? And I go, it's my 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 Creed Taylor. He, he was my boss, but I wanted to confront him too, and not necessarily come in with exactly what he expected. Bravery, I guess, was, has always been something that I feel like you have to have, stay with your vision, no, 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

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  as that as a solo career album for myself. I didn't think I would have one. And Creed said, it was time, because I'd done so many projects for him with Grover Washington and various other artists, I felt my identity at CTI was a ranger. And by doing a whole bunch of different eclectic kind of stuff, I was hoping to use that as like an audition to get more arranging jobs. And the more variety that I could show as an orchestrator, I could, to present it to other clients. And it, it was my good fortune that I had some commercial success with it, that I was almost forced into considering a, a solo career after that.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  Can I share with you a little bit about Nautilus on that same album?

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was next.

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  Talking to so many people about it and actually confronting with Wu-Tang Clan guys and various people about why, you know, I kept asking the question, why did Nautilus get sampled by so many people? What was it? And, and I was able to share the story on that same one album. You, you asked about the sequencing. Nautilus was the last cut on side B, kind of deliberately because it was almost a throwaway. And Creed Taylor knew that the other cuts would get the attention at that time. So traditionally with the LP, you always

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  may put your weakest cuts on the center, the, 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 Nautilus. And then over many 10 or 15 years later, I started hearing back that, that that, that hip hop producers were grabbing onto it and I could not, I, I knew it had a, a good bassline. And Idris 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 just made it just keep showing up over and over, and it still does, even, even to this day.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  So in a conversation with RZA, uh, uh, on the interview that he was doing, suddenly something clicked in for me that I had kind of not been paying attention to at all. But it wasn't just a simple rhythm section groove that, that Idris and Gary King were laying down. I had written a pretty elaborate string arrangement for fun. Creed 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,

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  ethereal kind of sound that permeated that track. And if anything, I would have thought it would have made it less commercial because it, it didn't fit in with the other standard funk type of a string arrangement that, that I might have written. But as I've recently talked 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 the most. I, I think it might be a combination of that groove and this

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  almost classical blurry orchestration that's over the top of it.

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  Texture.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, texture.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  It's, that's what I say, you're the king of textures, like, and I can't describe it, but it's, you know, somehow you manage, like, I know you don't intentionally say, okay, let me create a song that somehow in six years will hit another generation, like, no one thinks that, like, maybe a musician like me now will think that, like, okay, what I do now, maybe 20 years from now, it'll be in vogue. But, you know, I, I think at the end of the day, you caught a compelling 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

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  all come from people that aren't calculating. Here's lightning in a bottle, you know, like Michael Jackson trying to follow Thriller, like, I'm gonna sell a hundred million albums. Like, you can't, you can't capture lightning in a bottle that way. It just happens or it doesn't happen. So.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I totally believe it. And that's why I've always

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  tried to just enjoy the process of doing it and let whatever comes out of that happen. If you're passionate and if you're trying your best to get the best people, write the best arrangement, play the best solo, just do your best and keep trying to make the, 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 and privilege to, to make music and, uh, and go through that process.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Nile Rodgers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 1:06:40Speaker 05

  Man, I'm a black and Mexican kid from San Pedro and I grew up in Inglewood as well. I never liked to be like boxed in. Both of my parents colored outside of the line. I mean, even them being together at the time in LA was just not typical. And so I think that has always been a part of my DNA. There's a defiant something in me that feels like what we get to do with, with what we're given that's greater than us is to maybe connect people to ideas that they wouldn't naturally, you know, connect to. That's really me. I'm just kind of like defiant with love, though.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Experience before the moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:07:25Speaker 06

  This is Jonas Knox from Two Pros and a Cup of Joe. Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota Ford ability and it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's longest lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  Behind every chart topping hit, you know by heart, there's an original. Writing it someplace where nobody was listening, some basement, some bedroom, somebody with headphones on at three in the morning, chasing a thing they couldn't even name yet. Behind the culture that marks a generation, there's an original. Already moving, already shaking things up, already looping that one bar, already off tempo. On purpose, because on purpose was the point. Behind every night that changed the room, somebody had to walk in first. Not knowing it would land, but doing it anyway. Originals are out there, living stories worth telling. What's yours?

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  Behind every original, live in Levi's.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  You know, around eighty seven, when, you know, Peter Piper is coming out the gate, which, you know, I'll probably, I mean, you would say, Fonte, that's probably one of the first out the gate, uh, Bob James samples.

• 1:09:11Speaker 05

  Peter Piper, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, so.

• 1:09:14Speaker 05

  Eighty, yeah, eighty six, eighty seven, yeah.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when, when this is coming out in eighty six, eighty seven and whatnot, what is your immediate thought of what's happening?

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  I believe my first memory was Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince.

• 1:09:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, touch of jazz.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  They took my song, Westchester Lady, 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. So what the heck, you know, because it was just my record that played. It wasn't, it wasn't even a loop or a chunk.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  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 one of the first things back then that came into my mind is, hey, if they can do that, if Jazzy Jeff and, and Will Smith could just rap 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 change the title on it. From, you know, from, I left my heart in San Francisco,

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  I'll call it Bob James something or other, whatever. And I knew you could.

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  Ghostface does that, by the way.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  Times have changed, so, but, but that was my first reaction. And also.

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  But in your mind, you didn't think like, some fourteen year old or fifteen year old is hearing that and now looking at their parents' record collection like, wait, I have that. And then now you have new fans?

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  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, and 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. That if the copyright itself, the ownership of it, the control of it, so that the, that you have some control over your destiny is, was a very big deal for me. I fought for it in

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  all of my contracts. And the only way that you can protect it is by, is by going to bat for it and not let people plagiarize or fraudulently steal it. So, so that was really basic before I even was aware of what was going on in the hip hop world.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  And the whole structure of the legal thing hadn't happened yet, where you, where you could figure out a reasonable, fair way to license and all those.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  It was the Wild West.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  So, so, yeah, exactly. So you hear that happening and I owned my recording of West, of Westchester Lady and I, and the compositions. So I had to fight for it and I did it. And that sort of started me off in this world that at that time I thought it was a one-off thing and that I would just have to try to do my best to be compensated properly and then go on about my business. But it, it proved that it wasn't an isolated thing. And not only did the field get bigger and bigger, but the sampling of my music kept happening.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  So I had to make a decision about how to handle that. And eventually, yes, 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, I ended up being very grateful for it, but always mixed feelings.

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

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

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  Yes. And as drastic changes happen, I have so much appreciation and new respect, new desire to confront this whole phenomenon. I want as, as a copyright holder and as a composer who has fought hard to keep the rights to my music, I want to be one of the people in the music community that educates young people to, to learn about that, to learn about the business, to learn that these creations need to be protected and they need

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  to be identified in the right way and, and entered into the legal part of the music business in a legitimate way. So I've, I've kept fighting for that. But as I have learned more about the sample usage, I confronted RZA and I sort of, I actually confronted DJ Jazzy Jeff too. And, and there was a new cut on my album that'll be coming out in the spring that is a collaboration with DJ Jazzy Jeff where it's like, let bygones

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  be bygones. We're, we're not only friends, we're in bed together with a track, you know, we collaborated. And I'm very happy that we're able to do that in a way that demonstrates that we're all in the music business together. But in attempting to actually confront this issue for me, which is when they took Nautilus or Take Me to the Mardi Gras 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 sampled

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  more and more, the chunks of it were taken in all kinds of different ways, manipulated more drastically, tempo change, speed sped up, slowed down, distorted.

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  Kind of like Explosion.

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  Only I didn't have any control over the creativity.

• 1:16:14Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:16:15Speaker 03

  I'm not there. So they do whatever they want. So I began to think, if I could be in the same room doing my thing while they did their thing, a different result could come out of it where I would actually be, at least be able to say, oh, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, don't change this or something like that. So, uh, for five days, two weeks ago, I was in RZA's studio and we did pretty much exactly that. And he did his thing and I did my thing. And a couple of times, I would do a kind of conventional jazz melodic thing or a bassline thing or something like that. And, and he would hear some very small

• 1:16:57Speaker 03

  chunk of it and he would ask his engineer, stop right there and take just these two beats. And suddenly my conventional melody had 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.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Fonte, are you thinking about the Guitar Center beat right now?

• 1:17:34Speaker 05

  Oh man, I hope it's not that. I think it's not going to be that. But yeah, the Guitar Center beat, that's a whole other thing, RZA.

• 1:17:41Speaker 00

  No, for me, for me, a person who takes that and makes, I feel like someone's going to flip it like either vitamin D or something.

• 1:17:51Speaker 05

  You make it hard, yeah.

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  It's a long, as I joke.

• 1:17:54Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  It's one of RZA's most like, uh, unorthodox creations I've ever heard in my life. So when I, when I heard you two were collaborating, the first thing I thought about was, okay, the Guitar Center beat.

• 1:18:07Speaker 05

  Bob, do you recall, um, do you remember the reasons why you cleared Daytona five hundred, but you didn't clear the Flowers record for Ghostface? Do you remember the reason for that?

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  I do remember in those days, we were trying to create a kind of formula, which almost never worked because every new creation is different and every circumstance is 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, you know, ten percent, I tried to base the licensing fee. On the prominence of my music in the track. And if my bassline or my melody was prominent all the way through the track, it's essentially my composition that I have, that I own.

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  And that I own that copyright and then using it from beginning to end. I always was pretty firm and rigid about, no, I'm not giving that up. And I don't, I don't think any composer who's proud of the ownership of their creation would ever want to give that up or just say.

• 1:19:24Speaker 05

  When you say not giving it up, you mean not giving up any publishing on it? Or just not letting them use it, period?

• 1:19:31Speaker 03

  Well, either version, yes. Not using, not letting them use it, period, unless they license it properly. If they license it and, and to get a license to change my music when they use it from beginning to end, uh, that, why, I mean, why would I, why would I, why would any of you agree to do that? So here, here you've got this, this.

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  I understand.

• 1:19:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think, yeah, well, you asked the question, why would any of us agree to do that? I think definitely it has to be, um, it has to be, you know, you have to be compensated and the business has to be worked out. Um, I just know for me as a hip hop fan, there are so many records that I never would have listened to if it were not for hip hop. Like I never would have went and listened to, you know, your first four, well, not first four, but your albums, 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 now, I look at it as just, you know, kind of just planting that seed and putting it in a context that we may not understand, but the generation after us, they may hear

• 1:20:41Speaker 05

  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 Wire and all because the gif, there's a gif of Wee Bae that's like been used as a meme a million times.

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:21:02Speaker 05

  But to him, it was just, oh my God, so that's where that came from. Like, you know, this is a seventeen year old.

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  Oh, that's right. It, that is the new sampling.

• 1:21:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like.

• 1:21:14Speaker 00

  That is crazy.

• 1:21:15Speaker 05

  You know, right.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  And in defense of the way this thing started to come together in the legitimizing of licensing and all of that, many of the biggest samples of my music, such as Peter Piper, I didn't find out about until even two, three, four years later.

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  After the fact.

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  Was too late and I suffered, even if I wanted to confront, the statute of limitations prevented me from really being able to do what I wanted to do in some of the cases to protect my copyright, couldn't, couldn't do it. Uh, uh, Questlove did, called it the Wild West. And yes, it, it was during that time, you, you fend for yourself and you don't know the history of how it's going to turn out. If I had known that I would have had so much respect from the whole hip hop community and they treat me with so much dignity, it makes me so happy and proud that I'm a part of it. And I know that I have gotten a lot from the fact that it historically happened.

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  But when, when it was the Wild West, when all that stuff was going on, I had no idea and I was fighting for my own image as a jazz artist and had a hard enough time with that, let alone have a hard time holding on to my own compositions.

• 1:22:34Speaker 05

  I understand.

• 1:22:36Speaker 00

  Are there certain songs that you favor, like of your usage? 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?

• 1:23:03Speaker 03

  Little bit. Uh, by the way, I really loved meeting him last week. He, he had come a year ago, but finally had a chance to, to meet him and talk with him a little bit last week at the Blue Note.

• 1:23:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14Speaker 03

  Such a cool guy.

• 1:23:15Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  And, and I am embarrassed in some ways to admit that I still don't listen to that much hip hop music.

• 1:23:25Speaker 00

  Guess what? Neither do we.

• 1:23:26Speaker 03

  I'm not well versed to talk about it.

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  But because of the opportunity to, to be up on the stage with Talib Kweli and his other guests, finally I got some very great insight into the performance of, of rap and hip hop and the way that it feels like jazz when I'm up on a stage and the, the skill and the, the, the spirit of it that I had not paid attention to in listening to the recordings, but being there with them was fantastic.

• 1:24:01Speaker 00

  Wait, let me, let me explain to our, our listeners. So, um, basically Mr. James did a residency, a three night residency at the Blue Note in New York City with Talib Kweli, Black Thought was there, Rakim was there.

• 1:24:19Speaker 03

  DMC.

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, like just basically, you know, it, is this the first time that you finally had a, a meeting of the minds between yourself and, and hip hop MCs and a band that knew how to make this happen?

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  I, I did the same thing with Talib last year.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:24:39Speaker 03

  That, that was the only other time. And it, and I really liked that in, in a way of getting to know in real time, the music's happening, the tune starts and I'm playing right along with him. And, and when Rakim was, was playing his, uh, version where he had sampled my piece Shambuzy.

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  And it made me smile because I remembered, uh, um, percussion player that I used to work with all the time, Doc Gibbs.

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  Doc Gibbs had given me the title Shambuzy, which was kind of part of his vocabulary. And it just brought back a whole bunch of memories. And this, again, this, this, that was just an intro for me. Uh, the melody or the main part of that song, Rakim didn't use it at all. They, it was just those chords of the intro. Nevertheless, I loved the way he performed on stage with such confidence and charisma. And, and it made me proud, happy and smiling that he had chosen my, you know, as, uh, something to create a new piece out of it.

• 1:25:58Speaker 05

  What were your thoughts on Everyday People or People Every Day by Arrested Development? Because I thought that was just a genius, like taking that little piece, like to me that was genius. What were your thoughts on it?

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  Very, very complicated from the business end of it. And, um, and actually even from, it was another example of something that I was not paying attention to, know that my sample had even been used until way after the fact.

• 1:26:24Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  Way after had become a big hit. So it, it came to me late in the game. And what had happened was, uh, People Every Day had been released as the single without my sample on it. The first release out didn't have my recording on it and kind of didn't go anywhere. And they, uh, 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. Uh, and so quite clearly I knew that my sample had made a difference in, in that record.

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  But what we had, did not know at the time and until it got litigious and kind of got a little bit ugly, shall we say.

• 1:27:14Speaker 00

  Serious, right.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  The, the, 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 other got channeled into the other version of, uh, did not have my sample in it. So the royalties did not come my way. Uh, and after a long period of time, and it was this very significant difference.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  So that's why they had to identify the metamorphosis remix every time I see it used in public.

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  But even though they did, some unbeknownst to me, and the final analysis couldn't prove it anyway, uh, it got channeled wrong and it took us a long time before we figured out, well, why is this statement for the other version so huge and the statement for metamorphosis mix, nothing?

• 1:28:16Speaker 00

  Cause no one wants to write metamorphosis mix. I assure you, not, uh, yeah, I assure you 90% of the, 99% of the time, if someone's playing that song, they're, they're definitely playing your version and that's.

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  And all the GP appearances and everything else, that, that was the version that, that became a hit. But, um, I probably shouldn't even be talking about details of this because there was a settlement that we finally reached and.

• 1:28:43Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  It was not particularly good, but, so I don't have good memories about that. Let's put it that way.

• 1:28:49Speaker 05

  Got you. You have good memories about. Taxi, Angela.

• 1:28:52Speaker 00

  Angela thing.

• 1:28:53Speaker 05

  Angela thing.

• 1:28:54Speaker 03

  Well, of course, that's all good news for me, you know, kind of, I could have never anticipated how that would become such a signature piece for me. And I thank the producers of that series, which is still in syndication. But the, the most weird, but it turns out to be very celebratory.

• 1:29:17Speaker 03

  Sample usage of it turned out to be CeeLo Green when he used it on a tune called Sign of the Times recently. And he just kind of sang over it, redid it, added a lyric to it. And it, and first was a little bit shocking when I first found out about it because they, they hadn't come to me in advance about it either. But it, I, when I first heard it, I loved it so much that I just couldn't be anything but happy about it. And we ended up with a really fair and nice licensing arrangement. And it has led to me being able to meet him in person

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  in a similar way that I confronted RZA recently, but CeeLo and I did some stuff together. And

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  we wrote a song together that's going to be on the same new album.

• 1:30:11Speaker 00

  Album.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  If you haven't heard Sign of the Times by CeeLo, it's my taxi piece reinterpreted by him.

• 1:30:19Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, wait, you mean the Sign of the Times that Rod Timberton worked on?

• 1:30:24Speaker 03

  That, that's my Sign of the Times. So, the times, yeah, right, that Rod Timberton worked on, worked on is on my album. The CeeLo version, which he called Sign of the Times, has his lyric that has Sign of the Times in the lyric.

• 1:30:40Speaker 00

  I see.

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  It's.

• 1:30:42Speaker 00

  So you have another version, another song called Sign of the Times that's not

• 1:30:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  related to the Timberton version.

• 1:30:48Speaker 03

  Prince, I went to their several Sign of the Times songs, but, but his, his Sign of the Times has my taxi melody and a very, very cool, but very specific reinterpretation of it that it was a great opportunity for me to meet him and collaborate.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 1:31:34Speaker 06

  I had this dream of being a musician. And everyone I had known was kind of like, you're not good at music, you know, you should probably have other things a backup plan, whatever. Felt like I didn't have anyone close to me. And my wife had flown out to visit and she found out I was sleeping in a car. She didn't know. And she was like, let's do it. And she slept in a car with me. And for the first time in my life, I realized that in a life full of what I thought was things happening to me, something was finally happening for me.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Dude, that's like the most romantic shit I've ever heard.

• 1:32:04Speaker 06

  It's the coolest thing ever.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Timp. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's longest lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 1:32:45Speaker 00

  Behind every chart topping hit, you know by heart, there's an original. Writing it someplace where nobody was listening. Some basement, some bedroom, somebody with headphones on at three in the morning chasing a thing they couldn't even name yet. Behind the culture that marks a generation, there's an original. Already moving, already shaking things up, already looping that one bar, already off tempo, on purpose, because on purpose was the point. Behind every night that changed the room, somebody had to walk in first. Not knowing it would land, but doing it anyway. Originals are out there.

• 1:33:26Speaker 00

  Living stories worth telling. What's yours? Behind every original, live in Levi's.

• 1:33:35Speaker 00

  I want to ask about your gear. I know that as a creator who, you know, since the explosion record, like you've been experimenting with like electronic sonics and whatnot. But I do know like a lot of those early synthesizers that were available in the seventies were monophonic, which kind of makes it limiting for you to play chords or anything like you got to play one note. But I know like around seventy six, seventy seven, when they're making polyphonic synthesizers, which allows you to make chords, are sort of manufacturers, the Yamahas of the day, or the, or the, the electronic makers of the day, are they courting

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  you? Are you getting endorsements? Are you sort of in that Stevie Wonder way where, you know, they go to him and Herbie Hancock with all this new gadgetry and like, here, like use our stuff. And more specifically in the seventies, early eighties, not now where, of course, now, you know, we use that every day. But in the, in, in the late seventies and eighties, like, what was the, the courting system like with keyboard makers and you?

• 1:34:48Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't remember exactly when I got endorsement from Yamaha, but I've been affiliated with them for many, many years now. Specifically, the Distelvier, the acoustic piano that has MIDI capability that I use all the time. I love it. And I have a montage and motif, whatever. I use a lot of Yamaha gear. And I am affiliated with them. Most of the rest of my gear throughout has been, I pay for it. I go to this music store and buy it, whatever.

• 1:35:20Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  I remember you were talking about the polyphonic synthesizer. I can remember the early stages of that when it was very primitive by today's standards. And Oberheim was the company that I remember that had the polyphonic synthesizer that had separate oscillators for each sound. So in the Oberheim eight voice was the one I used a lot, that, that you could play polyphonically on it, but each note and the chord was going to it through a different oscillator and manipulated very differently than the way the more recent polyphonic synthesizers are. So that gave it a character. Each oscillator, you could

• 1:36:03Speaker 03

  kind of tweak it. And there was a thickness about it that they gave that Oberheim eight voice, where I made a lot of records using that. But, and I remember that they were also funky in the sense that yes, you could play four, six, eight note chords. But it was, the synthesizer was trying to catch up. If you tried to do anything too fancy or too fast, changing, it didn't behave like a, a, a gavel wood.

• 1:36:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  So if you held the notes down, you could do a string pad or something like that. But if you tried to do something really, really technically fast with it, it was clumsy.

• 1:36:51Speaker 05

  I was just gonna ask, I wanted to make sure we got any questions about foreplay.

• 1:36:57Speaker 05

  I used to do my homework to those records in school, in high school. So I specifically just wanted just the Between the Sheets album and Elitzer, like those, like I played those records, like, you know, back and forth. 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 to Morning with Phil Collins? What that session was like?

• 1:37:23Speaker 00

  That's my shit.

• 1:37:23Speaker 03

  Many, many, many great memories from those years. In, in nineteen ninety one, I think it was, I was headed out to Los Angeles, working on an album of mine. That album ended up being called Grand Piano Canyon. And I had brought Harvey Mason to New York many, many times to play with me because most of my sessions were being done in New York at that time. But I had also, Lee Rittenhour had used me on a project of his and we were dealing with wanting to do reciprocal. So if, if I do something for you, play for you, I want you to play on my album, whatever.

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  Lee owed 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 Rittenhour and Harvey Mason on my album. So I planned it and didn't know who to hire on bass. Wasn't that familiar with the LA scene. So I asked both Lee and Harvey, who, who should I use on bass? And separately, both came up with the same answer, Nathan East, who I had not met, never had worked with him before. And I found myself in the studio with those three other guys, Nathan, Harvey, and, and

• 1:38:44Speaker 03

  Lee. And it, something clicked. And all four of us could just feel, it wasn't like a regular recording session. The combination of our backgrounds, our things that we had worked on, different projects, whatever. It just felt really special. And, and on a break, we had a conversation about the idea of how do groups get formed? When, how did Weather Report get formed? How did the Modern Judge Quartet get formed? When did they decide to put a name on it and, and be a group rather than an individual? And one thing led to another. I had an A and R job at Warner Brothers Records and I was able to go to a meeting

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  there and say, will you give us a budget to experiment and do a project? Never thinking about it becoming a, a full time, long thing. It was, it was, at that time, maybe just one project was all we were thinking about. But the first song of restoration, my composition on my album was what we remember as being kind of like the first idea of a foreplay sound.

• 1:40:03Speaker 00

  Uh, okay. So speaking of Warner's, um, 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 1977, when Tommy LaPluna and, and George Benson create the Breezen 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 not dismiss him, but you know, even he said like, well, I'm at the end of my rule. Let me make this last record real quick and then retire. And then suddenly Breezen blows up. But did you see

• 1:40:46Speaker 00

  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, um,

• 1:41:01Speaker 00

  somewhat, uh, embraced by the mainstream community and given all those accolades, all those Grammy, uh, nominations and whatnot?

• 1:41:11Speaker 03

  Yes. Uh, I, I was experiencing it from a distance, having done some collaborating with George when he was at CTI. And I was a little bit familiar with the complicated exit from CTI and when he went over to Warner Brothers and the sort of transition from just being a guitar player to a singer and, uh, watched what was in George's mind and what he really wanted to do. And somewhat later, after he went to Warner Brothers, I also got the job of producing one of his records. And at that time, the big bosses of Warner Brothers gave me the assignment of wanting

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  him play more guitar. But as I started to work with him, his heart was in singing more. And I could see that that has always been a conflict. And a lot of people, jazz fans, just are aware of the genius that comes out of his fingers when he plays guitar that nobody else can do it. But, uh, his, his, the whole other part of his personality felt that talent that he had as a singer too. And in the, in the Breezen album, uh, both were happening. Both, of course, um, uh, masquerade and, uh, and every time I hear Breezen, that tune.

• 1:42:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:42:40Speaker 03

  It's the same thing happens to me. There's no bridge, which was for us at that time is unusual. It's just same. It's, it's the same key and it just keeps repeating.

• 1:42:55Speaker 03

  It was eight bars.

• 1:42:59Speaker 03

  And it's just simple. You never goes away from it. And some of us who, who have all these, uh, uh, things we think about, stay with the hook, you know, don't, don't go away from the hook. Don't get too cute. Don't get too complicated because the, the fans want to hear that melody. And, and the way that that record was produced was so clearly, uh, on the, on the money in terms of drive home that hook, drive home the uniqueness. It just made me want to go back to the drawing boards. I want to try to do that. I want to try to do something similar. But then you realize it's not easy to, to find that magic.

• 1:43:43Speaker 00

  I think a lot of our fan base might not know that Breezen was written by Bobby Womack.

• 1:43:53Speaker 00

  It's actually a Bobby Womack cover, which I didn't know. I just recently found the Bobby Womack original. And, you know, I tend to forget that Bobby Womack was actually a, a good guitar player. Like, so, you know, that was instrumental on one of his records in 1971.

• 1:44:12Speaker 03

  And I'm getting to know, I'm getting to know Questlove as a musicologist too.

• 1:44:19Speaker 00

  Nah, we're just, we're just music nerds, man.

• 1:44:21Speaker 03

  I should be taking notes. Cause I got, I, I knew that sort of in my distant memory, but I, I don't think I ever heard Bobby Womack's version.

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, it's, it's damn near the same song, uh, just with a harder, well, when we say harder, more like a hip hopper should jump on it. Like it's, it's actually amazing. The drums are more cracking on the, the Womack version. What are you going to ask Steve?

• 1:44:49Speaker 05

  Uh, well, we kind of breezed right over it. Uh, the time period that I wanted to talk about the, uh, that, I mean, Bob James had, uh, the coolest, one of the most iconic jazz labels of all time with Tappan Zee Records. And I'm, I'm a little, um, curious about the, the timetable because you were A and R-ing at Columbia. Was that during the CTI years when you were arranging and, and also playing on CTI records?

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  I kind of had reached the end of my CTI, uh, the, after my four solo albums that ended up around 1977. And there were some problems with CTI in the business world too. And then the lack of payment of royalties, et cetera, which, um, um, necessitated me litigating there. I'm beginning to make it sound like I'm a little.

• 1:45:50Speaker 00

  Litigious James.

• 1:45:53Speaker 03

  But I hope I wasn't in the, in the long version of that. But there have been times when I've had to protect and in this case, I'm glad I did because I ended up with the ownership of my four records, which, which made it possible for me to make many, many things happen. So I left in 1977, negotiated with Columbia and signed there where Bruce Lundvall was the president. And he did give 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, in which, uh, I had done enough in this role of

• 1:46:33Speaker 03

  arranger conductor for Creed Taylor that, that my intention was to not do exactly what Creed Taylor did, but my version of it and to try to develop my own style, but influenced by him. And very early tonight, you mentioned Joe Jorgensen, uh, for about many, many memories. I wanted Joe Jorgensen to be my Rudy Van Gelder because Rudy Van Gelder was a very unique engineer for Creed Taylor and, and his style of engineering, the sound of those records were very different from anything else was out there. And in my experience of doing studio work in New York,

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  Joe was the guy that I thought had the most interesting ears, uh, that, that the two of us could collaborate on trying to come up with our own sound.

• 1:47:25Speaker 00

  Would Rudy pre-mix the stuff or like, would you guys track first, then mix afterwards?

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  That's a very good, funny question because, uh, Rudy, uh, was extremely secretive about any of his techniques and he did not like sharing. He did not like anybody asking him any questions about it.

• 1:47:45Speaker 00

  You knew what my next question was. It was like, share the secret.

• 1:47:49Speaker 03

  So I got the job of writing these arrangements on where we'd have the basic tracks. And all Rudy would be willing to give me was this rough of two-track from the basic sessions. And I would take that home and listen to that to make my arrangements. And the mix on those roughs that he sent me were the worst, most crude, no reverb, no ambience, nothing, because he didn't want to let anything out of his studio, uh, uh, that could even possibly be released. And so I, that memory of his mixing is so completely different from the way anybody else worked.

• 1:48:30Speaker 00

  Wait, do you have a dry Rudy flat mix in your possession?

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  Well, I have many real, if I could find a real, real player that would play them.

• 1:48:43Speaker 00

  I'm begging you to make a compilation of just dry, because the thing is, is until, like, Steve really got me into like, listening to Steve's obsession with CDI, like, and I'm sorry for really carjacking this interview, Steve. Like Steve is the CTI college. So the thing is, is that when I started studying Rudy's mixing thing, I never was a fan of compression because I never liked being squeezed. But somehow on your, on your records, on Grover's records, like certain CTI product, there's, there's kind of a, I don't know. I, I, I can't, I don't have the, the proper

• 1:49:27Speaker 00

  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. Cause I feel like that is the, the apex of seventies production that I can't master just yet.

• 1:49:50Speaker 05

  Go to his studio. It's still open. Let's go.

• 1:49:53Speaker 00

  And still unscathed and still.

• 1:49:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's exactly the same.

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  I, I'm, 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 that studio for five or six years. And 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, uh, like his equalizers or compressor, anything like that he had, he had taped over the manufacturers, the names of them. So he didn't, he didn't even want you to know what they were.

• 1:50:30Speaker 00

  That's hip hop. See, that's hip hop. That's hiding the labels. Like y'all don't even know that y'all following a cycle.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Nile Rodgers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 1:51:00Speaker 06

  I'm like a kid when I play music and I make music and I'm constantly asking questions. You know, whether it's an instrument I haven't played, or it's a melody that seems foreign. You know, there's every night you play a show and it's the same set, but it's not the same show. At a certain point, your brain kind of goes on autopilot. When I'm in the studio, or if I'm making music, that's where that curiosity kind of comes back, you know? I haven't lost it yet, but I'm also on my sophomore album, so, and you, you obviously are an expert here.

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:51:35Speaker 05

  This is Stugatz from Stugatz and Company Live. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla sedan, with the latest features and tech, or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you can get more at trade-in. Get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  Behind every chart-topping hit, you know by heart there's an original. Writing it someplace where nobody was listening. Some basement, some bedroom, somebody with headphones on at 3:00 in the morning chasing a thing they couldn't even name yet. Behind the culture that marks a generation, there's an original. Already moving, already shaking things up, already looping that one bar, already off tempo, on purpose, because on purpose was the point. Behind every night that changed the room, somebody had to walk in first. Not knowing it would land, but doing it anyway. Originals are out there, living stories worth telling. What's yours?

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  Behind every original, live in Levi's.

• 1:53:05Speaker 05

  So yeah, hey, guys. Bob James had one of the most iconic jazz labels of all time called Tappan Z Records. And yeah, I just wanted to, I found it really interesting what artists you chose to have leader albums on Tappan Z. Obviously, you had so many of your own records on that label as well, but I wanted to just run some names by you 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 I'd be interested. Wilbur Longmire?

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I found out about Wilbur through George Benson, actually. He and George Benson were friends, and George had heard him. And yeah, he sang and played guitar, and to get a recommendation with George Benson is about as good as you could hope for. So that's the main reason why I signed Wilbur. And it was at a time when I was very much in the heat of wanting to be a good follow-up to the CTI sound, but my own version of it. And that's, that was the end result of it.

• 1:54:17Speaker 05

  Okay, Joanne Brackeen?

• 1:54:20Speaker 03

  Very, very original pianist, amazing. She could not be produced in any kind of a way like some of the other percussion artists that I had a chance to work with. She was completely her own person. And so my role with her, in some ways, was to try to be like what I would want a producer to be with me if I just had complete authority to do whatever I wanted to do. And I, I knew that, 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

• 1:55:02Speaker 03

  her, get the right sounds for her, and let her do her own thing. That was pretty much my, my goal with, with Joanne.

• 1:55:11Speaker 05

  There was an artist named Mark Colby that did a couple of records on Tappan Z.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, he toured with me a lot, played in my band, and I've always loved the power in his playing, and I could treat him similarly to the way I tried to treat Robert Washington, for example, another Sex One player for that label. Very fond memories of those records.

• 1:55:39Speaker 05

  And Richard T., the piano player, did a leader album or two on Tappan Z as well.

• 1:55:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, Richard, being a member of that, that stuff rhythm section that had Eric Gale on guitar and, and Gordon Edwards bass and Ralph McDonald percussion, they were a kind of quintessential, top, top of the line R&B-based rhythm section. And Richard T.'s unique, kind of heavily church-influenced combination organ and sometimes Fender Rhodes. I, I just loved everything about him. I was trying to emulate some of his feel, because I was alongside him on many sessions

• 1:56:30Speaker 03

  where some of Quincy Jones' dates and a lot of New York studio dates, Richard'd be on organ and I would be on piano, or sometimes trade off or whatever. So getting to know him that way and realizing what a uniquely great artist he was, of course, he was an obvious one for me to try to sign.

• 1:56:51Speaker 05

  And Steve Kong, the guitar player, I think that was the first Tappan Z record?

• 1:56:55Speaker 03

  Might have been. Steve was very determined that he wanted the Columbia identity on his albums also. So he allowed me to put the logo on it, but, but the-

• 1:57:10Speaker 05

  He wanted the red label, not the blue?

• 1:57:12Speaker 03

  Kind of like that. But Tappan Z didn't have enough prestige and that he needed a big name on there, too. He and I were friends, and so being a label 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.

• 1:57:36Speaker 05

  Just a couple more. Mongo Santa Maria?

• 1:57:39Speaker 03

  Well, yes, and he came through the bigger label as well. Particular kind of sound, Latin American sound that wasn't doing with anybody else, made it possible for us to make some pretty cool records with him.

• 1:57:55Speaker 05

  And where did you come across Alan Harris?

• 1:57:59Speaker 03

  Came to me through Columbia, through just, and the most unusual Tappan Z project, I guess. And one that 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.

• 1:58:27Speaker 05

  Okay, the last one, the one I want to know the most about, seemed to be your partner at the label, which was Jay Chataway. Can you tell us who, a little bit about him?

• 1:58:38Speaker 03

  Well, I think I had maybe originally found out about him through Maynard Ferguson, because he had done a lot of arranging for Maynard. And I was in need of somebody that had the same kind of arranging background as me, because I was not able to keep up with the requests that I was getting to 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 production. And yeah, we had some really very good years and have remained friends. I just, he's a big Sailor fan.

• 1:59:19Speaker 03

  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 Tappan Z stopped, he moved to LA and had a very successful career as a movie composer, and he was very involved in the Star Trek series. Very, very talented guy.

• 1:59:43Speaker 05

  Let me just wrap up the Tappan Z thing, Amir. You did such an incredible job with that label, really the best thing that a label can do, which is create this whole world unto itself, with all the beautiful continuity with the album covers, the beautiful gatefold album covers, and really, you really knocked it out of the park with the, with Tappan Z. It was, I mean, you're welcome for all the rabbit holes, folks out there with all those names, but all those Tappan Z records are great.

• 2:00:13Speaker 03

  Just a little short end, don't relate-

• 2:00:15Speaker 05

  Maybe not the Alan Harris record.

• 2:00:17Speaker 03

  Well, I wasn't going to say that.

• 2:00:20Speaker 05

  You said it now.

• 2:00:23Speaker 03

  Short thing, since you mentioned Joe Jorgensen, I've more and more think that there just aren't really any total coincidences in, in life, that some things just happen for a reason. Recently, I was contacted by Joe's son, Michael Jorgensen, who's interested in doing a biography on me, and he works with a video production company, and they, I've been starting up a project in which he's going to do a biographical thing. He's a member of the group Wilco.

• 2:00:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. True.

• 2:01:01Speaker 03

  But when he grew up, he was, when he was, I don't know, 10 or 12 years old, his father, Joe, would invite him into 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 had a lot of success with Wilco, now we're meeting again, and it gives me a chance to pay my respects and have such fond memories of all those great records that Joe did with-

• 2:01:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. You hear that, Amir? Stay on good terms with your engineer, it could pay off-

• 2:01:40Speaker 06

  Yes, whatever, Steve.

• 2:01:42Speaker 03

  Very important.

• 2:01:44Speaker 05

  But your very first production was on another Creed Taylor label called Salvation with Gabor Zabo, the Hungarian guitar player. What was that like, your first production, and what was Gabor Zabo like?

• 2:01:58Speaker 05

  1975.

• 2:01:59Speaker 03

  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 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, he, he's kind of like an ideal artist for

• 2:02:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:02:51Speaker 05

  Wow. Gary McFarland worked a lot with him in that regard.

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  Yes, definitely. I love Gary McFarland's work. In fact, I was very influenced by it. I used to study his records to try to figure out how he made his choices.

• 2:03:04Speaker 05

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 2:03:06Speaker 00

  The Sign of the Times record. Now, I get the feeling I'm about to answer my own question and say Quincy Jones, but I'll ask you, how did you get involved with Rod Timberton working on that album?

• 2:03:19Speaker 03

  Quincy introduced me to Rod and he was in the studio on a couple of the records that I was involved with, with Quincy. And I was a big fan and admirer. And Quincy put us together because he thought that we might hit it off. And even though Rod specifically with his talent was not a classical music, but I didn't think that much of an influence. But as he, as I was working with him, he just had a whole cinematic, classical way of talking

• 2:04:01Speaker 03

  to me and we hit it off. And I was trying to learn from him. I don't, I don't think Thriller had, I can't remember where he was.

• 2:04:12Speaker 00

  He was, he just finished Off the Wall and Thriller's about to come the next year.

• 2:04:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. So big. In other words, kind of out of my league and I was kind of shocked that he was even willing to spend some time with me. But at least I had a chance to work in studio with him. He had his own complete language of how he talked and how he put together his vocals. And they were totally different from anything that I was aware of. So it was very much a learning process. And the difference, I guess the main difference in the success there was that he, when he worked with me, he had Bob James. And when he worked

• 2:04:55Speaker 03

  with Michael Jackson, he had Michael Jackson. So that, that kind of says it all. That makes the difference in the success level.

• 2:05:05Speaker 00

  I guess you co-scorred one of my all time favorite films. And I didn't, I didn't realize it until maybe a year and a half ago during the pandemic, that you created the King of Comedy score. So can you talk about working with Scorsese and?

• 2:05:26Speaker 03

  Well, you're crazy. Where do you get all these details? How do you know? You know more information than I did.

• 2:05:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. The pandemic happens and trust me, the pandemic happens, you, you read all the fine print to keep yourself busy.

• 2:05:41Speaker 03

  Gosh, I mean, I should have done a lot of homework before I did this with you, Questlove. But 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.

• 2:06:01Speaker 00

  You just threw it together and just gave it to them?

• 2:06:03Speaker 03

  Well, no, I mean, I, I know that I was treating it very seriously at the time, but I haven't listened back to it. And what, it's been 23, 25 years ago or at least.

• 2:06:14Speaker 00

  Forty.

• 2:06:18Speaker 03

  And when you reach my, my age, you know how hard it is to keep retaining a lot of those memories. I don't have much of a memory, other than the way you described it as a weird film, made it a weird assignment for me to, 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.

• 2:06:45Speaker 00

  No, I, 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.

• 2:06:57Speaker 03

  It contributes to the, the power, I think, rather than everything be dark, it's too obvious.

• 2:07:04Speaker 00

  Right. You're right. This is sort of on the same level. But, um, so I, I used to work in a record store back in high school. And this is right when you and David Samborn started your collaboration process. I think this was, maybe this is the Double Vision album, but I just got to know this. You guys fade, you guys fade Al Jarreau's voice right when he's about to start scatting like a madman on Since I Fell For You. And every time I hear it, like I'm, I'm now a collector of, of Pro Tools and whatnot, you know, like

• 2:07:46Speaker 00

  I like hearing the original versions and it's dry state and see what happens after the fade. But how long, do you have any memory of how long that song goes on after the fade? Cause right when the fade goes down, that's when like Al Jarreau just starts scatting out of his mind. And I always wanted to know what happens after that fade?

• 2:08:08Speaker 03

  Well, I can say that I was probably not there in the mix and the choice. I don't remember being there. I didn't produce it. I mean, it was my, my albums, my name on it. But that fade, usually 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 want it to be, and I think the fade works just in the way you described it because it left you wanting more and it left it when it said it's most hot. What I would say about that record to

• 2:08:47Speaker 03

  you is that I'm very proud of the pre-production arranging and scoring that I did, which is, would have been a conventional string orchestra and brass and whatever. But I chose to do it with my home studio equipment. And it's, 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 production. But I, I had an Otari eight-track,

• 2:09:30Speaker 03

  and this was in the era when you had the multi-track studio or whatever in the studio, and then you had to bounce down in order to do the overdub. So I took Bill Snee, I guess it was, made a pre-mix bouncing down and all of the basic tracks were on, he gave me four tracks or something like that to work with. And I, I created the woodwinds, the French horns and strings and all that were synthesized. And the part that I loved the most was in that exact section you're talking about, where he, he goes, or something

• 2:10:10Speaker 03

  like that. And I, I scored it for the French horns going, and 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.

• 2:10:33Speaker 00

  Right. Okay.

• 2:10:34Speaker 03

  But those French horns were not there when he sang it. So, so I added the French horns before, so it'd make it sound like he was ad-libbing to my orchestration. And if, if I do.

• 2:10:46Speaker 00

  Sort of like Steve Gadd drumming. See, now, now I realize the.

• 2:10:50Speaker 03

  Same exact approach. Yeah.

• 2:10:51Speaker 00

  The power, the power of post-production. Now, that's, that's the lesson I learned today. No, that was at the time when I was working at that record store, I think, um, Moonlighting, Bruce Willis and Sybil Shepherd's show, very popular show on ABC, had just started using that song. So suddenly a whole, that was back in the day when like a show like that could feature a song and then suddenly everybody's coming in requesting it. And yeah, when that, that came out, just the whole world just started asking for Since I, you know, Fell For You, that, that, that cover. So.

• 2:11:28Speaker 03

  Can I turn the tables and ask you?

• 2:11:33Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 2:11:33Speaker 03

  One question?

• 2:11:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:11:36Speaker 03

  Since I have the opportunity?

• 2:11:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:11:38Speaker 03

  This is a hypothetical only. So since you nor I are kind of session players these days, but if we were in New York, session players.

• 2:11:50Speaker 00

  Yes, let's do it.

• 2:11:51Speaker 03

  And if there's a trio date that we were called upon to do, and.

• 2:11:58Speaker 00

  You had me at hello.

• 2:11:59Speaker 03

  Looking for a bass player, who would you recommend to do a trio date with, with you on piano and me on drums? I mean, the opposite.

• 2:12:10Speaker 00

  Or we could do that. Um, we, I, I would actually, hmm, let's see. Who?

• 2:12:18Speaker 05

  Derek Hodge.

• 2:12:19Speaker 00

  I would say either Hodge or I would actually go with Pino.

• 2:12:25Speaker 05

  Pino. Of course.

• 2:12:27Speaker 03

  I would go with Pino, Derek Hodge, we can go with Christian McBride.

• 2:12:32Speaker 05

  Christian McBride, but Pino, you know.

• 2:12:34Speaker 03

  I like the idea of Pino. I've worked with Pino a little bit many years ago and Christian McBride I did an album with, so that could be that. But the Pino is more unusual and since you've worked with him, let's go with that.

• 2:12:47Speaker 00

  Are you, are you committed to a label right now?

• 2:12:49Speaker 03

  Tap and Z, we'll do it.

• 2:12:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I gotta say, I'm sorry, this is the, I have to cut in here because I have my own jazz label here as well. Uh, but thank, thanks partially to my love for Tap and Z and, um, and, uh, we can go, uh, co, co on that if you're, if you're interested, but, um.

• 2:13:10Speaker 03

  I was only joking about Tap and Z, it's, it's kind of dormant.

• 2:13:13Speaker 05

  Let's bring it back, man. Let's bring it back.

• 2:13:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was about to say, I'm, I'm signed to JMI for all my jazz stuff, so I gotta ask my label president right here.

• 2:13:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think we're good for, we're good for a Bob James, Pino, Questlove. Yes, we'll sign on for that.

• 2:13:28Speaker 00

  We are absolutely going to do that. You, and I'm not doing that like fake, you heard it here first, people. No, we're, we're making, I'm telling you, I got so much envy when I saw that clip, uh, at Blue Note and, you know, I was working all week, so, but nah, you, you're, you're a favorite of mine and, you know, I, I thank you for letting us nerd out on you for two hours. Yes, we will make this happen.

• 2:13:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. I hope that was recorded.

• 2:13:58Speaker 00

  Yes, it's absolutely recorded. You can sue me if I reneg on, on, on, on this, on this audio contract.

• 2:14:05Speaker 03

  Let's do it soon because of the age factor. So we don't.

• 2:14:10Speaker 00

  Yes, I, I don't know if I have much time left. So yes, I will do it. You will be here forever. Trust me. Steve, I'll leave you with a last question, then I'm signing out.

• 2:14:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. Last question. Whose idea was it to name the first four Bob James albums, one, two, three, four? Cause we're modeling Ray Angree's, uh, catalog after that on our label. But, uh, was that preconceived or did you just do that as it went along?

• 2:14:32Speaker 03

  Definitely Creed 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 died.

• 2:14:39Speaker 05

  Ah, wow. Okay.

• 2:14:41Speaker 03

  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, but if you name, if you, 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 it's a collector, the more records you make. And I did have it happen to me that after I got up to 10 or whatever, that the avid fans know what they have to look for. That, ooh, I don't have eight or I don't have, and I, I heard him talking about that, but that was, that was what was in his mind.

• 2:15:21Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh. Thank you. Thank you for your time.

• 2:15:24Speaker 03

  Do we have time for me to tell you one more little thing? Because.

• 2:15:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  You and I encountered each other when I came in the middle of your back and forth thing that you had going with Biz Markie about the bells.

• 2:15:36Speaker 00

  Damn, I forgot about the bells. Now that he's no longer with us, can you just release a copy of Peter Piper without the bells?

• 2:15:44Speaker 03

  Well, here's what I wanted to tell you. I did a little round table at the Blue Note, uh, with some hip hop guys and we had a surprise for them because my engineer, David, we, we had gone out to Iron Mountain to, to check out my master recordings, the multitracks. And so I, uh, and got the multitracks from those sessions for, uh, that album, Take Me to the Mardi Gras. And we have an outtake of, uh, a different take of Take Me to the Mardi Gras that David made a rough mix and played it for these guys at the round table that nobody had heard before. And, uh, it's, it's got the bells on there, but I have the

• 2:16:28Speaker 03

  multitracks and I could do whatever I want. And, and when I went to Iron Mountain to check them out to make sure that the multitracks were still in good shape, I was able to sit at the console and push the solo button and hear boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

• 2:16:44Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:16:45Speaker 03

  Uh, and it's a different, 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 of the other production, any of the strings, all that other stuff because it was out.

• 2:17:00Speaker 00

  I do have a question, but 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 Mardi Gras and even with Ally of the Shadows, like what was the purpose in using those like sound effect records on top of the music?

• 2:17:22Speaker 03

  Cinematic? I, I don't know that we were even that specific about it, but the atmosphere of it with, with Take Me to the Mardi Gras, we were trying to create the party in New Orleans, kind of a atmosphere. So that was, that one was pretty clear.

• 2:17:36Speaker 00

  With animal sounds?

• 2:17:39Speaker 03

  No, I don't.

• 2:17:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, it sounds like a bunch of sheep in the background or something, but, uh.

• 2:17:46Speaker 05

  It sounds, it sounds like they were just having fun is what it sounds like a lot on Tap and Z. They use a lot of sound effects on Tap and Z and it's just, you know, you can tell they're just having a blast.

• 2:17:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:55Speaker 03

  We're gonna have new sound effects that we'll, we'll be able to do.

• 2:17:59Speaker 00

  Let's make it happen.

• 2:18:01Speaker 05

  We're all analog though, so bring your analog thoughts.

• 2:18:05Speaker 00

  Yes, we'll do this. So on behalf of, uh, Sugar Steve, Laia, Fontigalo, and Unpaid Bill, this is Questlove talking to the great immortal Bob James, uh, my, my future collaborator.

• 2:18:18Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:18:18Speaker 00

  And we're, we're going to do this project and, and up your Grammy count. I'm, I'm calling it right now. This is Questlove Supreme, one of the, dude, this is nerds paradise right now. And I'm happy and I'll see you guys on the next go around. Questlove Supreme, see y'all.

• 2:18:42Speaker 00

  Questlove Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:18:48Speaker 00

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