Inside the Studios, Part IV

Our look at the studio scene will conclude with a few more scenarios experienced by some of our Archive interviewees.

Trumpeter Joe Wilder had the skill and work ethic to become an integral part of the studio scene and found that he could have played sessions almost nonstop. His professionalism led him to self-limit his participation in order to maintain his skill level. Joe observed some musicians who couldn’t resist playing every possible session they could.

Joe Wilder

MR:    I remember you talking a little bit about some fellows who would try to cut corners and play the game of booking two sessions at the same time.

JW:    These were guys who were counting every penny they could get. And someone would call you for a jingle date, a television commercial or something. And they would say well can you do a date from 10 ‘til 12. And the guy would say yes. And someone else would call and say “yeah, I’ve got a date that goes from 12 o’clock until 3, can you make it?” Now he’s got a date from 10 ‘til 12, and he’s like 15 blocks away from the other studio. It’s no way he’s going to get to the other gig on time. And so the guy would say yes to the fellow. Instead of saying I won’t be able to make it because I’m already busy, he’d say yes to the guy that has the 12 to 3 date, and show up on his date at maybe a quarter to one, and say jeez, you know I didn’t know that the other date was going to go overtime or something, not calling to warn him of it or anything, just to make the money, rather than saying let somebody else make it. There’s enough for all of us, and there was at that time, a lot. Sometimes we did three or four jingle dates on the same day. And it got to the point where, in my case, I wouldn’t accept more than three because sometimes you’d go on one and it would be so easy that you felt like you were robbing them, and then by the time you got to the fourth one it would be something so hard that you wish you hadn’t started playing the instrument. So I knew that I could handle three in one day, but four was rough.

Bass trombonist Alan Raph, who was noted in our last blog entry, further described the musical rat race which could cloud one’s judgment:

Alan Raph

AR:    At that point I was juggling. That’s the story of my life, juggling. Keeping [Gerry] Mulligan happy when I had to send a sub to the first set at Birdland every night because I was playing a Broadway show. I was doing “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” which let out at 11. And Mulligan started at Birdland at 9 or 9:30. So Benny Powell used to sub for me. And I came in and did the second [set] and did the night. I’d finish at 4:00 and then go home and get up early and do a couple of dates and do a show and do that again. It was kind of interesting. But juggling. Keeping one contact while you make another, and then honoring the commitments. If you overbook, and you do this all the time, you book something that’s right on the tail of something else and then you have the problem of trying to get out of the first thing a little bit early or come to the second thing a little bit late. And there’s generally a way. I mean I only once or twice had to resort to outright subterfuge. I remember once breaking — my daughter at the time had a little plastic cow and I broke its foot off and put iodine on it. In the middle of a rehearsal I reached in and said, “oh man, I just broke my tooth.” I managed to get out of rehearsal. I left the trombone on the chair, just to make it look really good, and I went out, took my other trombone and went and did a brass quintet date Uptown. Every now and then I’d have to do something like that but not too often.

Studio work almost always paid better than the average club date, and musicians sometimes became overzealous in their quest for the extra bread. Saxophonist Kidd Jordan spoke about playing studio sessions in New Orleans, and how the players collaborated to earn a few extra dollars.

Kidd Jordan

MR:    Did you just show up and play?

KJ:    That’s right. And we had the head. They didn’t have any arrangement. We’d put a head arrangement on it and we’d go and put something on it after they started singing.

MR:    Was most of that stuff done with everybody there? Was it live?

KJ:    Oh yeah, you had to do that. And then we had a trick, you make a mistake this time, you  make a mistake the next time, and keep going round and round so you’d get overtime. ‘Cause there wasn’t no punching in, I mean everything had to go down, the vocalist, the band, the whole rhythm section so everybody had to do it. So we got our formulas for that too, and all the sessions was union sessions and we had a formula for that also.

Kidd described a now-obsolete way of making recordings: band and vocalist recording together and horn players creating a head arrangement on the spot. As technology changed, recording methods kept in lockstep. Trumpeter Lew Soloff of Blood, Sweat & Tears described how one of his signature solos was constructed:

Lew Soloff

MR:    When you did the solo on Lucretia Macevil, did they make you play a bunch of them and then choose?

LS:    God that solo, there were so many touches in that solo. Bobby Colomby produced that tune, and he would punch in here and punch in there, and that solo was very, very constructed by Bobby. I mean I like the way it came out, but it was very constructed by Bobby and I always used to think that that was wrong, but I don’t think it’s so wrong. I mean I don’t want to mention names, I don’t want to give it away, but there’s a lot of incredible pop records that are made and they’re constructed that way. My favorite playing, for the record, on that is just where they fade me out. That’s when I start to really go, just before they fade me out. I’d like to hear what I played after that.

You can listen to Lew’s solo here, starting at 3:56 in this version. It sounds like a brilliant one-take performance, which was the goal. Listen carefully to the fade out. Lew does one of those musical quotes which is still keeping me up at night, trying to figure out its origin.

Much of the music these accomplished musicians were called upon to record was harmonically simple and musically unchallenging. The jazz musicians who stayed out of the studios — either by choice or by lack of qualifications — sometimes looked askance at their colleagues who were thriving in the studio scene. Drummer Panama Francis spoke about his friends’ perception of his studio work in rock ‘n roll:

Panama Francis

PF:    By the jazz musicians I was called that rock ‘n roll drummer. It was a put down. Like we’d be in the bar at Jim and Andy’s and I’d walk in the door and they’d say, “ohhh, here comes this rock ‘n roller.” They didn’t realize how much money I was making, but when they found out how much money I was making, they was knocking the door down to make them records. But anyhow, two years ago they honored me, they gave me $15,000 and a plaque. And I went to make my acceptance speech and all I could say was “ladies and gentlemen“ and I bust out in tears, uncontrollable. Because I was hurt by the jazz musicians who knew me and knew that I worked in bands and heard me in jam sessions, and they went along with the white musicians who labeled me a rock ‘n roll musician. Because they never heard me play no jazz, because I was in Harlem all the time see, with the big bands. So they didn’t get a chance to hear me on 52nd Street. So they thought that this was all I could do, you know, that I was only able to play rock ‘n roll. And my so-called friends and brothers that knew different, never stood up and said well no man, he can play something else. I never got called for a big band date, I never got called for a jazz date. That was a label that was laid on me that wasn’t fair, because, I mean, I was able to play, you know, at the age of 13 I was playing in bands. I wasn’t playing no rhythm & blues — I was playing in bands, playing arrangements and things. But I knew how to play this music, because I used to play in the church. Just like rhythm & blues became rock ‘n roll. It’s like the word “funk.” That was a dirty word with black people. You told somebody to “funk” you’d be ready to fight. But the jazz critic heard the term being used by musicians, and they thought it was hip and it caught on. So they said, “he sure plays funky, doesn’t he.” I remember the time you used that word that you’re liable to get your teeth knocked out of you. I mean that wasn’t a nice word.

I’ll conclude this series with a brief anecdote of my own. A close friend in Utica, Bob Yauger, operated a respectable studio where I assisted as a producer and studio musician. I would often overdub a keyboard or sax part for local bands searching for their own moment of stardom. On one session I showed up with my saxophone and the producer said, “all we need is one screeching note in this two-beat break in the song.” He did his best imitation of a motivational coach and hyped me for the moment: “you rock, you’re the man, you can do it” and other similar blather. Fortunately for me, the note happened to be a high A, transposed to my alto sax, a high F#, slightly out of the range of the horn but a note that I could squeeze out with appropriate intensity. I donned the headphones, and when the moment came I screamed out a high F# for all I was worth. The producer was ecstatic. That was it. I was done — 15 minutes in and out — a first take. The question arose, what do I charge for one note? Do I charge for just the note? What about the money I saved the band for doing my part in less than a quarter of an hour? I honestly can’t remember what I ended up making for that session, but I was grateful that the producer was not one who said, “that was perfect, let’s do it again.”

That’s a wrap on our studio sequence.

Spinning Notes

Our next arrangement is another Grammy-award-winning chart, this time written by saxophonist/keyboardist Fred Lipsius, and recorded by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears. Unlike “Ode to Billie Joe,” which starts serenely with solo acoustic guitar, “Spinning Wheel” announces itself majestically. Fred Lipsius writes an ear-catching brass fanfare that rips up to what musicians call a sharp 9 chord.

It certainly gets our attention.

Blood, Sweat & Tears goes on my short list of favorite bands. Their second and third albums produced multiple hits and are considered to be the highpoint of the band’s career. In 1969, as a saxophonist/keyboardist and budding arranger, not only did I want to play in Blood, Sweat & Tears, I wanted to be Fred Lipsius. I wanted to do what he did, but I had to remain content (along with my college roommates) to play “air horn” while listening to the LP’s.

In April of 2000 I was pleased to interview trumpeter Lew Soloff, a BS&T member featured prominently on albums two and three. He spoke about the popularity of the band, his admiration for Fred Lipsius’ creativity, and the differences of opinion that arose:

Lew Soloff

LS:    Blood, Sweat & Tears of course was in a class by itself. You know how big that band was at the time? That was a real trip. We were the second biggest band in the world to the Beatles.

LS:    The real creative force in that band was a particular arranger named Lipsius. I mean [Dick] Halligan also, but Lipsius was the prime creative arranger in the band. And he is kind of a shy, laid back sort. And oh man, he would bring in this chart or that chart and instead of saying okay we’ll do this, okay we’ll record this, it was like naaa that’s no good, naaa that’s no good. And finally he just stopped.

MR:    Yeah, he had less arrangements on those records than he should have.

LS:    Near the end, yeah. Of course. Because he didn’t want to bring something in and have it put down. And he was the real, amazing creative energy in that band. Actually so was Al Kooper, before I was there. I loved his songs. But it doesn’t matter. I’m always of the mind that if a band is allowed to just continuously try to be creative they’re better off than if they have a hit and they try to keep following that formula.

Lipsius got the assignment to make something special out of the song “Spinning Wheel” written by the band’s vocalist, David Clayton Thomas. The song had been recorded in one of David’s previous bands, but I’m sure it sounded nothing like the BS&T rendition.

After the brass pronouncement, the song builds from almost nothing. In verse one, Clayton sings two bars with only unison bass and piano; two measures with cowbell; then two bars with drums; providing a perfect setup for a “whap!” from the brass section. Clayton sings by himself “ride a painted pony, let the spinning wheel ride.” In the second verse, our arranger adds horn hits on beats two and four, and a very bluesy riff that climbs up to the flat 3^rd blue note.

The bridge of the song reflects the psychadelia that found its way into pop music in the late ‘60’s. The feel is smoothed out with long and rather dreamy notes, a touch of phase-shifting, and a reverb-drenched echo on the word “real.” Horns build up with a catchy triplet figure and lead to a restatement of the opening riff.

In the third verse Lipsius writes two of the most distinctive beats in any BS&T song. It’s a wonderful solo spot for the trombonist, climbing from a basement pitch and landing on its target note with the word “drop” sung by David Clayton Thomas.

When I write arrangements I always arrive at a spot that I describe as “okay what now?” At this point in “Spinning Wheel” we’ve had a terrific intro, a couple of verses, a bridge, a third verse, and I can picture Fred Lipsius at this “what now” moment. What “now” becomes is classic BS&T. A number of the players in the band were jazz guys, so Fred writes the jazz part. At the 2:00 mark, for 37 seconds, the rhythm section becomes a swinging jazz piano trio, backing up a solo from Lew Soloff that had all my trumpet friends green with envy. At the 2:21 mark, brass chords set up what I can only describe as a demented bugle call that ends on a lip-busting high G.

The final verse has it all, brass hits with “shakes” worthy of the Count Basie Orchestra, the blues riff and the sliding trombone.

Time to end the song. Again, Lipsius is faced with a decision. Rather than a standard fade out or a dynamic last chord, Blood, Sweat & Tears engages in a bit of self-indulgence, which we happily encouraged them to do via our support of their records. As the song reaches its climax, an unexpected switch to a 3/4 occurs. If people were dancing they would have fallen down. This merry-go-round waltz quickly gives way to a duet of recorders that transport us from a merry-go-round to a steam calliope. There is a brief battle with the brass, trading their measures back and forth. Eventually the brass give up and fade out, leaving the recorders to play a vaguely familiar tune. In fact, it’s a melody that’s been around for many years, known by two titles: “Have You Ever Seen a Lassie Go This Way and That Way,” or “The More We Get Together.”

The music grows more chaotic and at 3:56 Fred Lipsius adds a wry opinion on the whole affair with a few sarcastic notes on his alto sax. Drummer Bobby Colomby sums it up with his tongue-in-cheek comment, “that wasn’t too good.” The jovial response by the rest of the band seems to say, “you’re right, let’s keep it.”

One of the most significant bygone technologies in the recording business is the use of magnetic recording tape. The state-of-the-art in 1969 was two-inch multi-track tape, which allowed the band to record multiple parts and overdubs, and mix down to half inch master tape. Every studio had a ridiculously low tech tool that was kept within reach. If the record company needed a shorter 45 rpm version, out came the razor blade. In the case of Blood, Sweat & Tears, their most creative middle sections often were literally sliced out of the mix. If you have the 45, a greatest hits compilation version, or if you listen to the song on YouTube, you may hear the edited version. The Lew Soloff solo is sadly left on the studio floor, replaced by a few measures of Steve Katz’s guitar. Not bad, but if you’re used to the long version it’s jarring when you hear the song without the jazz section.

Fred Lipsius can be counted among the arrangers who were indispensable contributors in creating a unique sound for a band. Lipsius won a Grammy for “Best Instrumental Arrangement” for his contribution to “Spinning Wheel.”

On a personal note, I was thrilled when brass player Steve Guttman became the musical director for the resurrected BS&T in 1985. Steve was my best friend in high school and my first musical collaborator.

In our third and final arrangement spotlight, we’ll look at the perfect combination of song, singer, band and arranger.

New Year's Advice

While I didn’t go into the jazz archive interviews with a pre-prepared list of questions, I occasionally asked interviewees if they had advice for aspiring musicians. They often did, and here are eight gems:

From saxophonist Phil Woods:

Advice for young jazzmen? No. I figure that if they’re going to do it, no matter what I say they’re going to do it. It’s for those ones in between, those ones that aren’t really sure, those are the ones I worry about. I mean I think jazz is only for those that have no choice. I think if you’re a young man and you’re entertaining thoughts of becoming a brain surgeon or a jazz tenor man, I’d go with the brain surgery, you know what I mean? If you have a choice. If you’ve got two burning desires, don’t pick jazz. I mean keep playing it. Sometimes I envy the amateur, like all those dentists and doctors who play for kicks. They don’t have to worry about making bread at it. They really enjoy making music. And that’s really what it’s about. Never forget that joy, that first time you made a note and it made you feel good. Musicians kind of forget that stuff, you know, they’re sitting in the pit and reading “The Wall Street Journal” and grumpy, grumpy, grumpy. They forgot that feeling, that burn of the belly the first time they sounded decent. And it’s easy to get kind of trapped into just making some bread and trying to exist when the bloom is off the rose. But a young man should consider — you only have one life. When you make a choice, a career decision, it should be well thought out. Not too carefully structured mind you, but I wouldn’t rush into anything. I wouldn’t rush to go to a jazz school or any university. I always recommend take a year off man. Hitchhike around the world. Take your horn and see if you can play for your supper around the world. See what life is about while you can, before you have a family, before you need bread. Get a couple of thou and just do it. Just do it, man. Take a chance. Because you might never have a chance to do it, and that’s when you can really kind of get inside your head. It’s hard to do it when you’re surrounded by your peers or family or the pressures of society that you know — go somewhere where it’s all fresh and pursue your — find out who you are. And then when you decide, you’re going to be a much better player for this experience.

From guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli:

Utilize the education you got, which we never got. We learned hard knocks you know. Somebody’d say you’re playing the wrong chord or do this or do that. Sometimes it’s costly. You’re on a job and you don’t get the job back. But you have to learn the repertoire. The repertoire is Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, Walter Donaldson, people like that, Harry Warren. And it takes about this much space on your shelf. And for about five bucks a piece, or seven dollars maybe now, you can buy everybody’s book. That’s where it’s all at, right in there. All the changes. Learn the song the way the guy wrote it first. And then apply all that slick stuff you learned in school and sometime you’re going to end up playing exactly the way it’s written.

From vocalist Dianne Reeves:

A lot of everything came through experience. I remember when I had a band with Billy Childs and our music was just way out there. We would try to go as far out harmonically, we would perform on stage in a place where they didn’t care about the music that we performed. It was a place for artists. So we were very, very fortunate to have that. And we would experiment every night. And I remember things got more and more complicated, more chance taking, and then I ended up with Harry Belafonte. And when I got with him I thought to myself, wow, I can’t sing this music. It has like three chords and the melodies are real simple and you know I thought what is this? And at the time I was working with the great vocal coach Phil Moore. And he said “I think that you should definitely do this, have this experience with him.” And he was going to feature me. And what I found in performing with Harry Belafonte was that I had all of these songs that came from all over the world that had all of these dual meetings, you know some social, political meanings. And I found that there was a way that you had to sing them to communicate the message in the song. And that the harmonies were very rich and beautiful but simple. The rhythms were interesting and it was just different. And I found from that point on less is more. And so where in my early years when I would sing it was really about my instrument. I really didn’t care that much about lyrics. I wanted to use my instrument. But later on, I think after my experience with Harry, it changed, and I wanted to be able to tell stories and use the colors that I gathered from the very beginning of my career to really color the words and to really make my point very clear with the lyrics and the stories that I was trying to tell.

From trumpeter Lew Soloff:

First of all you have to decide what you want to do, whether you want to be an instrumentalist, a trumpet player per se or whether or not you have a love of jazz to the point where you want to be a stylist. You have to decide what you want to do. If you want to be an in-demand cat, and I include women in that, to play any kind of job for anybody, the key is versatility and very fast sight reading ability. There are people that learn to read lines ahead of where they’re playing. Very few people have this ability but some people do, culminating in maybe a whole page ahead, almost like photographing the page with your mind. But most people that can do that learn it when they were very small. But it’s a good thing to learn to read, if possible, a bar or two ahead, or even more if possible, than where you’re playing. It’s a skill that’s hard to develop, I don’t have it, I read maybe a couple of beats ahead of where I’m playing or something. But if you can do that, if you can become a superb sight reader, if you want to become a horn for hire or a musician for hire, that’s one of the prime things you need to do. And there’s another kind of musician who could be a for-hire musician as a side man, and I think this combines with being a stylist, where you may not have to read as well but you still have to be a good reader if you’re going to play in somebody else’s band. Because somebody else wants to do new material, and if the whole band can learn the material in two hours and you need to spend four days learning it because you can’t read, if there’s another person plays as well as you they’re going to get the job you know? And then, if you’re hooked on music and you want to really express yourself playing your music you should start getting bands together, ensembles together, whatever it is you like to play and you should start assuming the role of leadership at a young age and learn how to play your own music, in your own group, and how to get a whole concept of what you like. Don’t have any doubts about it. And the final piece of advice is that it’s a very competitive field, everybody would like to have a good time rather than go to work and do a job they don’t like from nine to five, so if you love it enough and you really want to do it, work really, really hard at it. And if you don’t have the ability to do that, if you don’t have the ability to work hard at it, it’s going to be a very dangerous field for you to make a living. There’s no guarantee of making a good living anyway in it, because it fluctuates. But in other words the passion has to overcome all the possible problems. It’s very possible to make a great living at it also. But the passion has to overcome all these problems. It has to become more important than a comfortable, meaning rich, lifestyle. It has to be more important to you than that, and then you might get the rich lifestyle from it.

From trumpeter Randy Sandke:

I think the most creative part of the whole thing is getting your career going. And it’s going to be different for everyone. And the people that do it are the ones that are — it’s like they don’t have any choice, this is what they have to do and they do it and they find a way and they meet the other guys that feel the same way and then somehow they start forming groups and you go through that period in your twenties where you’re willing to sleep on floors and crash at people’s places and do whatever it takes, and trust that hopefully you’ll come out on the other side. I mean I think on the positive side it is — maybe some opportunities are opening up. It’s kind of a double edged sword, this bit about the little bit more media. Jazz is kind of getting into the mainstream of American culture more then it has been, and with it comes all the other parts of mainstream culture, like just the kind of media focus on personalities, focus on looks, focus on this and that. But at the same time it’s creating some kind of economic base, some money is coming in, it means opportunities, it means more people are talking about it and curious. So it’s tough, but it can be done, to turn it into a career, to do it. And I see young guys breaking in every year. I feel sorry for people moving to New York and having to deal with the expense and you’ve got to be prepared for having this double life of doing something else to make money or having some money saved up, until you get things rolling. And that can take some years. But people still do it. They still do it.

From saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom:

Play as much as you can. Whatever opportunity you have to perform, take it. The whole idea is you can’t learn how to improvise without doing it, and hopefully every day. That’s how you learn how to do it and do it well. So take every opportunity you can to play and play with musicians who might be better than you are, to learn from them, and take any opportunity you can, even when it’s scary.

From trumpeter Warren Vache:

From the point of view of practicing as a trumpet player, we’re all concerned with endurance. Because it hurts to play the instrument. What I did was when it started to hurt I put the horn down. So instead of practicing an hour and a half at a clip, I may do thirty minutes three times a day, or fifteen minutes six times a day. But if it starts to hurt, stop, because you’re practicing at feeling bad. You might as well practice while it feels good. If your lip isn’t working, don’t struggle. Put it back down. The other one is an amazing amount of practice for me happens all day long. I’m always thinking about music. At this point in my life, every time I hear a tone I’ve got fingers going down, because that’s what I’ve done naturally, you know? So there’s a larger sort of practicing if you’re really committed to music, every time you hear a piece of music there’s a certain amount of analysis that gets done. If something moves you on something you’ve heard on the radio, can you analyze what the voicing was that moved you? Can you analyze, do you know what the chord was? If you don’t have perfect pitch, do you sit there and try to figure out well that’s an A minor seven and the seventh is in the bass and that’s why it’s that movement that I like. And you remember that and use it somewhere else. And that’s, I mean this is the great vast wonderful thing about music is the more you know the more you know you don’t know and the more there is to find and hear. So in that sense the practicing never stops. Because just learning to play and make a sound on an instrument is not enough. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about making music, and that involves thought, a lot of which is compulsive in me. I’ve always said that anybody that goes into music or into jazz for a living does it because they’re diseased. It’s a compulsion, you know. It’s a disease. There’s a voice in my head that keeps playing melodies. I can’t stop it, much as I’d like to sometimes.

From drummer Roy McCurdy:

What the guys used to tell me is just to listen to everything that you can get your hands on. Listen to all different types of music. And play as much as you can. And for me, I’m a gym guy so I like to be in the gym a lot. So I think that’s really helped me over the years, for being strong and for playing and for being on the road and keeping healthy. You know I don’t drink or smoke or anything like that, so that’s, the physical thing in the gym has really been a big part of helping me survive.

And here’s, my two cents for young musicians: for every mode and pattern you learn, memorize an actual song. And finally, the bandstand is not the place to tell stories to fellow bandmates, check text messages or practice licks between songs. Don’t play everything you know in one pass, there will be more chances.