A couple of months later I was standing in the middle of the large room at United/Western Studios in Hollywood, making an album with the Stan Kenton Orchestra. I have worked in that same room over the years, and nowadays it doesn’t seem all that huge, but as an 18-year-old about to make his first professional recording, it was LARGE. There was and would be so much for me to learn about the art of making music, especially in the recording environment. I remember that I was self-conscious in regards to knowing that any take could possibly wind up on an album, and that I’d better play well every time. Still, I remember that I took chances while we were tracking; I couldn’t resist the feeling that I might get lucky and play something really cool. When I listen to those moments now, however…. Well, those are the times I cringe. Live and learn.
That album was not something that the rest of the band really wanted to record — a DOUBLE ALBUM of national anthems arranged for the Kenton band by the very talented Bob Curnow, much in the style of the Ralph Carmichael-arranged Kenton Christmas album that I listened to so much in high school. But this was my first album and I was up to record anything. The band would schlep from Anaheim every morning following a late-night gig at Disneyland, set up and record for several hours, and then tear down, pack the bus, and drive back down to Anaheim, unload, set up, and play three or four shows there that night, and repeat the process for five days. Stan recorded like this a lot; a day off without concert or gig revenue was to be avoided at all costs, I guess.
The Kenton band recorded in Los Angeles or Chicago during my tenure with Stan; however, the Maynard Ferguson big band always did its recording work in New York City. One of the first times that we got to cut a track “live” and complete in the studio (this was the exception rather than the rule during the height of disco) was to record the Mike Abene arrangement of Sonny Rollins’ “Airegin.” We schlepped our instruments into the legendary 30th Street Studios of Columbia Records — the same room where Miles and Monk, Leonard Bernstein, and Glenn Gould, Tony Williams’ New Lifetime, and countless Broadway show soundtracks were recorded. WHAT A VIBE, and WHAT A SOUND in that room. I took some time to walk around the room on my own, and I stood silently for several minutes just to get the “feel” of the room and its history. I’ve also done this at such studios as the Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and MGM soundstages. I like to pay my respects to a place and its memories.
Mr. Gone was my Weather Report initiation, and I did drum, percussion, and vocal overdubs on the album as well as playing on “Pinocchio.” But this did not fully prepare me for the real experience of being in the studio with Weather Report. A lucky accident while mixing the “live” tapes for the 8:30 album provided the opportunity: one of the engineers erased all 24 channels at a crucial edit point of one song, which ruined the piece and left us with too little material for a double album. So it was decided that we would go into the studio to record additional material. Back into the room with its carpet-covered walls and oh-so ’70s lighting fixtures, I learned one of the secrets of WR’s success: their operating rule was to always have some sort of a tape recorder “on” and recording all of the time whenever anyone was in the studio — meaning whenever the band was in the building; this was in order to capture any spontaneous bit of playing or musical exploration. So, a stream of musical consciousness was encouraged (as opposed to an engineer slating the tune, “Uh…okay…we’re rolling! ‘Weather Report, free jam,’ take 2…”). This also encouraged and necessitated the creative use of editing, and that was how some memorable musical pictures were created. In fact, the title track to that album, “8:30,” was initially captured on a cassette tape that was left running while Joe and Jaco started fooling around in the studio—Jaco on my drums! I walked by the control room and heard them playing, and I rushed to the cafeteria and summoned the engineer to come and turn on one of the proper/multi-track tape machines. If you listen to that cut, you’ll hear it go from black and white to full and glorious color; that’s about when the real tape machine got turned on — my contribution to musical history! Anyway, we also recorded Wayne’s tune “Sightseeing” during that week, and it’s still my favorite thing that I’ve played on a Weather Report album. That album won a Grammy. We were on tour when the Grammy Award winners were announced; we didn't even know that we were nominated!
A funny story from Mr. Gone: Joe invited me to sit down, telling me that I could “sit down in the producer’s chair” for a listen to one of the tracks. The engineer cues up the 2-inch tape of the title track that had a blisteringly cool Tony Williams drum track on it. Meanwhile, Jaco has cued up several lines of cocaine on a framed Heavy Weather gold album that he’s taken down from a studio wall, and it sits partway on the mixing board and partway off the mixing board, as the mixing console is angled towards the engineer with a padded elbow rest to even things out. I start to sit down, feeling pretty lucky to be seated in the producer’s chair for this rare listen, and I act the part of honcho by crossing one of my legs in exaggerated fashion. Of course, my foot hits the overhanging album cover with all of the blow on it and the drug platform goes up on end, flips into the air, and I hear the tape stop and the music goes “droo-o-o-p.” The engineer, Alex Kazanegras, yells “You motherfucker!” as the drugs fall onto the floor, and I quickly follow them down on my knees, trying to salvage whatever I can of the precious white powder. Jaco later hits me up for a “loan” of $70 that I gladly pay in hopes of not getting fired for my clumsiness.
Other sessions in L.A. will include some film work for Henry Mancini and Patrick Williams, another couple of TV shows and, of course, the Weather Report and Jaco albums from 1979 to 1982, whereupon I followed Joe Zawinul’s advice and headed east: “If you want to be a real jazz musician, then you have to live in New York.”
30. Go East, Young Man
The musicians of New York represented everything cool about professional music making as far as I was concerned, whether playing on recording sessions or jingles or television shows or Broadway albums or the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein. When I was a kid, I wanted to do what the musicians were doing. I wanted to be just like them and be able to do what they could do. I wanted to be Art Blakey, Shelly Manne, Don Lamond, and Sonny Payne. I wanted to be Sol Gubin, Saul Goodman, and Elvin Jones! Photos on albums showed musicians in Webster Hall or in the ballroom-turned-recording studio of the Riverside Hotel, or the legendary 30th Street Studio of CBS, or RCA’s midtown studios — gentlemen in white shirts and ties. Mike Mainieri, vibist and founder of the band Steps (Ahead), told me that he and his jingle-recording cohorts helped to usher in the era where white shirts and ties were eschewed for tie-dyed T-shirts and fringed leather vests. And guys like Mainieri and Gary McFarland, with Warren Bernhardt on piano and a great drummer, Donald McDonald, along with such studio stalwarts as Chuck Rainey, Grady Tate, Bill Lavorgna, Bernard Purdie, Eric Gale, Ron Carter, Marvin Stamm, Jerome Richardson, and others, were the guys making the albums I was increasingly drawn to in the years before I went away to high school. My sisters had been dating plenty of jazz musicians who would bring the latest and hippest albums of the day to the house, including Miles and Coltrane LPs, but I liked this music that had other elements in it. Not just world, not just jazz, but with a pop backbeat. Think Beatles with really hip chord changes.
I’ve read that a person’s musical tastes are pretty much cemented into place by the time that person is 15 years old. I suspect that this is true. I still love to listen to this music, as well as to the other recordings I collected during this formative time. Writer Jon Pareles asks: “Does love of music have a window of opportunity? Is there some moment in our biological program when popular music means the most, when we bond to ‘our song’…the way baby birds bond to the nearest moving object?”
In any event, Mike Mainieri’s music inspires me and keeps me company in high school. My girlfriend Anne and I hug each other to one of his songs, and I transcribe another to play on vibraphone for my senior recital. So imagine my
thrill when I discover that Mike’s son has come to one of the Weather Report shows in New York at the Beacon Theatre and suggests that Mike use me for an album he’s producing of Japanese guitarist Kazumi Watanabe. I’m flown in for one evening’s worth of recording, and the other musicians on that date include Warren Bernhardt on keyboards, Tony Levin on bass, and Michael Brecker on saxophone. We did this at Media Sound, a studio located in the building where Béla Bartók lived the last years of his life, the studio living the last years of its life there, too, as that locale is now a bar and dance club.
The session went well, and I am delighted when Mainieri calls again, this time to work on his next solo album. Others on the session that week include the keyboard players Don Grolnick and Warren Bernhardt, bassists Marcus Miller and Tony Levin, flutist Jeremy Steig, percussionist Sammy Figueroa, guitarist Steve Khan (who I know from my Maynard Ferguson days, the first professional New York rhythm-section studio musician to take me under his wing [“the click track is your friend”]), and my heroes Mike and Randy Brecker. We’re recording in Power Station Studio A, the best room in the world then and now. For better or worse, I’m a change from the New York guys who normally work with Mike. My studio chops are still not nearly what they should be, but whatever I might lack in polish I make up for in genuine musical enthusiasm. I’m a fan of all of these guys, plus I’m a Weather Reporter — it’s a good club to happen to be in. Every one of them plays great. Mike Brecker is truly outstanding, despite his being in the midst of some hard-core drug use at this point. The first morning, after we’ve gotten sounds on all of the instruments, we’re still waiting for Mike to show up, and so a betting pool is created where the first thing Mike says will be either:
(1) I’m fucked;
(2) I didn't get any sleep;
(3) I can’t find a reed.
We each picked the most likely thing Mike would say upon entering the studio. Imagine our collective pleasure and the guffaws that greeted Mike when he walked into the studio all of sudden, saying to all of us and no one in particular, “I’m fucked, I didn’t get any sleep, and I can’t find a reed!”
Don Grolnick and I hit it off really well during the week of recording. Still, I’m surprised to hear from him a few months later asking if I’d like to come to New York to work with his band at the Breckers’ jazz club, Seventh Avenue South, for a week. Don had never led a jazz band, and this week-long gig in New York represented a real milestone for him. So he took a bunch of the money he had made and saved as a studio musician and invested it in having all of the music for this gig professionally copied, flew me in, put me up in a Manhattan hotel, and paid me well, plus put together a stellar band with such players as saxophonist Bob Berg, guitarist John Tropea, Marcus Miller or Will Lee on bass, and me. It was a fun week, the first of what would be many gigs at Seventh Avenue South. And as a result of this week, I’m asked to come and play with the kicks band that Mainieri started along with Mike Brecker, Don Grolnick, Eddie Gomez, and Steve Gadd known as Steps. They’ve already played and recorded in Japan. I fly back to New York for another week, and it’s beginning to look like a move might be in order.
Meanwhile, life in Los Angeles has not been without its exciting moments. Jaco has been camped out in my rented home in the hills of Silverlake just east of Hollywood, during which time he has been overdubbing, mixing, tracking, and fixing, writing, and overdubbing some more, and mixing into the wee hours of the morning, and then coming back to this house I’m sharing with Deborah, sometimes turning on my stereo full blast at 4:00 in the morning to listen to his latest mixes of “Crisis” from his Word of Mouth album in the making — and Debbie as well as the neighbors have just about had it. I reach my limit when a vodka bottle gets thrown through a bedroom window one afternoon and Debbie says, “I can’t take this anymore.” She walks straight out the door and down the hillside to who-knows-where, and I’m late to a gig, so I stop looking for her and race over to the Music Center, where I play a very distracted concert. Jaco shows up telling me not to worry, that Debbie’s come home, but I’m so angry at him that I tell him he has to leave. He follows me around the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion parking structure, where I can’t seem to find my car, and all the while Jaco is walking five or six steps behind me. “I said I was sorry, man!” but I won’t accept his apology. Maybe it’s time to move to New York and change my scene a bit.
Debbie and I make the move. I’m still in Weather Report, and I’m still working with Jaco, and it looks as though I’ve got all of the scheduling worked out for the next few months so that there will be no conflicts of interest or calendar. Well, that was the plan, anyway.
photo: Peter Erskine
31. But First, Down South
Jaco’s 30th birthday is fast approaching and he wants to celebrate it in style. Word of Mouth is complete, an album that was a long time in the making. In fact, Jaco was already planning his Word of Mouth album back in 1978 during my first tour with Weather Report. The band ran into the New York Philharmonic in Osaka, Japan, as we were all staying in the same hotel. Having gone to the opening concert of their tour, Jaco invited legendary flutist Julius Baker to his room, along with a couple of the Phil’s esteemed percussionists, to play them some music and specifically to ask Julius Baker if he would consider playing flute on an upcoming album. Joe Zawinul stopped by the room, and while Jaco was preparing to ask Julius the Big Question, Zawinul was busy getting into a friendly argument with maestro Baker concerning who could get the “better flute sound”: Julius on his flute or Zawinul on his synthesizer! Jaco pulled me out into the hallway, exasperated and saying, “I can’t believe Joe is THAT rude!” But, to be honest, Julius Baker thought it was funny. And, of course, he agreed to play on Jaco’s album; the orchestral tracks wound up being done in Los Angeles, and the L.A. Phil’s Jim Walker as well as Hubert Laws did the flute tracks. The accompanying photo is of Jaco and me and New York Phil percussionist Arnie Lang, and, I remember the moment very clearly: Jaco was playing the opening vamp of “John and Mary” for Arnie. I felt lucky to be there, hearing the piece for the first time. Arnie merely turned and said to me: “This guy’s never heard Aaron Copland, huh?”
As Jaco’s posthumous website describes it: “On Jaco's 30th birthday (Decmber 1st, 1981), he held his own “surprise” party at Mr. Pip’s in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. This recording documents the birthday party concert with 11 tracks. The Peter Graves Orchestra and other Jaco favorites were brought together as The Word of Mouth Band for this spirited performance. Peter Erskine contributes liner notes for this release and is also the album's producer.”
I produced the mix session that engineer James Farber should receive all credit for, with honorable mention going to recording engineer Peter Yianilos. I like to think that Jaco would have been pleased by the album’s sound. The actual event was a wild and wooly affair; the recording captures the vibe pretty well and, if the reader is a fan of Jaco or Michael Brecker or Bob Mintzer or Don Alias — or me, for that matter — then the album is well worth hearing. There was a tremendous amount of energy and good playing that evening. I mean, check out “Invitation.” Ferocious.
The next morning, Michael Brecker would enter rehab in south Florida, and a new era of sobriety would enter the musical universe I was traveling in.
Conrad Silvert © Conrad Silvert. From the collection of Ina Silvert Hillebrandt
32. Cue Now… I’ll Take Manhattan
After the birthday gig, I return to L.A. to finish the pack for the move. There will be some more gigs with Jaco and the Word of Mouth band; the album is doing well enough despite Jaco’s seemingly best efforts to derail its successful launch by alienating most of the staff at Warner Brothers. Wintertime is a heck of a time to move to New York, but move we do, subletting Warren Bernhardt’s one-room studio that happens to be right next door to Steve Khan’s apartment. I’ve made the move to New York!
The one-room apartment proves to be too small for Debbie, me, our cocker spaniel, Buffy, and my dr
ums and newly acquired Oberheim OBX — a synthesizer (for composing), and Debbie decides that she should move out only eight months or so after we’ve made the move. Where I once imagined that we would be together for life, for some reason I don't fight her suggestion to move out. She’ll go back to her family home in Chicago, and I’ll eventually go back to my bachelor ways.
I forgot to mention that, during this time of our first having moved to New York, I have left Weather Report. In the middle of a Japanese tour with Steps in February, the best-laid plans of the upcoming summer touring schedule are bumping into reality: I get a phone call from Weather Report’s management advising me that Joe and Wayne are determined to tour in the summer of 1982 despite earlier assurances that I could plan my ’82 summer tour with Steps in Europe. And I’m enjoying playing this music with these guys. I’ve got a ton to learn, but the softer dynamic and, frankly speaking, nicer vibe of everyone is making a whole lot of sense to me. But now I have to make a decision, real quick. No help here. I think, and I don't think for too long and say, “Please tell Joe and Wayne that I’m going to tour with Steps this summer, so… I guess that means I’m leaving the band.” To which management merely replies, “Okay, if that’s your decision.” I hang up the phone in my Japanese hotel room and I feel FREE.
I decide to go for a late-night walk and run into Michael Brecker in the hotel hallway. “Hey, Mike. Guess what?” “What?” “I’ve quit Weather Report so I can do the tour with Steps this summer in Europe!” Mike says, “Are you nuts?” and walks off.
Turns out that the Steps guys have a problem with commitments, at least as far as a band goes. What started out as an informal entity — a so-called “kicks” band — is risking evolving into a real band with long-range planning and commitments (that word again) and responsibilities, etc. Mainieri desperately wants the band to get to the next level, but Grolnick and Brecker are resistant. As a result, things are made worse by our having more and more band meetings to address this lack of commitment. Would have been simpler had we just shut up and played and took the gigs as they came, but bands are like personal relationships in that way.
No Beethoven: An Autobiography & Chronicle of Weather Report Page 11