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 |
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.
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