The Value Of Collaboration

A Meditation On A Job That Is Never The Same

A number of years ago I became interested in the Portuguese singer-songwriter tradition of Fado. I was listening to quite a bit of Amalia Rodriguez, who is considered to be the “Queen Of Fado”. This led me down into the musical rabbit-hole of the Fado world, and into the work of various contemporary Fado singers, both male and female. In listening to what was going on in recent years in this genre I came upon Ana Moura. Her voice took me to the place that I go to when I hear a singer that I’m inspired by, and have a desire to possibly to work with. Along with a passionate intensity, she sang with simple honesty. Synchronicity stepped in, I connected with her, and it turned out that she was excited about the idea of working together. We decided to make an album together.

One thing that occurred to me as I listened to the recent fado albums that were being made was that there were distinct rules regarding instrumentation and form that seemed to still be followed in a uniform and strict manner. I went to Portugal, explored the fado clubs in Lisbon with Ana, and we began to listen to the work of the new generation of Fado songwriters, as songs were already being submitted by writers for the album that we intended to make. As I do on every project that I work on, during the pre-production work that I was doing with Ana, I was searching for what my role needed to be on the album. I discerned that the overall role that I needed to occupy was that of the “rule-breaker”. I began to hear a non-traditional approach to the instrumentation, sonic character, and arrangements in my head. Ana loved the idea of breaking apart the norms of the genre while still retaining the spirit of Fado. I had found my place on the project.

The record company was concerned with what the reaction of the Portuguese Fado audience would be, but Ana and I were in agreement that we needed to pursue this course. We ended up with an album that was titled “Desfado” or “Not Fado”. We recorded with a great American band at Henson Studios in Los Angeles, augmenting it with two musicians from Ana’s band. It was not only accepted by the Fado audience, but was passionately embraced as a Portuguese pop album.

Quincy Jones (The Record Producer)

Quincy Jones recently passed away. I never worked with Quincy as a musician, but his albums, the albums that he produced, and my few conversational interactions with him were poetically catalytic for me. His passing made me think that it might be interesting to take a brief look at the job that is called “record producer”.

Because there are innumerable record producers whose work I greatly admire in every era, and in every genre, including many that I have worked for as a musician, it’s very difficult for me to pick out specific producers or artist-producer relationships as examples, so in this brief piece on the role of the producer, I have focused on the somewhat ineffable nature of the job rather than specifics, only making exceptions for Quincy, and The Beatles’ relationship with each other along with George Martin.

Quincy might be thought of as the veritable Picasso of record producers. He had the stylistic restlessness of greatness. He never stopped moving. He designed everything on some records, sometimes writing the specific arrangements, then in many instances he simply knew who to call to get at what he and the artist needed for each specific role on a given track or album. He was exquisitely talented at finding “the magic.”

The musicians and arrangers who worked for him agree that he always knew how specific his direction should be. Should he be metaphoric in his description of what he was after, literal, something in-between, or should he say nothing, knowing that the wisest approach is to rely on the intuition of the person selected for the situation? Should he put someone in a context that they are comfortable in, or challenge them by taking them out of their comfort zone? Would he get the best out of them by giving them a few clues, then waiting to see what they came back with? I’ve been fortunate to work for many talented record producers, and these are some of the sub-textual choices that I learned to be of utmost importance in doing the job well. In many instances the best thing that a producer can do is to stay out of the way. Many times the best thing to say is nothing. Everything that you say matters. Direction given in the wrong way can take the oxygen out of the room set things back for the rest of the day.

There are very few jobs in the making of records that are as misunderstood to the extent that the job of the record producer is. One reason for this is that in any era of music the combination of assets that a producer brings to the role are always different, depending on the artist who they are working with, their strengths, areas of vulnerability, personality, and the specific contour of their talent. The shape of the job has always been multi-faceted and different with every artist, every album or single track.

The function of producer on records has included everything from the producer who is simply somewhat of a facilitator and budget supervisor, to the type of producer who helps to define a direction for an artist, but is generally not in the studio for the tracking and development of the specifics of the execution of the ideas, all the way to the other side of the continuum; to the auteur who writes, arranges, perhaps plays everything on the record, and every gradation on the spectrum between these poles.

One thing that seems to me to be a constant in the case of great producers is that on an overt or subtle level, their intention is to make the artist feel that they are capable of making what they aspire to create and to assist them in the process. To grab the magic when it occurs, and hopefully create a musical situation for it to occur. There are certainly exceptions to even this general definition, as in the case of dictatorial producers who perceive the job as a mandate to impose their own creative vision of an album or song.

Though there are situations where approaching the job in this manner is appropriate and necessary (and I have worked as a musician on albums where this was the case), I find the collaborative form of the relationship between producer and artist to be more interesting, and generally more successful in making records that will hold up well in the long-run.

The producer can be someone who does all of the engineering and programming on the tracks, writing or co-writing all of the songs, or an editorial presence who acts as a teammate for the artist to bounce ideas off of, helping them decide how to execute ideas they have already have put together. It is a well-known fact that at a certain point many artists began to produce themselves, not wanting or needing another person to occupy the job with “producer” as the title. In some cases the artist can have a group of people, including the engineer and musicians that are involved in the recording process, as well as the engineer who mixes the work as editorial mirrors. The choice of collaborators who have a kindred aesthetic in these capacities, and who possess a strong and intuitive sense of structure can serve as architectural collaborators for the artist to rely upon.

Having worked in this capacity for over half of my life, I know how amorphous the nature of the job is. For me, the consistent part is providing the artist with elements of the creative process that they want or need in order to help them to push their work beyond what they’ve done before. To help them distill the magic.

In the era that we live in now many artists are self-produced. The results are mixed. In some cases, especially in the areas of hip-hop, rap, and electronic music, I see some of the most interesting and idiosyncratic music that is being made. In other cases, even with records by major artists that do very well in their streaming numbers, many albums are being made that will not be listened to in 6 months, much less 6 years.

When I was approached to make the album “River: The Joni Letters” with Herbie Hancock I knew that I would be collaborating someone who had changed the musical landscape of jazz many times. I would be working with a musical genius who was capable of going in any musical direction. When we were beginning the pre-production process I went to Herbie’s studio armed with the original versions of a group of Joni’s songs along with the lyrics, that I felt would be ripe for re-interpretation through a new musical language I began to imagine that we would create together. At the beginning of this meeting Herbie remarked “You know, I’ve never listened to lyrics in songs.” My response was “well….. you’re going to have to start now!” We looked at each other and burst out laughing. This was a funny exchange, but also one that made me realize that part of my role on the album would be to always make sure that what we did musically would support the poetry… that we needed to create a musical language that would serve as underscore to the lyrics. Everything that we did, and all of the musical choices that we made had to address this purpose. The musicians that we decided to use on the album were all exceptional in an intuitive and technical sense, but also capable of approaching what they played with the humility required to make the storytelling of the lyrics govern how they approached what they played. We were fortunate enough to have Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, Lionel Loueke and Vinnie Colaiuta as our band.

Music as storytelling has always been an organic part of Wayne’s genius. I had seen how naturally playing around poetry came to Wayne over and over on the albums that I of Joni’s that he had worked on. He was a sharpshooter in this respect. I recall a moment that occurred as we were preparing to work on a song of Joni’s called “Edith And The Kingpin”, in which the lyric was placed in a bar where a pimp was presiding over the women that were in his employ. Though I had a specific picture of what we would do on the song in my head, and we would be working to a couple of pre-recorded elements, I passed out a very basic leadsheet of the song along with the lyric to all of the musicians without saying anything about how we could approach the song. After playing Joni’s original recording of the song Wayne came up to me, paused and looked me in the eye and said “I’m going to be the guy at the end of the bar…. watching everything!”

Working in a solitary context can either be helpful, in that the artist can maintain a singular vision without the potential distraction of discussion or interaction, or it can enable an artist to create in a “bubble” that is myopic. I believe that ultimate success in creating music is to make something that will change people when they listen to it…. maybe for an hour, a day, or longer. To help articulate the human condition; to enable us to feel the things that we become numb to in everyday life. To remind us that we are human beings.

The Beatles (The Value Of Collaboration)

When I think of success in the pursuit of making great and timeless records, I can’t help but immediately think of The Beatles. The inherent contrast in the aesthetic that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had provided the first layer of collaborative friction and productive interaction. In many cases their contrasting sensibilities were additionally tempered by the stylistic intuition and idiosyncratic musical choices of George Harrison and Ringo Starr, (and later Billy Preston). The addition of George Martin’s sensibility to the process added depth, overview, and often another dimension to the songs, as well as an additional editorial sounding board. This fabric of collaboration resulted in music that I believe will always stand up as great examples of what is possible in the realm of pop music. The careful listener can hear the extraordinary results of like-minded collaboration, or the assimilation of the friction of opposing perspectives in many elements of the albums.

The Editor As An Analogous Role

I’ve always thought of the book editor as a literary parallel to the record producer. Again, the job takes a multitude of shapes, depending on the nature of the editor, the writer, and the specifics of what the writer is working on. There are the examples of Maxwell Perkins, who played a different collaborative role with so many of the writers who produced the canon of great fiction of the twentieth century, his relationship and function different with each of them. Or there is Gordon Lish, whose merciless revision and editing of Don Delillo, Barry Hannah, and to a radical degree Raymond Carver, created it’s own genre of sorts that became known as New Fiction.

Another beautiful example in this area that comes to mind is the Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor Henry Robbins. Joan Didion describes him in her poignant post-mortem essay “After Henry”: “The relationship between an editor and writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental: the editor, if the editor was Henry Robbins, was the person who gave the writer the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it.”

The value of collaboration….