Victor Feldman, Wayne And Joni

The Shadows And Light Of Of An Overdub Session

Victor Feldman was a musical phenomenon. I’m reticent to go into the detail of his early life, but suffice to say that he was an amazing child prodigy. He excelled on drums, piano and vibraphone from a very early age. His father founded The Feldman Swing Club in London in 1942, and in 1955, at Ronnie Scott’s urging, he emigrated to the U.S.

He toured with Woody Herman and Buddy Defranco, then had his own piano trio that featured the great Scott LaFaro, and recorded with Cannonball Adderley, Benny Goodman and George Shearing. He recorded with Miles Davis, and Miles asked him to be in his band, and Victor passed, deciding that he wanted to stay in L.A and pursue the stable life of an L.A. studio musician.

Victor was the consummate studio musician. He worked with everyone from Steely Dan to Henry Mancini. He was a great piano player in any idiom, was a percussionist who could function in a traditional orchestral manner, as well as being a great creative player on a record date. His jazz piano playing brought to mind Bill Evans, which probably accounts for Miles offering him the piano chair in his band. (Miles was quoted as saying that Bill Evans played piano “the way that it’s supposed be played”.)

Around 1981 I did some sessions with Victor, which resulted in him asking me if I would play with his band. Victor was a bass player’s dream to play with, especially in a jazz context, as, like Bill Evans, he was an absolute master of jazz piano voicing. He ended up writing a very good book on the subject. He, like Bill, was partial to the idea of the bass being a contrapuntal and somewhat free voice in the context of a piano trio. The trio that we worked with the most was John Guerin, Victor, and me. It was an education to play with Victor in this context. A pinnacle experience for me.

During the same year I was called to play on what was to become Joni’s album “Wild Things Run Fast”. The development of the record was incremental, as she started out having written 3 songs, and from there on the John Guerin, Joni and I would record basic tracks as she would write them.

“Moon At The Window”

One of the later songs that Joni wrote for the album was a song called “Moon At The Window”. It was a diamond of a song, both musically and lyrically. Ostensibly, the poem was written about a close friend of hers who, after the break-up of her marriage, became an agoraphobic, not leaving her house for years. This was the allegorical first layer of the poem, but beneath that layer was a deep and dark treatise on the nature of love, and the place that it occupies in the social structure of human nature. The musical setting was Joni’s version of a Tin Pan Alley song structure. One of the best aspects of Joni’s musical gift was that she never learned the conventional aspect of mid-twentieth century songwriting. Because of this she wasn’t restricted to the conventions of musical song structure of this period. Her musical gift was grounded in her imagination and intuition. In the case of this song, her harmonic movement is almost the inverse of “normal” chord movement.

The other aspect of Victor’s life that is necessary to know about in order to appreciate this story is that when he turned down the offer of being a part of Miles’ band, he also opted for the archetype of a “normal” American family life. He married a wonderful and gracious woman, and had two sons with her. They lived a modern and stable Norman Rockwell life in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles.

The Sessions

As we did overdubs on “Moon At The Window”, Joni let me experiment with the idea of stacking bass overdubs to provide one of the figurative elements in the musical structure of the track. She craved another harmonic element that would be interspersed through the song, so came up with the idea of calling Victor to come in and play vibes on the song.

After setting up, we began running the song for Victor to see what would be his spontaneous musical reaction to it, just having the basic chord movement that I had sketched out for him.

As we ran take after take for Victor, it became noticeable that not only was Victor uncomfortable playing through the song, his playing having an unusually stilted and awkward quality to it, but his facial expressions indicated that he was actually finding it exceedingly unpleasant to play on the song. Now remember, the studio musician’s role is not to make qualitative judgements on the songs that he plays on, but to take what he is given to play on, and find a way to augment the existing structure; to find a way to make the track and song work better. Victor was an Englishman, and a consummate studio player.

At a certain point, Joni and I went out into the studio and she asked Victor if there was a problem; if perhaps he didn’t like the song. He responded by saying “Actually…. I hate it!!” Needless to say, the session ended shortly after this exchange. After the session was over, Joni and I laughed together, and discussed what had happened, and we both agreed that there were multiple reasons why Victor’s reaction was so strongly negative. Not only was the harmonic movement antithetical to the “normal” movement that Victor was a master of, but the darkly cinematic nature of the lyric was antithetical to the life that he had built for himself in Los Angeles. The dark inquiry into love’s manifestation in what Jung would call “the shadow self” must have been an unpleasant narrative for Victor to listen to, think about, and to try to play over.

Wayne

In the wake of the “crash and burn” of the Victor session, Joni suggested that we call Wayne Shorter to come in and play on the song. We both thought that Wayne would be able to be non-judgmental regarding the unusual chord movement, and that he might enjoy the dark and cinematic narrative of the poem. Wayne did not generally play on other artists’ album projects. He made exceptions for Joni, Steely Dan, and Don Henley. Sure enough, when Wayne came in and we ran the song for him, he played with miraculous acuity through the structure; finding ways to both augment the musical aspect of the song, and to illustrate the poetry. Wayne had a sharpshooter’s ear for both musical context and poetic narrative. An example on this particular song is that when the lyric “people don’t know how to love, they taste it and toss it….. turn it off and on like the bathtub faucet” went by on the first pass through the song, Wayne played a musical argument between a man and a woman. These are the kind of things that would consistently happen when working with Wayne. He had lightning-fast musical intuition, and he really thought about music with a screenwriter’s sense of allegorical structure. He was as much a screenwriter as a genius composer and musician.

Wayne became one of the biggest influences on me in many areas of my life. He really was a mentor. I’ll be expanding upon the lessons that he taught me, and the mysterious and subtle wisdom that he had, and that he imparted to me in coming posts.

Here is the lyric to Moon At The Window and the track that we ended up with from “Wild Things Run Fast”:

Moon At The Window

It takes cheerful resignation
Heart and humility
That's all it takes
A cheerful person told me
Nobody is harder on me than me
How could they be?
And nobody is harder on you than you

Betsy’s blue
She says, "Tell me something good"
You know I'd help her out if I only could
Oh, but sometimes the light can be so hard to find
At least the moon at the window
The thieves left that behind

People don't know how to love
They taste it and toss it
Turn it off and on like a bathtub faucet

Oh, sometimes the light
Can be so hard to find
At least the moon at the window
The thieves left that behind

I wish her heart
I know these battles
Deep in the dark
When the spooks of memories rattle

Ghosts of the future
Phantoms of the past
Rattle, rattle, rattle in the spoon and the glass

Is it possible to learn
How to care and yet not care
Since love has two faces
Hope and despair

And pleasure always turns to fear
I find at least the moon at the window
The thieves left that behind
Moon at the window, they left that behind

Moon at the window, they left that behind
At least they left the moon behind the blind

Moon at the window