Discography

Al Kooper's band. Al convinced me to leave Columbia and work as an independent producer. In my naivete, I didn't even know that independent producers existed! Fred Catero was the engineer for this project, as he was for Cheap Thrills later on.

A movie soundtrack that Peter (of PP&M) and I did for a documentary of The Sixties.

I loved writing the string arrangements for this album. Artists have various ways to come up with songs. Lightfoot once told me that he would check into a hotel in a strange town and walk around and the people and situations he would see would suggest song subjects to him. I saw that Lightfoot was playing locally last summer so I went to see him. He sounds great.

A favorite arrangement: "The Last Time I Saw Her Face" — just a use of the gorgeous sound that a full string section can deliver.

We all met through the intuition of Howard Alk, the film editor of You Are What You Eat. On our first session, in one afternoon, we recorded "We Can Talk About It Now", "Chest Fever", "Lonesome Suzie" and "Tears Of Rage". Then we added "The Weight", which turned out to be The Band's most popular song, at the end of the session. We'd spent a lot of time on the arrangements for the other songs but no time at all on The Weight.

I was doing 2 projects at once in the same place, Columbia's Hollywood Studios. The Electric Flag in the afternoon and Cheap Thrills at night. Janis came into the Flag's session and heard me playing piano. She said, in her particular, indignant fashion, "How come you're playing on THEIR album and not on OURS?" I replied that I was IN The Flag at that point and Big Brother, on the other hand, was a self-contained band. But she insisted, so we recorded "Turtle Blues" that night with me on piano. It's one of my 2 embarrassing performances on record. At the time I knew NOTHING about playing the blues. I knew the blues intellectually, but not internally. But there it is. That day turned out to be eventful for me in a related way. Taj Mahal also dropped in on the session and invited me to join his band for a European tour (with Ed Davis, Bill Rich and Jim Carstein). I jumped at the chance. If I was looking for an opportunity to internalize the blues, that was it!

I didn't produce Cass's hit, after which this album was titled. This album was space-y, a lot of fun and indulging Cass's more fanciful side. In fact, it was so non-pop that I heard that the producer of her hit was going to sue us. I came to love Cass as a warm, accommodating soul. Her parting came much too soon.

We recorded this 2nd Band album principally in the pool house of a Hollywood estate that had previously been owned by Sammy Davis Jr. We were our own engineers, so there was no one on the scene except for the 6 of us. Prior to the start of recording, Robbie and I and our families vacationed together to work on songs. The only one we ended up collaborating on, "Davey's On The Road Again", appeared later on my own 1st album, not The Band's.

I got real good reviews for this album, but I never went out on the road to promote it. I had seen what the road did to relationships and I had just started a new one that I knew would be very important to me (and which has since lasted about 40 years). So it became a little-known item that would either show up for collectors at 50 dollars a pop or in garage sales for 50 cents.

Bobby Charles, composer of "See You Later, Alligator" and other hits, showed up in Woodstock and he, Rick Danko and I were able to utilize all of Woodstock's best resident musicians to make a delightful record.

In the same year, John Hartford came to Woodstock with his playing partner, Norman Blake, to record an album. As John and I drove through town, he said, "We'll need a bass player." I said, "Well, there goes one of the best bass players in the world carrying his laundry to the laundromat." It was Dave Holland. I asked Dave if he wanted to play on this bluegrass album. He asked me what bluegrass was. I said it was like jazz, but from the mountains of Appalachia. He signed on and continued to play with Hartford, off and on, for years.

My 2nd album. My first album took years and too much money to make so I resolved to change that and did this album in 3 sessions with all the musicians playing live. As a result it's much more jazz-tinged. There are great performances from Dave Sanborn, Dave Holland, Randy Brecker, Howard Johnson and others. It contains "Short Visit" which fits into the story later on.

Cyrus was the hub of whatever wheel I had in LA. "Islands" was recorded on equipment I bought and set up in his home, equipment that Charlie Piera and I eventually drove back across the country to set up in my studio near Woodstock.

Rachel is a talented writer and singer. For "Refugees" we assembled an all-star cast from many different schools of music: Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland and Michael Brecker from the jazz world, Colin Walcott, of Oregon from the New Age division, Bonnie Raitt from folk and pop, Tito Puente from the latin realm, a chorus of female Baltic singers and a classical string quartet.

Al Kooper won't let me forget the comment I leveled at him from the control room after his first attempt at a particular vocal on this solo album: "Al, let's try it again and see if you can achieve some level of palatability." He did.

The beginning of a long musical association and friendship with Hirth Martinez. An artist sent to me by Robbie Robertson and previously sent to Robbie by Bob Dylan. Good credentials for a great performer.

The first of 2 wonderful records I did with Hirth. As far as arrangement touches, check out the end of Hirth’s solo on “The Mothman Samba” when his vocal scat singing segues into background singers picking up his line. Silky as smooth peanut butter.

What a night! So much has been written about this concert in which The Band was the back-up group for many of their favorite artists. I had to run the rehearsals and coordinate the musical aspects of the performance. I felt like the ringmaster at a circus.

What an honor to work with Gil Evans, one of my idols from the moment I first heard his arrangements. In addition, Gil had heard the song, "Short Visit" from my "Journey" album and had arranged it for Dave Sanborn without my knowing it. That was a thrill.

Gary is a yodeling cowboy-poet. The real McCoy. One of Gary's poems asks that, when he dies, he have his hide made into a saddle — to be bought by a beautiful woman — so that he can be between the 2 things he loves the best.

Michael gave me carte blanche to write the arrangements for this album and it turned out so well I used it as my arranging demo. Great players, great songs too.

"Underneath The Appletree" just has a lot of nice touches: trombones associated with "dogs sleeping in the shade", flutes depicting the mockingbirds. The instrumental chorus starts with unison tenor saxes, a real strong sound and then morphs into an off-the-wall be-bop line which propels George Young into an off-the-wall solo. "Jardin Botanico" — 3 flutes used as a rhythmic pattern several times. (There's also a wild flute break played by Dave Liebman.)

Sessions were set up for Steve to record with Nashville's Finest but, after the 1st date, Steve said he wasn't happy with them. But they had already been booked for the duration of the project and pre-paid. Oh, no! What was I going to do? In my hotel room there was a Gideon’s Bible. I opened it at random to a Psalm addressed “To The Chief Musician”. “Oh, that’s me!”, I thought. Wait a minute! No, the reference is to God. So I left it up to The-Higher-Power-Of-My-Choice to figure it out. And figured out it was: the next day, one of Nashville’s Finest said, “We figure we’re not right for this project so we’ve got some other guys to recommend and we don’t want any money.” Hmmm.

Also, this recording was done live with everyone in the studio at once, no splices, no overdubs. Some wonderful material too.

A gypsy guitarist in the mold of Django Reinhardt (but with 2 more fingers), Bireli was actually just 15 when I went to Germany to record him live in a club with his group. At the time of this recording he had just become aware of Jimi Hendrix and had bought an electric guitar. But he had to cut a small, round hole through his acoustic guitar case for the volume knob of his new electric to poke out through.

I got a call from my friend, George James, saying there were a couple of Japanese gentlemen asking around Woodstock if I was still alive. I was happy to report that I was. They said I had "krazyfans" in Japan and they funded a brand-new album for me, the very first on a record label under the aegis of Pioneer, the electronics giant. George and I assembled a great crew for this project: Levon, Rick and Garth from The Band, John Hall from Orleans, in-the-pocket bassist Paul Ramsey, consummate drummer Terry Silverlight, jazz greats Ron Carter, Toots Thielmans, Randy and Michael Brecker, Lew Soloff and George Young and Cornelius Bumpus from The Doobie Brothers. Listen to his solo on "...Summersong"! HMV Record Stores voted this one of that year's 3 best, along with Eric Clapton's and Peter Gabriel's.

A.J. is Jim's son and a really exciting and talented piano-player, writer and singer. Though I'm old enough to be his dad, he taught me some things about music, like: often the albums you really like to listen to sustain a mood throughout, rather than being a potpourri of styles. Food for thought.

Dr. John told me he liked my charts for this record which was a nice compliment from a son of New Orleans.

Jackie and Roy were close friends, introduced to us by hip lyricist and ex-pat, Fran Landesman who wrote jazz classics like “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most”. Fran and I wrote some songs together including “Poems To Eat” which is on my “Journey” album. Jazz vocalist, Bob Dorough also recorded that song along with “New Song” and “Am I OK”.

For the first time, I recorded on my own piano. You know, piano players are usually subject to playing on unfamiliar instruments when they record because no 2 pianos are the same. Two of them may come out of the factory with consecutive serial numbers and be worlds apart. So this was really a pleasure — at last! I turned our living room into a recording studio. When I was working on those Legacy projects years ago at Columbia, I heard a version of the Gloria text from a mass in Spanish, but set to mariachi music! I loved it and used the same notion for the 91st Psalm.

Keiko Lee was the 1st of the artists from Japan that I worked with. It was a short notice project. She arrived in NYC and I wrote all the arrangements in 2 days. We recorded them — with an all-star jazz cast: Ron Carter, Grady Tate, Lee Konitz, Renee Rosnes, et al.

For “Lover Come Back To Me”, I wrote a counter-melody which can stand on its own as a bebop song. I called that counter-melody “Come Back, Be-Bop”.

Moto Sano, who is the equivalent of Bruce Springsteen in Japan, brought his entire office with him to Woodstock for this album. Later that year, Garth Hudson and I went to Osaka to perform with him in a mega-concert promoting this album. Largest audience for a concert I ever saw!

A second album recorded in my living room.

Our second record together. You can really hear Hirth's further sophistication as a songwriter from the former album to this one.

Co-produced with Manny Moreira.

Proposed by Yoshi Nagato, my man-in-Japan, this was a lot of fun to put together, using some of my favorite performers, from Steve Forbert to Jackie Cain, Terry Blaine and Geoff Muldaur.

A Greatest Hits album that Pioneer put together along with a couple of live recordings from a concert in Japan and a special tribute to Rick Danko who passed while we were recording this album.

I've never considered myself much of a singer. I made this album to showcase some songs that I thought others might record. No nibbles yet. How about you?

My close friendship with Bluesmaster Taj dates from 1968 when he asked me to go on tour with him. Over the years I realized that there were many songs in The Great American Songbook that were tinged with The Blues. We picked a bunch of them for this wonderful album. I had fun with the arrangements, for instance changing the chords on the classic “One For My Baby and One For The Road” to support the sadness of the lyric. While, for “Summertime”, I went in the other direction and tried to evoke some bounciness with the horn pattern under the vocal.