And I do find I like the challenge of trying to find what's right.
Hello and welcome to the Keyboard Chronicles.
I'm your host David Holloway and I'm thrilled as always to be here with you at this stage at 4 .41 in the morning and there's no one I'd rather spend the early hours of the morning
with than you Paul Bindig.
How are you sir?
Well I feel exactly the same way David.
If I'm going to be up at 4 .11 a in my time I might as well be with you in talking about our favorite subject which is
keyboard playing and keyboard players and gee, haven't we got a great guest this time?
Yeah, look, it doesn't get much better than Larry Goldings and as you'll hear in this first part of two and that gives you an indication of just how deep we went with Larry, we
cover a lot of ground, particularly his amazing formative years as a player, some of the incredible people that he studied under and then some of those early significant gigs he
undertook.
We cover a whole bunch of ground and do stick around for part two because as you'll hear in that one, there's a lot more stuff to learn there as well.
look, Larry is just an amazing guy to talk to, Paul.
Yeah, he certainly was, David.
I really was impressed with the...
It's nice when you can ask a question and the answer coming back shows a lot of thought and care and introspection.
And that's really what I got from our time with Larry was just how much he really cares about his music.
And he's so open -minded when it comes to idiom and genre.
And although he's an absolute master of the world of jazz, he has some really interesting insights and influences from many other aspects.
And as you alluded to, David, that a lot of that came from his formative years.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, I hope you enjoy this one a great deal and we'll see you at the end of part two.
Larry, I cannot thank you enough sir for joining.
It's an honor and a privilege.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for reaching out.
Happy to be here.
So I feel like we've got so much to talk about.
So I'll jump straight in, but we'll start with our standard question, which is just a bit about your musical upbringing.
So I'm particularly keen to talk about your formative early adult years and the amazing teachers you had.
But let's start from the very beginning.
What was your musical upbringing that
you know, developed a passion for you for music.
There was a piano in our house in a suburb of Boston, Newton Mass, where I grew up.
I didn't grow up in a musical family, although my father in particular was a music lover, is a music lover and listened to a lot of classical music.
And we had a piano in the house and I gravitated to the piano apparently at around nine and just started playing things by ear and was
listening to people on the radio like Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder and whatever was coming through the radio or was popular at that time.
And was able to, you know, pick things up, learn about harmony that way by particularly some of the, when my ear got a little bit more sophisticated, particularly things like
Billy Joel songs, which were more harmonic than other pop songs.
Although that,
At that time, pop songs were generally quite interesting compared to what you hear today.
Harmonically, I mean, between Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan and Billy Joel, there was a lot for someone who was maybe heading towards jazz, you know, to grab onto.
So I didn't really, I did have a classical teacher in the beginning or like just a basic piano teacher that taught me how to read and things like that.
But I didn't take, I didn't go very far with that.
in terms of the playing of it, the listening of classical music, I've done very thoroughly over the years, but also for just for harmonic information, you know, a lot of that and
just the beauty of it.
so I did, I went to a music camp when I was 12 in Maine, in the state of Maine.
And that was probably when I had my first jazz piano teacher.
that summer and he gave me, I remember he typed out this list of artists that I should, know, whose records I should find.
And that sort of got me on the way.
And actually a client of my father's was a jazz fan.
He gave me a Dave McKenna record.
And it was the Dave McKenna record that I think really hooked me into jazz.
And I was also listening to Oscar Peterson and
a lot of blues based kind of players like Oscar.
But that summer camp experience was very, I think, influential.
Got to play with other kids who were into it.
But I also had a rock band and things like that.
was always been sort of all over the place in terms of what I liked.
But when I came home from that, I definitely wanted a teacher and I...
I had a teacher named Peter Casino in the early, you know, when I was probably 13 or 14.
And he really gave me a lot of my jazz knowledge, you know, gave names to the things that I already knew and then got me just a little bit deeper into other things, improvisation.
And after a couple of years with him,
though he said, I was still in high school, he said, you know, I think I think I should send you to somebody else.
And he recommended a guy named Rand Blake.
And Rand Blake was the head of the what was called the third stream department at the New England Conservatory.
And he was teaching there, but he was also teaching out of his home.
And that was a really big eye opener for me, ear opener, I should say, because he was really
very much about training the ear and getting me exposed to music that he figured I probably hadn't heard yet.
And that was, again, a very eclectic spectrum of music.
And he was really important, I think, because of all of those things and other things too, just working on finding my own voice.
When I would play my Oscar Peterson licks and stuff, he would say, well, Oscar's cool, but he sort of suffered from diarrhea of the hands.
I remember he said something like that.
And really wanted me to, even at that point, try to get rid of some of those influences, you know, to really focus on myself.
I think I might've been a little, I mean, I'm really happy he led me down that direction.
I think I still needed to absorb some of the great
pianist at that point, but he did put that notion in my head that it's really about finding myself.
But he would give me cassettes of various things on one cassette, like come and be able to sing the 16 bars of this Bartok piece, plus this Stevie Wonder tune and this Bud Powell
solo.
And to him, music was music.
You know, Duke Ellington said, there's only two kinds of music, good music and bad music.
So I think that was just the perfect person at that formative stage to get me thinking about the full picture and the fact that one can draw influence from anything.
so Rand was very, very important.
I also thought that he was a very, and still is,
very original piano player.
Not like a swinging piano player by his own, you he himself would call himself a, how does he describe himself?
A noir, you know, sort of, he's really more into mood and texture and he doesn't really play any recognizable licks, you know.
And so I still think of him as sort of someone that
I look to for, you know, for someone who really, where originality is really where it's at.
And, and he turned me onto so much music.
So that was still high school.
Also during high school, it's sort of a long story how this happened, but I got the opportunity to have three or so lessons with Keith Jarrett.
And that was at his home.
in Oxford, New Jersey.
By that, even by that point, I mean, I hadn't heard everything that he had done.
But he was certainly a huge influence and almost, I was almost too intimidated by him to fully absorb what happened in those lessons.
Having said that, he was very supportive.
He, he invited me to come back after the first lesson and
But I was really young.
I was really young.
if you've ever read his interviews, you know that he can talk on another plane of thought.
And I think I was a little bit too young at the time to absorb a lot of what he had to say, or just being around him and seeing him play right in front of me and getting to play
with him on two pianos and just getting a glimpse of his life.
was crazy.
I didn't really keep up the relationship, unfortunately, although I could
just and I should call him up, especially since what he's been through with his health.
And I plan to call him, but he's still somebody that I feel like, he's going to judge me for being an organ player or for not being true to pure improvisation or something.
And I had sort of a complex about it, which is maybe a therapist's job to help me figure out.
But
He certainly will always be considered one of my main influences.
And people often ask me, is there anything that you remember that you drew from those lessons?
And the one thing that I always talk about, he had this book and I wish, and when I do call him, I am gonna ask him if he remembers the book, but he had picked up a book in
England, I think I remember saying.
where the whole premise was like five volumes and the premise was, here's like volume one, here's a very simple one hand, folky melody, four bars of it.
You take as much time as you need to compose the inevitable sounding and that's the word he used, the inevitable answer.
to those four bars.
The point being that what we're doing in improvisation is just a completely sped up process of that.
And if you can get good at really coming up with the perfect way to end your idea, that's what we're trying to do in real time.
And by the fifth book, it was like atonal, know, two handed harmony.
So it's a very cool idea.
And also,
in retrospect, it made me think of the importance of composition too, because if you can write something really good when you have all the time in the world, that's the first
step.
Not everybody can write something that sounds inevitable.
if you can practice that discipline, and then it's just a question of speeding it up.
And if anybody can do that consistently, brilliantly,
over the years on record, live, you know, it's Keith Jarrett.
I mean, he does it probably, I mean, I don't want to say better than anybody, but I mean, in terms of the number of records he made and the number of times he does exactly that,
you know, plays a phrase and then without flubbing or any, you know, disruption in his thought.
just plays the most beautiful, gets out of it in the most beautiful way.
And he also, he's a great composer.
He hasn't composed in a long time or he hasn't released anything like that in a long time.
But those were formative players.
I then went to the New School for Social Research, the jazz program there in its first year of its existence.
And I had great teachers there.
had Jackie Byard for one, who was really another
I think I started to learn more about him when I was there.
Went back and checked him out with Mingus and his own records.
But I really look to him as someone who is very much kind of what I'm trying to do.
And that is look at the past and the future at the same time.
You know, he's someone who can sound totally authentic playing fat swallower stride, but then set them off on something that's free.
He's completely.
beautiful there and he has his own language and but he's very he has a very very firm he has very very firm roots in the past and he was great he was just a very eccentric and
original personality kind of an unorganized teacher but it didn't really matter it was just wonderful that was one of the great things about being in New York in the 80s was you
could still
You could still sit with those people, approach them.
A lot of them were coming through the school.
And even if they weren't great teachers in the classic sense, as long as they played for you or told stories about their experiences, it was kind of better than what you get.
know, it's just that much more, you get that much more in touch with the roots of the music.
Then you do someone who's in their 30s and has a lot of information.
Not to knock younger good teachers, but at that time it was quite a unique thing to be able to be around Jackie Byer, Jim Hall, Jimmy Heath, Donald Byrd.
These are all people who were at the school.
Reggie Werkeman, just to hear them talk about their own experiences was just something that you would only really be able to get from a book of interviews or something.
So it was a great experience.
Roland Hanna, Sir Roland Hanna was not my private teacher, but he was taught an ensemble that I was in.
And one day he came up to me and said, would you be interested in being an up and coming special guest at an international jazz party that I go to every year?
I was like, I hadn't even been to Europe.
And that was a huge life -changing experience.
It was a three or four day thing in Holland.
The pianists alone were Roland and Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones and Cedar Walton and little 18 year old me, you know.
And then Sarah Vaughan was there and Kenny Burrell and Swedes Edison and James Moody.
And they, they put a set together where I was a sideman with some of these people and, and it was just crazy.
And then there was
a night where all these cats were hanging out in the bar.
And my dad, by the way, came with his mother, my grandmother.
We all went to Europe together.
And I think they had gone to bed, but I went to this bar where they were just hanging out and there was this cocktail piano player playing, poor guy.
And then Roland Hanna, you know, had a few drinks and he asked the cocktail piano player, do you know memories of you?
And the guy said, no, I don't.
And he goes, Larry, you know, memories of you.
And I'm looking around and I see like the who's who of the jazz world sitting around having drinks.
And then I played for about a half an hour and just the experience of getting little approving glances from Tommy Flanagan and such, it felt like my confidence just went up,
you know, a hundredfold.
One of those experiences that in a weekend, you know, just made me feel like.
wow, maybe I could be part of this community, you know.
People like that were incredible who took me under their wing in that way.
Arnie Lawrence, the saxophone player who started the new school, I need to mention him.
was hugely important.
He was one of the first guys to hire me for local gigs and make sure that certain people heard me.
when people came to give master classes, he would always have me in the band.
That's how I ended up playing with John Hendricks, which was my first real big name kind of gig.
And was doing it through, you know, while I was still in college.
And not to mention Jim Hall, that was the other person that I started playing with Jim as a result of Jim being a teacher at the new school.
So it was a great time to be in New York and the school was really important in getting me exposed.
It sure was.
so I think it's safe to say, Larry, that your formative years were very nondescript, not much going on there.
So I do want to ask you about two things.
One was Rand Blake in the third stream, which you mentioned in passing.
So how influential was that?
And for our listeners that don't understand what the third stream is, just how you mentioned he liked playing a diversity of music.
And I'm also kind of here just a little bit more about the new school and it's
why it was called the New School and its different approach to music education.
don't, well, the New School has a longer history than, than the jazz program.
The New School was, I think started in the forties.
I'm not even sure why it was called the New School, but Arnie Lawrence, developed a friendship with the Dean, David Levy, I think was his name.
And he was a big jazz fan and a big art, artist and, and,
very important in the art community, I think, in New York.
And so that's how that started, that relationship started.
David Levy was more of an academic guy, but Arnie Lawrence was not.
And it was really that kind of tension that made the school very, very unique.
And unfortunately in the end, they kind of pushed Arnie out because he was such a sort of outsider to that sort of organized kind of.
academic kind of mold.
But, mean, that was unique really because of the people that he hired to come in.
they, as I said, a lot of them were really just, he felt like we have to get players, people who are players first and maybe teachers second.
And, you know, for the people who already had kind of had a head start in playing, I think they got a lot out of it.
For some of the less experienced players, I think they were a little bit more lost, you know, because they didn't even quite appreciate who they were surrounded by.
And they needed more basics, you know, before learning about, know, listening to Jimmy Heath talk about Coltrane was interesting to them, but they really needed more basics.
And there were a few of us that already had some of that.
down and what we really needed is to be able to sort of play with this type of caliber of player.
that to me was the most, and going to New York at that time, that was what you got out of New York is you were able to be thrown into situations that were above your level, thus
making you better much more quickly.
You asked about the third stream.
Third stream, think, was just a name that I don't know exactly what it, you know, there's jazz, there's classical, and then there's the third stream, which is sort of everything
else, you know, world music from around the world, classical music, and just this whole idea of getting influence from all that is interesting and worthy of study and using your
ear to learn.
not trans, not looking at transcription books and things like that.
If you want to transcribe, do it by ear.
And if you want to transcribe, just don't do Charlie Parker and, you know, listen to this Bulgarian women's choir or whatever it's going to be.
Especially for the purpose of you finding who you are.
you know, so I think that's what the third stream was about.
Larry, I'm interested in the journey into the world of the organ.
You mentioned before the hypothetical idea that Keith Jarrett might be horrified that you went down that road.
I'm sure he wouldn't be, but I'm fascinated as to what attracted you to it, how did you discover it, and how did your journey into it start?
Yeah, it was very, very kind of random.
I mean, when I went to New York, I hadn't been playing the organ, never had even seen the Hammond B3L.
Of course, knew what it was.
I loved the sound of it.
I had heard probably some of the Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery records and heard gospel music or gospel influence music like Aretha Franklin.
Probably would have been Billy Preston on some of those records.
Maybe didn't even realize that it was Billy Preston on some of the Beatles records.
And because I loved Dave McKenna, when I played solo piano, I would concentrate on walking bass lines.
And so I had that going for me.
But I hadn't thought about playing organ until a friend of mine named Leon Parker, great drummer, was holding down like three days a week at a little shithole up on the West,
Upper West Side called Augies, which is now Club Cold Smoke.
He called me one day and said, hey, my bass player didn't show up and I know you like to walk baselines and maybe you'd come up and walk baselines, you know, on a keyboard.
And that's literally how that happened.
I brought up a DX7.
Then I was like, well, if I'm walking bass lines, maybe I could do it on an organ sound because that's what organ players do.
And that then turned into a regular gig.
We just started doing that a lot.
then I got really, I get very quickly obsessed with this idea of the organ and walking my own bass lines.
the type of little places that I could get gigs didn't have piano sometimes.
So I thought, well, there's a way to play these little clubs.
And I got more and more interested in the organ.
I got different, I went to a used music place and got this old core double -tiered organ and got really into it.
Long story short, the personnel of that changed and Peter Bernstein and who I met,
I already forgot about the Eastman summer program, high school program.
was a huge deal.
Did a summer there in Rochester where I met Peter Bernstein and other great players.
And that was of course hugely influential and I think cemented the fact, cemented that I was going to pursue jazz and that I wanted to go to a jazz college.
or music school anyway.
So that was like my junior year.
That was the summer before my junior year maybe in high school.
That a group developed with various people eventually being Peter who introduced me to Bill because they had gone to college together.
And the next thing you know, we have an organ trio.
That's literally how it happened.
You know, the bass lines were probably the easiest thing for me to figure out.
Then the next thing was how to get.
good sounds on the organ and how to breathe on the organ and various people that I knew.
Mike Ladon was one of them because he was already playing both organ and piano.
I remember he looked at my bass stop and he said, no, use that.
No, don't use that middle stop with that back.
And people were giving me little pointers about that.
And I just got more and more into organ records.
It was really the first regular group.
It was the first group that I
that I had and we started to play around the city a lot, the Village Gate, Augies, anywhere, with a portable, with some kind of portable organ.
During that stint, while we were still sometimes playing at Augies, the late David Baker, great recording engineer, brought Maceo Parker up to hear Bill because they needed a
drummer for a record that was happening like the next day or something.
And he said, well, Bill's playing with this organ tree uptown.
And that's how I met Maceo.
Maceo hired Bill for the record.
And then a few months later, I got a call from Maceo saying, you want to come on the road, this project.
And I still hadn't really played the Hammond organ, actually, and the real Hammond organ.
And I think on that first tour, I wasn't playing mostly organs, Hammond's.
I was playing my thing that I brought on the road, which was this cork.
whatever it was called, VX2 or something.
And then once in a while they'd have a B3 at the gig and I literally was learning the real organ on the gig.
Wasn't even messing with the pedals.
And to this day I only mess with them about half as much as someone like Joey D did.
And then the producer of Maceo's record at that time, a German guy named Stefan Miner, who I see now when I go over to
Europe said, well, you have a trio back in New York.
Why don't you record a record for my label?
And I was like, well, I don't, I've only been playing organ for a few years.
And he said, sounds good to me.
And I really didn't want to.
I just felt like I wasn't ready, but that's what happened.
And suddenly people's vision of me was more as an organ player.
heard me maybe with Maceo, because we made this record with Maceo called Life on Planet Groove that a lot of people heard.
I don't know.
And without me wanting this, it just kind of happened that people were thinking of me as an organ player.
And that's really how it happened.
I mean, I was happy with it.
It was getting me work.
And it also led me into other kinds of situations because of the nature of the organ and how it fits in with pop music and R &B.
So it was just opened some unexpected doors.
And particularly by the time I started playing John Schofield and that I made that at the first record under my own name, for that matter, the first three or four were all in
Oregon.
So I was really learning as I went.
Didn't even have room for an Oregon where I was living.
So I wasn't even practicing Oregon.
But I did like about it the fact that
you could orchestrate, you know, behind somebody.
And as a pianist, I was and still am very, very into that idea of coloring and a mood under somebody.
I mean, if I could just comp for somebody great all night, I'd just, I'd be perfectly happy doing that.
And I love the orchestral possibilities and the harmonic possibilities of controlling the bass, what it's doing harmonically and everything else.
So that's pretty much how that happened.
And just started doing more of my homework with records and things like that.
And like everybody else who goes to the organ, I was of course interested in Jimmy Smith and things like that.
But because I was playing with Peter and Bill, who are both very open -minded and Bill is not like a standard kind of organ drummer and he had heard so much modern jazz by that
time.
And I had heard so many great piano trios.
We sort of just didn't really go the route of a Jimmy Smith type of vibe where the guitar player sort of is in the background.
It was really more of a, we never talked about it.
It was just the way that it all just kind of went down and we were writing, we were all writing.
so it just felt very much like I could still write the same, way I would write for a piano trio, but with these guys.
And that's essentially how.
Yeah, the organ.
Yeah.
Yes.
And so Larry, your collaborators over the years have been astounding.
The number of collaborators.
And I'm just interested at a broad level through your substantive and prolific solo output.
What are the factors that make a collaboration appealing to you now?
What needs to catch your eye that you go, I want to explore this quite deeply and actually do some recording or some playing in a more substantive way?
You know, it just has to.
pose some kind of challenge, you know, and allow me, you know, freedom.
Well, there's my trio, which is very much a collaboration, and that's just great, because we're all very like -minded and good friends and play well together.
Recently, I was asked by the Scary Pockets guys, which was how the Scary Goldings thing happened.
That came from them, but I...
I really saw that put me in a good light as an organ player and got me a new audience too, which was great.
And particularly when we started adding some really amazing players, like we did a record with Mono Neon.
So it's just like, I just want to play with great, good players.
Let's see, I love a good singer.
there's a great, I just made a record with a wonderful singer here named Danielle D 'Andrea.
And we have just a really good thing together and she allows me to do whatever I want.
And we also can write together and that's been a great collaboration.
Yeah, as long as I can be myself and try something new.
I've been playing with this wonderful tap dancer named Melinda Sullivan.
We have a record, a very experimental record that's gonna come out in August.
She just has the most amazing time and is very creative.
it kind of brings back, brings me back to the walking bassline thing, which I hadn't really done outside of Oregon.
in years, you know, and actually I started doing it more during COVID when I was stuck here and started taking some of my synthesizers out of storage and stuff and would do
videos where I'm playing left hand bass line, is something I used to do just at home.
Apart from playing Oregon, I never really did that as a piano player, but I started doing it again with Melinda.
because it just kind of worked and it created this very compact way of being able to sort of spontaneously arrange with her.
Because I also grew up with synthesizers and stuff like that, during COVID I had the opportunity to collaborate with this guy named Pete Min, who's got a wonderful label and a
studio where he's got probably one of the best synthesizer collections in LA.
And his whole thing was like, let's make great sonic.
landscapes, you know, and I was like, yeah, you know, which interested me for, because I love synthesizers, but also because for a while now, I just haven't really, that's been,
I'm fine with not being pigeonholed as just a jazz player and particularly as just an organ player.
I think my voice is in what I play, you know, the music that I, that I play and the
things that I write and I don't really care so much about whether it might be confusing to some people.
I just get bored playing jazz organ.
Having said that, I mean, I'm not bored when I'm doing it with some of the people that I've been lucky enough to do it with.
We Jack DeGionnette and Schofield and Peter Bernstein.
But I either want to get back to the piano or I just want more colors or
So yeah, a fun collaboration for me is just something where I feel pretty free.
So I'm open to all sorts of situations.
And I love great singers.
That's always something that I like.
I also like writing collaborations.
It's something that I've been doing with various people over the years.
And that's a whole other side of me, a whole other discipline.
I'm not a lyric writer, but I love writing with people who
a knack for lyrics and melody and storytelling and stuff.
It makes me think differently, you know, and it just freshens things up for me.
So when I get back to a jazz gig, I feel like I've kind of fresh, you know.
Yeah, well, there's so much diversity in the range of your collaborations.
in case anyone missed it, Larry just mentioned he's collaborated with
diverse artists as tap dancers, is Melinda Sullivan as an example.
And for all our listeners and viewers, and David will put a link in the show notes, I really encourage you to watch these videos with Melinda Sullivan.
They're very watchable and very listenable.
And it's maybe a collaboration that people don't think of naturally, but they're wonderful.
And I wanted to ask you about a comment that someone made on one of the Melinda Sullivan videos.
And they said, Larry Golding's has no boundaries.
And I'm curious as to whether you feel like you've
you're approaching your boundaries or where your boundaries could be or how do you respond to that sort of idea?
Yeah, as long as I'm proud of the situation and then it's either something that challenges me as a player or as a writer or is just a fun opportunity for me to communicate with
another person or make them sound better or
then yeah, my only boundaries would be things that I don't wanna do.
And sometimes we're in situations like that because we can't help it for some reason.
But these days I'm lucky to say that I'm able to only be in situations that I wanna be in.
But in terms of genre and style, and I don't really think I have any boundaries except for those that I wouldn't be able to do because of technique or, you know, for instance, if I
could really read music great, I would love to play more classical music or, you know, be in a situation that requires more reading, you know, because I'm frustrated by the fact
that I can't just sit down and without being
very, very, without it being a very slow, daunting process, like sit down and open a Brahms Intermezzo or something like that.
Those are boundaries that I'd like to break through.
But that's only because I'm not there yet.
I don't practice enough and I don't read enough to get me better at those things.
yeah, they're pretty, but again, I...
In my mind, I kind of don't even see the boundaries.
guess that's true.
Throw me in a good, completely free situation with really good free players.
And I'm just as happy there as I am in a real nice swinging situation with great players.
It's all just, it's all music, you know?
And I also put myself in very limited
you know, situations where the language has to be limited appropriately to that situation.
James Taylor is a perfect example.
But just because I play with James Taylor, I mean, I want to go out with every folk pop person.
I've been extremely spoiled by the fact that when I played funk, I was playing with one of the innovators of that music.
When I'm playing pop music, it's with James Taylor who invented that style of music.
Or more recently Steely Dan.
I went out and I subbed for Jim Beard.
And that doesn't mean I want to be in pop situations all the time, you know, but it just so happens that I've been able to do these things with very authentic people.
And the situation has to be right for me to go out and do something that's where I'm not able to exhibit all my jazz knowledge and stuff like that.
by the way, that more and more that's, or I should say that over the years, that's less and less really what I want to be about.
I love that I can go from one thing to another.
And I'm very, very lucky that when I do something that's non -jazz, it can be with some really high quality, inspiring people like James, John Mayer was a great experience.
And I do find, I like the challenge of trying to find what's right, you know, in those situations and turning off those jazz buttons, you know, in my brain.
it's to me, it's just a different kind of challenge.
know, it's why I was always interested to know like who's playing on a Paul Simon record or which is a good example because I loved like Richard T for instance, or Don Groenick or
some of these people that you're like, you know, like they sound like they know jazz, but they're not, they don't, they don't, but not in that way of like, that's a jazz guy
playing on pop music.
They just, I could tell that they have some kind of intuition about.
how to play with jazz inflection and feel and knowledge, but really still they're serving the song and they're serving the artists.
I don't know, that always attracted me, like, how do you do that?
And also within the different keyboard instruments, how do you play the right stuff on a Wurlitzer electric piano?
And a lot of that has come over the years working
with really good producers in the studios.
Larry Klein is a good example.
Someone who famously said to me, not famously, but in my mind, it's a great line.
He would say, that was a great take, Larry, but could you play less playerly?
Like, we know you can play.
That's not really what's needed here.
We need a different part of your musicianship.
We need just the taste.
tasteful part.
And that's a great lesson.
Even when I'm in a jazz circumstance.
And this is again, taken me years to figure out, but like, you know, I don't feel like I have to prove myself in every situation that I'm in.
Prove myself as a jazz musician or as someone who knows harmony or can do
it has facility or whatever.
What's needed is what song needs, you know, in a lot of those situations.
And it's not always about you and your chops and your knowledge.
It's more about your, it is about your knowledge, but it's about how to put that knowledge tastefully into a situation.
And so I've learned that by getting to know James Taylor's material and listening to how the players
before me played with him and listening to great studio musicians.
And, you know, I recently was able to spend a little bit of time with Bob James.
He was like an early influence of mine.
just loved how he approached the roads and writing and he was dabbling and television.
He was just doing, you know, everything he did just seemed to be, you know, done very musically and tastefully and
One thing I learned about myself after moving to LA was that I am really fascinated with the whole history of recording here and all the records that have been made in the various
studios.
It's just really, really interesting to me.