Film & TV – Page 13 – Fifteen Minutes With…

Interviews from the world of film and television!

David T. Walker – Noteworthy

By: Michael D. McClellan | David T. Walker’s fingerprints are all over one of the most noteworthy periods in music history, his contributions to the Motown corpus lauded by everyone from Stevie Wonder to Diana Ross, but you would never know it, not with the reticent Walker perfectly comfortable working in the shadows of such brilliance. Ubiquitous yet invisible, a silent partner to some of the greatest recording artists of all time, Walker’s reputation as a consummate pro long ago earned him the trust of music royalty – and with it a lifetime worth of memories. Smokey Robinson. Marvin Gaye. Aretha Franklin. Name a star in Berry Gordy’s Motown universe and chances are Walker has recorded with them, 2,500 albums and counting, his guitar appearing on everything from Wonder’s Innervisions to Gaye’s What’s Going On. Not bad for a self-taught guitar player whose journey began humbly and provided little hint that Walker would, like the fictional character Forest Gump, find himself smack dab in the middle of 1960s zeitgeist.

David T. Walker and the incomparable Aretha Franklin, 1988. Photo courtesy of David T. Walker

“I’ve been blessed to play with a lot of very talented and creative people,” Walker says, his satin-smooth voice carrying a singular brand of charisma – an unpretentious swagger that is equal parts chill guitarist and dispenser of sage advice. “It’s very gratifying to have gone on their journey with them. It’s something that unfolded one song at a time, so to speak.”

Walker’s journey from obscurity to Hitsville, USA, is full of twists and turns, the kind that can take a young kid from Watts to the Deep South to New York and back again. It happens in cramped cars, in cramped Harlem hotel rooms with nothing more than a place to wash your hands and lay your head, and in smoky clubs working for pennies on the dollar. It happens in greasy diners, with barely enough change to pay the bill. It happens on the side of the road, the broiling summer sun bearing down and frustrations boiling over, petty arguments pitting brother against brother and occasionally leading to punches thrown. It’s a life filled with dirty clothes and lined with empty stomachs. There’s no entourage. There’s no cook, no physical therapist, no private jet or screaming fans. This is what life is like on the road when you’re barely out of high school, the possibilities endless, the odds of success equally daunting. And while the journey seems to start here, it actually begins years earlier, the seeds of a musical career sown decades before Walker began jamming with pop music’s illuminati.

“I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” Walker says, “but my parents migrated to California when I was two years old. We bounced around when I was growing up – I started school in San Pedro, but I didn’t finish the year there. We moved first to Greenfield, and then Bakersfield, which was very much a rural setting back then. The blues was a prominent form of music because the people that lived in that area of central California were largely from the South. I worked the fields before and after school, and I learned a lot about music from the people singing when they came in from the fields after a hard day’s work. There were a lot of influences.”

He wasn’t David T. Walker back then, but rather a kid from the country whose imagination was sparked by what he heard in church and on the radio, be it the lilting riffs of jazz saxophonist Cannonball Adderley or the fervent gospel being belted from the local choir on Sunday mornings. Which explains why it wasn’t the dark, rolling, Delta-born finger picking style of Muddy Waters that left an imprint on Walker’s own unique guitar playing, but a desire to emulate Adderley’s upbeat, quicksilver-fast sounds that stuck with him most.

“Even today I approach the guitar like I’m breathing into it. Most people assume I started out playing the guitar, but in elementary school I actually played the violin. I wasn’t very good – I only played it for one semester before switching to a C-melody saxophone, which I played all the way into high school. That was going to be my instrument.” – David T. Walker

Walker’s distinctive style has been compared to that of someone playing a harp, a holdover from his days playing the sax. It’s uniquely David T. Walker, and it suits him just fine, the way his laid back demeanor coalesces so simpatico with even the biggest egos.

“I’ve always been something of an introvert,” he says, “and I think that helped me to learn the art of listening at a young age. When you’re working with stars like Quincy Jones, you do a lot more listening than talking, especially at the beginning of the relationship. You have to earn their trust, both as a musician and as someone they feel comfortable getting to know on a personal level.”

Respect is something else that Walker has earned through the years. Three-time Grammy winner Keb’ Mo’ calls Walker one of his biggest influences. Seven-time winner Al Jarreau likens Walker’s guitar playing to ‘a trip to heaven and back’. Frank Sinatra recorded with Walker. Tupac Shakur and Busta Rhymes have sampled his music. So, who cares if most of us aren’t familiar with his work? David T. Walker isn’t losing any sleep over it, not when the list of luminaries offering praise for his work is a mile long.

David T. Walker and Al Jarreau at Tokyo Jazz Festival (2011) Photo courtesy of David T. Walker

“It’s certainly flattering,” he concedes, “but I’ve never been one to be star struck, or to let things go to my head. I’ve just always shown up ready to play. The rest has been a dream come true.”

Walker was still dreaming of a career as a saxophonist when his family moved again, in 1955, this time to Watts. The transition from rural tranquility to urban ghetto wasn’t easy, but the even-keeled Walker learned to adjust.

“I was 14 when we moved to Los Angeles, because machinery and other kinds of ways of clearing the fields and the crops were beginning to happen. There wasn’t as much work in the country anymore – they even had machines that would pick the cotton by this time.

“It was a cultural shock moving to the big city and living in the ghetto. You had to watch your step. I wasn’t easily accepted by the other kids – I was a quiet person, I still am, and that was a barrier I had to overcome with the neighborhood kids. But we had a lot in common, which helped: It was a largely black community, and we lived near the high school in the government housing projects, so everybody was on an even par, so to speak – at least economically, certainly. So I was eventually accepted, and I made my way through.”

Walker’s parents may not have fully grasped their eldest son’s talent, but they recognized the gravitational pull that music had on him. It didn’t hurt that music ran in the family; Walker’s father played guitar, mostly Delta blues. His mother was American Indian, which meant that he found himself exposed to beautiful chanting growing up. It also didn’t hurt that Walker’s father fancied himself something of a musical virtuoso.

“My father played a little guitar,” the self-taught Walker says, smiling. “He could play two or three chords, and he knew one or two licks which I can still remember, actually. He could play some acoustic blues, that kind of stuff. Of course, whenever he came around, especially in later years, he would tell everyone that he was the one who taught me how to play [laughs]. He could also play a song or two on the piano – gospel, mostly – and although he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, that didn’t stop him from singing whenever he had the chance. And trust me, he didn’t mind who was listening.”

The technical aspects of playing the guitar have never been high on Walker’s priority list, and hasn’t since the very beginning. He has always been about feel, about letting the music take him on its journey, untethered from the constraints of technique.

A young David T. Walker with his second guitar, a Fender (1960). Photo courtesy of David T. Walker

“My first guitar was a loaner,” he says. “I was standing outside of this little church one day, listening to them play some really soulful stuff. Well, the preacher came out, and he ended up loaning me his guitar. I took it home and immediately started teaching myself some of the gospel stuff that they were doing at the church. Then I tried playing what I heard on records and on the radio. Eventually, with the help of my father, I was able to get a guitar of my own. It came from Sears, it was an electric Silvertone. I still have that guitar, but it doesn’t have any strings in it now. I wore it out.”

~ ~ ~

Go ahead, ask David T. Walker about Michael Jackson. He knew Michael before Michael became the King of Pop, before The Gloved One’s seminal, iconic, mind-blowing moonwalk on Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever way back in 1983.

“I remember Michael being a polite young man. When the Jackson Five were in the studio recording, he was always very well-behaved. He would stand or sit quietly until it was time for him to perform. He was shy and a little awkward, but when those lights came on he was completely different. Even back then you could tell that he was going to be a star.” – David T. Walker

Go ahead, ask him about any other major recording artist who was making noise in the ‘60s or ‘70s, and the odds are Walker has a fond memory to share. The Temptations? Etta James? Al Jarreau? Each name brings a smile to his face, and then the stories tumble out with the ease of a David T. Walker guitar riff.

“Al Jarreau is such a beautiful person,” he says quickly. “I was with him several years ago – we did three or four concerts overseas together as part of something called Jazz for Japan. Al Jarreau is a bright light in this world, someone who loves entertaining and who cares deeply about his fans. We had a great time together in Japan.

Walker’s network crosses eras and genres. How about current blues heavyweight Kevin Moore – aka, Keb’ Mo’?

“Funny story,” he replies, not missing a beat. “When I first started performing, I actually played a place called Moore’s Swing Club. I found out only recently, from Keb’ Mo’, that Moore’s Swing Club was actually owned by Keb’s uncle. So I had actually played there many years before Keb’ and I were introduced.

“Keb’ is a dear friend. I recently performed with Keb’ on Conan O’Brien’s show, and we were able to spend some time together catching up. He’s a very talented singer and musician, and he’s been very dedicated to his craft. He’s worked very hard and he’s certainly paid his dues to reach the top.”

So, how exactly does someone get from there to here? How does someone go from playing on a borrowed guitar in poverty-stricken Watts to jamming with some of the biggest names in the business? Think about it: There have been legions of aspiring artists who’ve performed in the shadows their whole careers and have never gotten within a country mile of a Stevie Wonder or a Smokey Robinson. What sets someone like David T. Walker apart from the rest?

“It’s something I’ve always loved doing,” he says. “I was sixteen when I started playing guitar, and very soon after that I got together with some of my friends and formed a band called The Kinfolks. Our first gig was at the Watts Community Center – we were hired to play at a dance other teenagers, and at the time I don’t think we knew more than four or five songs. Still, it was very well-received, which gave us the motivation to continue playing.

“We worked up and down the West Coast during high school, mostly on weekends. We played in a Los Angeles blues club called The Hole in the Wall, and we played in places like The Skylark, which was down by the railroad tracks in the heart of Watts. A couple of times we drove up to San Francisco to play at a hospital. We were young and naïve and didn’t make very much money – sometimes we made zero money [laughs]. But we loved it. Before I finished high school we had started traveling as far away as Seattle and Portland and Las Vegas.”

After high school The Kinfolks stayed together, embarking on a 7-year cross country odyssey that included stops on the Chitlin Circuit and just about any backroad bar you could imagine. Walker’s world was expanding, and perhaps more importantly, so was his network: The group’s road gigs included time with The Olympics, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Etta James, and Little Willie John, with each new relationship bringing him closer to his dream of making it as a musician.

“When I graduated high school I knew that music was a good option for me,” Walker says. “But part of me still didn’t think it would be a wise move – I came from a large family and I was the oldest of eight, and I had a sense of responsibility to help my family economically. I just didn’t think music could do that, because I hadn’t experienced making any money at music to that point. So I was studying to be an accountant. In fact, my first job after graduating from high school was with the City of Los Angeles, working as a clerk at the county courthouse.

“I worked that job for a year and a half, and during the evenings and on the weekends I continued to play with The Kinfolks. And then, all of a sudden, I quit my job cold turkey and found myself in a station wagon headed to Greensboro, North Carolina. We’d landed a job backing up The Olympics, which had produced some hits like Hully Gully and Western Movies, so we decided to take the plunge. They were a big act, and we were lucky to join them as their backup band. I’ll never forget that trip – we drove across the country, three days and four nights, and we got to the club about two hours before we were supposed to begin playing. That was my introduction to being on the road.”

The Kinfolks ultimately landed in New York, which had been a dream and a goal all along.

“We called New York our home base for about five years,” he says, “but we were still working largely in the South. We were a known commodity down there, so that’s where we played.”

Harlem’s Cecil Hotel, already shabby by the time they arrived on the scene, is where the band stayed in those lean scuffling days. The Cecil was a dump with pedigree; bebop was born here, on West 118th Street at St. Nicholas Avenue, where in the early 1940s Minton’s Playhouse hired as house pianist an unknown named Thelonious Monk, who played the instrument as if nobody knew how before. The Kinfolks lived in a one-room apartment at the Cecil. Sometimes they’d eat. Sometimes they couldn’t scrounge up enough money for a loaf of bread.

“The whole band – all six of us – were jammed into one room in the Cecil Hotel,” Walker says. “The room had a face bowl and one bed, and that was it. We had some rough times. We ate out of the sardine can, so to speak, but we leaned on each other for support. We were a close-knit, self-contained group, and we were in it together. If one had food, we all had food. We were friends. I think that if I didn’t know them the way that I did, then it would have been so much harder to survive.”

Walker made the most of his time in New York. He would occasionally venture into the East Village, and he would figure out ways to catch shows at the Apollo Theatre. And just when he’d start to get comfortable with his surroundings, the money would dry up and the band would have to hit the road again.

“That station wagon could get cramped, especially during the summer months in the South,” he says. “Sometimes tempers would flare. We had two brothers in the group, the pianist and the saxophonist, and sometimes we would have to stop the car on the highway and let them fight it out. We would say things to the pianist like, ‘Don’t hit him in the mouth’, because we didn’t want to lose our saxophonist. Other than that, they could go at it. But it never lasted very long, and nobody ever got hit in the mouth, so we were okay.”

Eventually life on the road took its toll and the band split up.

“It could only last for so long,” Walker says. “Still, it was a good run with a lot of great memories. We were together for almost ten years, counting our time together in high school. But we could see the handwriting on the wall. It had to end, because we could never say, ‘This is what we do to buy groceries and provide shelter for ourselves.’ That part of the dream just didn’t happen.”

~ ~ ~

By the mid-sixties, Walker found himself at a crossroads. The Kinfolks were history, he was burnt out from all of the travel, and he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to sustain his fragile career as a musician. There were plenty of stories to tell, but stories don’t buy groceries or sustain a family. Serendipitously, Walker’s career trajectory intersected with that of Gordy’s fledgling empire.

David T. Walker and James Brown – a.k.a., The Godfather of Soul (1987) Photo courtesy of David T. Walker

“I had an epiphany,” Walker explains. “Until then I didn’t realize that musicians worked during the daytime. I hadn’t heard about studio work. I formed a trio after The Kinfolks broke up, and we started backing up acts like Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, the Marvelettes, and a few others. So I was working, just not enough to convince me that I could make a career out of playing the guitar. That’s when Motown just sort of happened for me. It opened up all sorts of doors. Somebody helped me to find a studio in Detroit, and I recorded some tracks to take around to different record companies, to see if I could get a record deal of my own. It worked out better than I could have hoped – when I moved back to Los Angeles in 1967, I had a deal in place. A year later I released my first solo album.”

The Sidewalk was a sparkling solo debut, the first in a 15-album career that spans five decades. It was an inviting blend of studio jazz and soul, recasting the role of the guitarist in the soul instrumental field. Laidback, yet filled with a strong sense of his guitar’s ‘voice’, The Sidewalk brought Walker out of the shadows and introduced him to a whole new audience. It also served as a showcase for his unique playing style, and in many ways triggered the demand for his services; suddenly, everyone from James Brown to Lou Rawls to Barry White was tapping him to perform on their records.

The Sidewalk – Promotional Photo. Photo courtesy of David T. Walker

“Up until that time,” Walker says, “most of the requests came mostly from artists that I’d met along the way. They would call me to play on some of their record projects. That changed with the release of The Sidewalk. Having an album of my own playing on the radio was a tremendous advertisement. From that point on, contractors, producers, and other artists became aware of me, and so I started getting these calls. At the time I didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t know where they were coming from, and I had no idea that they knew my name. I think the fact that I was on the radio was a big part of it – I guess they liked what they heard or something. So I would get calls from all kinds of people. People like Cher, Little Richard, Carole King. So that’s how I started doing studio work on a full-time basis.”

Artists today operate in an ever-morphing digital world, creating music on computers and serving it up in the cloud, their voices manipulated courtesy of software such as Auto-Tune, and with many of their instruments generated on Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) like Ableton Live. None of which existed when Walker was doing his thing in the early ‘70s.

“I didn’t have to think about technology, or the learning curve associated with it,” Walker says. “The artists who were calling me – many of whom I didn’t know at the time – were wanting me to do what I normally do. Fortunately, I understood that. All I had to have with me was my guitar and an amplifier, and I would just come into the studio and sit down and play off the top of my head.

“To this day, no artist I’ve ever worked with has ever written out a part for me to play. I have always been called because of what I do, and because of the sound that I have, and so I’ve always functioned from that standpoint – I’ve always just played whatever comes to my mind, making sure that it goes along with what someone is singing, or whatever they’re playing. When I started working in the studio it wasn’t about the technology. It was about creating great music.”

The Sidewalk remains Walker’s favorite album, but a year later his follow-up effort, Going Up, proved equally important.

“Releasing The Sidewalk was special. The first time I ever heard it on the radio I was driving in my car, and it came on the jazz station here in Los Angeles. Of course I pulled over and took a listen like I’d never heard it before. It was very nice little moment.” – David T. Walker

“By the time I released Going Up, I knew that I was going to be able to provide shelter and buy groceries and whatever. I kept doing the studio work, of course, but I was also able to focus on my solo projects. I was also doing concerts with my trio – I would play at some of those same clubs that I had played in my earlier career. I just kept building my career, brick-by-brick. Eventually I played the Forum here in L.A. as part of a big show – getting equal billing with other major artists. And I would travel a little bit, playing some colleges and universities and that kind of thing, usually on the weekends so that I could be back in town for any session work or record dates through the week. I guess you could say that I had arrived as a professional musician.”

~ ~ ~

The stories keep coming, each a snapshot of popular culture through the lens of someone who was both everywhere and nowhere all at once. When performers like Donny and Marie Osmond were appearing on the cover of Tiger Beat magazine and sending teenaged girls into a frenzy, David T. Walker was content to quietly help shape the hit songs that helped make them world famous. He was never going to be celebrated like the big acts of the day. He was the thought on the tip of the tongue, the obscure answer to a trivia question in a pre-Google world.

David T. Walker – Live Performance (1971) Photo courtesy of David T. Walker

Unless, of course, you were one of the stars who kept his number in their Rolodex.

When Michael Jackson recorded Ben in 1972, Walker was right there in the studio with him. When Barbara Streisand recorded The Way We Were for the 1973 movie of the same name, Walker was one of the first to get a call. When Marvin Gaye recorded the incomparable, sexually overt Let’s Get It On, Walker was at his side, guitar in hand, his fingers bringing the funk. Walker’s respect ran so wide and deep that he counted a young jazz aficionado named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar among his biggest fans. For those living under a rock, Abdul-Jabbar is only a six-time MVP and the all-time leading scorer in the history of the National Basketball Association.

“I respect him greatly, for many reasons,” Walker says. “I’ll tell you a quick story – I performed at a noon concert at UCLA when he was going to school there – he was still known as Lew Alcindor at the time – and he approached me beforehand and let me know that that he was a fan of mine. I knew it was him, of course – there aren’t that many 7’2” people walking around, and I’d already seen him play on television. He told me that he’d ditched his class so that he could come over to hear me play [laughs]. We had a good time, and we kept in touch through the years. We later had dinner together and got to talk music. He was playing for the Lakers then.”

Walker released five albums in a six year span, solo efforts of which he remains immensely proud. Each is like one of his children, unique in temperament.

“It goes without saying, but each album any artist does is going to be a little different,” he says. “The first one I spent more time on than any of the others, because I had to prepare for that one. I had to do some extra work and a lot of rehearsing, because it was done in a way that involved just a trio. And I didn’t know anything about the studio situation when I recorded The Sidewalk. I was still naïve in those days – I thought you had to be ready when you came into the studio. I thought that, the minute they turned that light on, you had to be ready to record and that everything should be ready to go. So I spent a lot of time preparing, and I think that held the project back a bit. It could have been better, I must admit.”

Walker released the critically-acclaimed album On Love in 1976, and then a self-imposed, eleven-year hiatus ensued. It wasn’t until 1987 that he resurfaced with Y-Ence, which brought a darker, moodier vibe.

Carole King Promotional Poster, featuring David T. Walker (1973) Courtesy of David T. Walker

“I sort of took a break,” he says, “because I had become unhappy with the music industry itself and the things that were going on. By this time, I could see that things weren’t what I thought they were when I was in high school. There were people around that really weren’t so nice – of course, there were always very decent people, and I’ve been fortunate to run into them and work with them, but I didn’t like the way the business aspect was being conducted, so I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ll just step away for a minute.’ And I did. But I kept working for other people. And I was doing some concerts – I had recently come off of a Carole King tour, which was 1973, and I kept working. Doing some live stuff. And that was enough for me. But I just didn’t feel like going through the bureaucracies of the companies at the time.”

~ ~ ~

Jimi Hendrix is a member of something called the 27 Club.

Admittance to the club comes with a heavy price: Those who enter the club do so the hard way – famous musicians dying tragically at the age of 27, at the height of their careers, their lives cut short by drugs, alcohol or suicide. Blues great Robert Johnson, who was thought to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for success, is a member. Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Curt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, too, A-List performers erased before their promise could be fully realized.

David T. Walker was born a year ahead of Hendrix, in 1941, so he was well aware of what the world lost when Hendrix aspirated on his own vomit and died of asphyxia while intoxicated with barbiturates.

“Jimi was certainly was a very sensitive person. He was very quiet, and very much an introvert. I got to know him through Little Richard. Unfortunately, Jimi and I never actually worked together, which I would have enjoyed very much – he left this planet way too soon.” – David T. Walker

“The great Billy Preston was another mutual friend – I’d done a lot of album work with Billy – and the two of us just happened to be at the musician’s union on the same day that Jimi was there. This was three or four months before Hendrix passed away in London. Well, Jimi’s limousine pulled up, and Billy and I went over to chat. Jimi said something odd to me at the time – he said that he was going out, but it wasn’t delivered in the usual context. I didn’t think much of it, because, as you know, Jimi Hendrix did get high on occasion [laughs]. So that’s the last time I saw him alive, sitting with him in his limousine. Three or four months later he was found dead at the Samarkand Hotel in London. What a shame.

David T. Walker and Billy Preston (1989) Photo courtesy of David T. Walker

“Jimi Hendrix certainly was, I think, a great blues player. And then when he put on those pedals and all of those little psychedelic hookups, it became a whole different thing with him. He was one of the greatest guitar players of all time, and the divining rod of the turbulent ‘60s – you can hear the riots in the streets and napalm bombs dropping in his version of The Star-Spangled Banner.”

~ ~ ~

The true test of whether an album is a classic has more to do with its lasting appeal than its immediate impact. In 1973, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions hit hard immediately. At 23, Wonder was already a musical wunderkind, and this album stamped him as a fearless innovator unafraid to tackle heady social issues. Songs like Living for the City and Higher Ground remain ripe anthems, both tracks resonating in the post Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman world in which we live. The album peaked at Number 4 on the Billboard 200 chart and spent 89 weeks on the chart overall. It spent two weeks at Number 1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and 51 weeks on the chart overall.

More than forty years later, Innervisions stands as one of the greatest albums of all time. Fans and critics still marvel at the mastery Wonder exhibits throughout; on several cuts, he’s credited for lead and background vocals, keys, synthesizer, harmonica, congas and drums, right on down to handclaps. Most of the album feels as if it was created weeks ago.

While Wonder’s genius is both palpable and readily evident throughout, he still needed help creating his masterpiece. A phone call later, and David T. Walker found himself working on the project of a lifetime.

“I could immediately tell it was going to be great,” he says. “The energy, clarity, sense of vision that he had for this project was different than anything else I’d ever worked on.”

Much has been made of Wonder’s landmark recording, but only a select few had a hand in bringing it to life. Take a listen, and you can clearly pick out David T. Walker’s brilliant guitar work.

“It was a joy, and a lot of fun and laughs,” he says with a laugh. “Sometimes I just think of chicken, because we ate a lot of chicken in the studio during the week that we were working on that album. We certainly didn’t go hungry…

“It was just a delightful experience – it always was when you worked with Stevie because he was so creative. We’ve always been close – in 1968 we did a Motown review together in Japan, and we got a chance to hang out a lot. He would call me every night to have me listen to something he’d laid down on this little reel-to-reel, hand-carried tape recorder. He was all about his music, and he never did anything else when I knew him during that period. But he didn’t take himself too seriously – he had a beautiful sense of humor, and still does.”

For David T. Walker, the process of putting this album together remains vivid.

“I remember we spent a lot of time waiting,” Walker says quickly. “He played the drums on most of those tracks, and he would sometimes put down the drum track first. So all of the rest of the musicians, myself included, would just wait around until he did that, and then we would put down whatever he wanted to do next. So it took a week or more, which I guess is not a long time, but it can be tedious, especially when you’re waiting to lay down your piece of the puzzle and you only need a few takes to get it right. But I didn’t mind one bit. Everyone could tell that Innervisions was going to be special, and I truly enjoyed being involved. There was a cosmic-like feeling to it. Stevie said some nice things about me; on the album’s liner notes, I think he said something like, ‘David is as warm as his birth sign – Cancer’. Stevie has always been a little bit into the stars.”

~ ~ ~

In 1959, Berry Gordy borrowed $800 from his family to start Tamla Records, the precursor to Motown. He was already producing by then, having signed the Miracles and its talented front man, Smokey Robinson to a contract. Over the next decade, he signed such artists as the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Jimmy Ruffin, the Contours, the Four Tops, Gladys Knight & the Pips, the Commodores, the Velvelettes, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder and the Jackson Five.

David T. Walker and Dionne Warwick (1991) Photo courtesy of David T. Walker

In 1972, Gordy relocated Motown from Detroit to Los Angeles. He wasted no time making full use of David T. Walker’s services.

“I did a lot of work for Berry Gordy and Motown when they came out to Los Angeles,” Walker says. “He was always around when we were working. There was this one time, which I won’t forget, when we were recording with Diana Ross and he dropped by the studio to see how things were going. He smiled at me and said, ‘When David T. plays, everybody listens.’ It was in reference to a popular E.F. Hutton commercial that played on the TV back in those days. There was laughter all around the studio, so it was a little embarrassing – I think I dropped my head and closed my eyes [laughs]. But I did appreciate the compliment. It felt good to know that he respected my work.”

~ ~ ~

Living in Los Angeles opened up another creative outlet – and revenue stream – for David T. Walker during the 1970s, as he smartly leveraged his name recognition to make the leap into movies and television, his work appearing in films ranging from cult classics like Blacula to megahits like The Goodbye Girl, and on popular TV series such as Kojak. It even led to a dream come true: Performing live with his childhood idol, Cannonball Adderley, who hosted the self-titled tribute show 90 Minutes With Cannonball Adderley, on which Walker proudly shared the stage as a member of his sextet.

“It was a dream realized and a life highlight, yes,” Walker says. “He was one of my favorite people growing up. As I’ve said, saxophone was going to be my instrument when I began to play – at least that’s what I thought. Cannonball Adderley had a TV show in the early ‘70s, which was a forerunner for Saturday Night Live. It even held the same timeslot. He called me and asked me personally to be a part of his band. We played the themes when the show came on or went to break. The fact that he would call me, that he thought of using me…the fact that he even knew my name was very invigorating, and I shall always remember that.”

The combination of Walker’s talent and easygoing demeanor went a long way in Hollywood, and opened doors to a wide range of motion picture projects, at times with unexpectedly pleasant results.

“It’s funny who you can bump into when working on a film,” he says. “Marvin [Gaye] was one of my closest friends, and when he first moved to the West Coast he signed to do this soundtrack to Trouble Man, a detective movie that had actors like Robert Hooks and Paul Winfield in it. Well, I got an offer to work on a movie – they just gave me the working title, Trouble Man, and the time and place they needed me to show up. They didn’t say that Marvin Gaye was involved. Well, I walked in and saw him across the room on this big soundstage, and we just smiled and hugged and had a good time. He was so happy to see me because he didn’t know anyone there. He had just moved to the West Coast, and I don’t think he had done any movie work. It was a joy working with him on that film.”

~ ~ ~

David T. Walker released nine albums following his prolific run during the’70s, including ‘87s moody Y-Ence, navigating a changing musical landscape and the loss of some of the world’s biggest stars. Gaye’s life ended tragically on April 1, 1984, when Gaye’s father, Marvin Gaye Sr., fatally shot him at their house in the West Adams district of Los Angeles. And we all know what happened to Michael. Losses felt by the world for sure, but especially so for the man who played on some of their biggest hits.

“Big blows,” he says. “There will always be a sadness in my heart. It reminds me of how fast time flies, and of the fragility of life. Losing Marvin was like losing a member of my family. I didn’t know Michael as well, but I do have very fond memories of him. When I first met the Jackson Five, they were all so young and innocent. Michael would just sort of stand over in the corner. He was so quiet, although that changed as time went on – I don’t think Michael was a quiet teenager when they started putting out all of those hit records.

“I liked the Jackson family very much. It was a refreshing change of pace for me, because a lot of the work that I did to that point was with adults. I also played on most of the Osmond’s music, which was another talented group of young people. It seems like yesterday but that was more than forty years ago. Where does the time go?” – David T. Walker

“The one project that got away – and one that I wish I had been involved with – was working with Michael Jackson on Off the Wall. I was originally selected to be involved in that project – Quincy called me and asked for me – but for some reason I didn’t play on that album. By then, Michael had left Motown and was making most of the major decisions, and I think he had his vision of what the album should sound like. I think it turned out well without me [laughs].”

~ ~ ~

Walker’s passion for music hasn’t waned.

During the ‘80s he worked with such acts as The Brothers Johnson, the Crusaders, Jeffrey Osborne, Patti LaBelle, Lou Rawls, and the Godfather of Soul himself – James Brown.

“I’ve never had a problem in fitting in, certainly not musically,” he says matter-of-factly. “I’ve always appreciated people like that, people who were dedicated to their craft. I certainly think of myself as a dedicated person. I can also sense their nobility, and that has always made it easy to develop relationships with them. I pay attention to whatever they’re doing, or what they’re talking about, and certainly whatever they’re playing musically at the time. And when you get to perform with someone like a James Brown, or a Marvin Gaye, or a Smokey Robinson – or any of the amazing people I’ve collaborated with through the years – how can you not be excited to get up in the morning and go to work? And working with these people has not been a J.O.B. It’s been easy to do.”

~ ~ ~

“I never worked on my sound,” he says, when asked about his collaboration with other artists. “I just try to conjure up a sound. It has worked for me over the years, so I’ve learned to trust it. It’s also taken me from low-paying gigs on the Chitlin Circuit to studio work where I could provide for my family.”

It’s also allowed him to continue his solo projects into the New Millennium, work that continues to turn the heads of critics and contemporaries alike. It has been a fulfilling career for sure, and it begs the question: Have there been any surprises along the way?

“I never thought my music would be used as much as it has been,” he says quickly. “There are these terms that the musician’s union calls ‘new use’ and ‘re-use’ which addresses the use of an existing artist’s work in new projects such as films, commercials, and the like. I’ve especially seen this in things that I worked on with the Jackson Five – I Want You Back, or ABC, for example. Those songs have been given new lives over and over again.”

And how does he feel when he hears his guitar sampled in other artist’s music?

David T. Walker and Joe Sample (1989) Photo courtesy of David T. Walker

“I’m fine with it,” he says. “Tupac was one of the first. He sampled my guitar, but not the song as a whole, which is a song by Joe Sample titled In All My Wildest Dreams. For some reason Tupac only used my guitar, and with technology today they can take songs apart and only use what they want – the drum sound, the base, whatever the case might be. So in this case, Tupac decided to only use my guitar. I didn’t recognize it at first, because it was squeezed and manipulated in various ways, but then I could hear it.

“I’ve been sampled by Tupac, Busta Ryhmes, and quite a few people, I suppose. A Tribe Called Quest was a hip hop group that sampled On Love, and they gave me credit for that, which I appreciated. I get a list from the musician’s union of who sampled what, which helps, because these artists today don’t always send out a request and ask, ‘Can we use your song?’ It does happen on occasion, but it’s a rarity when they reach out to ask for permission.”

~ ~ ~

David T. Walker is international.

These days he spends a lot of time performing in Japan, where he has developed a rabid fan base who love him like one of their own. It goes all the way back to those Motown tours with Stevie Wonder, and Walker has cultivated many friendships over there, too.

“Japan is one of my favorite places to go on this planet,” he says with a smile. “I laughingly refer to it as the homeland. It’s a place where I’ve been accepted way back when, and even in the ‘80s when I didn’t have a lot out on the airwaves, people there enjoyed my work and what I did, and they gave me all of the respect – and more – that I can use. Still do. So it’s a place that I go two or three times a year now. I perform with my quartet, as well as some of the other people that I’ve worked with through the years, including many Japanese artists. It’s also one of the few places where I perform live these days. They accept me for who I am, and I’m grateful for that. The Japanese are a beautiful people. A lot of jazz artists like Al Jarreau feel the same way, too.”

~ ~ ~

Every day seems to bring a new surprise, a reminder of a life well-lived, of opportunities seized, and of a reputation that extends well beyond the Motown universe. Walker explains that his friend recently found the Frank Sinatra track that he’d played on all those years ago, back when Ol’ Blue Eyes was the biggest name in the business. He talks about the joy that comes with being a part, no matter how small, of some of the most important recordings ever made. And above all else, he treasures the friendships that he’s cultivated along the way.

David T Walker – Promotional Photo

“Playing in the studio has opened a lot of doors and allowed me to develop friendships with these people,” Walker says. “Everything is connected – without one link, there wouldn’t be a way to reach the other. That’s how I met Quincy Jones, actually. I was doing a date for Ray Charles, and Quincy was supposed to be doing the arrangements – I say ‘supposed’ to be doing the arrangements, because, well, let’s just say that he was a little late [laughs]. But when he got there, it not only led to some great music, but also to a lot of laughter and good times, and a friendship that’s lasted a lifetime.”

~ ~ ~

Overstanding.

It’s a word David T. Walker coined a long time ago, and one of the mantras by which he’s led his life.

“Overstanding means to be on top of understanding,” he says. “And when you’re on top of understanding, you can sort of step back and have a whole different perspective. It has helped me see clearly what my talents were as an artist, and how best to use those talents to achieve my goal of making music my career. Some people don’t fully grasp where they fit in the big scheme of things – they try to be something they’re not, and try to put the square peg in the round hole. But if you’ve reached the point of overstanding, you can better align your talents to your goals.

“For me, I knew early on that there were geniuses in this world like Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye who were destined for greatness. They were blessed with certain gifts, and they had the drive and dedication to realize their dreams. They became megastars. I knew that my gifts were different, but no less valuable in the big scheme of things. It’s the same thing in the movie business. Everyone can’t be Tom Cruise or Denzel Washington, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for other actors to shine in different ways. Every movie needs supporting actors. The same is true in music. I’ve been blessed to play alongside some of the most talented people in the music business. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”

Film & TV, Music

Al Jarreau – The Gift

By: Michael D. McClellan | Once upon a time, when Los Angeles lived and breathed, there was a man marked for greatness, despite the placid Midwestern upbringing that provided little hint that he was more than us after all. His backstory didn’t contain the baroque detail or the meteoric rise of a certain working class family from neighboring Gary, Indiana, whose irascible patriarch built a musical Byzantine Empire that has sold more than 200 million records and continues to print money, thanks to the late King of Pop. Nor did his backstory have the preordained inevitability associated with other acts like, say, Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber, who were blessed with gifts and connections, and who had a social media infrastructure on which to trampoline into another pop culture stratosphere. Where today’s entertainment icons seem to come from nowhere, flashing white hot in 140 characters or less, this man built his remarkable career methodically, brick-by-brick, in a world void of social media, and only after ditching the ordinary space in which the rest of us live – participating in high school athletics, playing college basketball, and earning a Master’s Degree in Vocational Rehabilitation.

His celebrity sneaked up on us, building gradually like an Oklahoma thunderstorm on an unseasonably warm April afternoon, the skies roiling, flags snapping angrily in the sudden chill wind, and with it the rain and hail and acclaim that comes with being recognized as one of the great jazz artists of our time. By then he was a Grammy-winning vocalist, the first to snare Grammys in three separate categories – jazz, pop and R&B – and a master showman, filling seats in the stadia of the world’s capitals, selling out everything from London’s Wembley Arena to Washington’s Constitution Hall. We couldn’t help but love him – the infectious smile, the unnerving vitality, the way the words tumbled from his mouth at such a rapid clip. And when he opened his mouth to sing, Lord, we knew right then that he was not only different than the rest of us after all, he was also different than any other performer before or since.

A younger generation might simply dismiss Al Jarreau as just another old singer that their parents listened to back in the day, or they might consider him with a fleeting hint of nostalgia, if his name even registers with them at all. Those of us who grew up listening to his music might instead see a lion in winter, a distinguished artist in the final act of an amazing career, while the misinformed cynics among us might see a has-been singer schlepping name recognition in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Whatever image his name conjures, to cast him as either irrelevant or diminished is to miss the boat entirely, because Jarreau is neither. The Al Jarreau sitting in front of me today exudes the same vibrancy that landed him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He possesses the same disarming charisma that has intoxicated audiences for more than five decades. Washed up? Phoning it in? Go find another celebrity to diss. Al Jarreau, national treasure, is on top of his game.

LOS ANGELES, CA – FEBRUARY 11: Singer Al Jarreau poses in the press room with his Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance at the 49th Annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center on February 11, 2007 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Vince Bucci/Getty Images)

“I’ve been very blessed. I’ve had a long and successful career, and I’ve been able to reinvent myself along the way,” Jarreau says. “I’ve made various forays as an R&B pop singer, and jazz remains my home base, so to speak. Obviously health plays a major part in what I’m able to do, and I’ve been blessed to be able to continue recording and performing, and to continue pushing myself as an artist. The key to longevity, I think, is loving what you do and then being able to explore the boundaries and then be willing to try something different. Ruts are bad. You need to stay out of the ruts and find those roads that haven’t been traveled.”

Jarreau’s road to stardom originated in Milwaukee, on March 12, 1940, and it would surprise no one if he entered this world all smiles and laughter, or if his first cries weren’t cries at all, but rather an infant form of the trademark scat singing that would later come to define him. Today, Jarreau is as optimistic as ever, and positivity, like a fear of failure, is a powerful tool that can carry far those that wield it well. Jarreau didn’t have to survive the streets or climb out of the ghetto like Dr. Dre. He didn’t have to dodge bullets on Reservoir Avenue in his middle class Milwaukee. But to lift himself from obscurity to icon he had to have something – all of the great ones do. For Al Jarreau, attitude was the Great Differentiator, the gift that would eventually help make him a household name.

Jarreau: “That’s who I am. It’s part of my DNA, I guess you could say, and that’s the way I try to live. I think it’s the way we as human beings have been created. Life can be so painful – anyone who’s around long enough will find that out firsthand – and there are going to be times when things are so depressing it’s hard to wake up in the morning. It’s easy to get sucked into a vicious cycle of negativity – just turn on the TV and watch the news; if that’s all you saw or cared to believe, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that we’re going to hell in a handbasket.

“It takes resilience, fortitude, and consistency to stay above the noise. Once you discover that you can, then you must. It’s not easy – you have to take very direct steps to condition yourself to see things differently. You really have to count your blessings and you have to make a decided effort to not get drawn in. We have to celebrate the successes in our lives, big and small, because that plays a big part in fueling our internal happiness. We have to say ‘You know what, I’m gonna make a list of what’s going on good in my life, and I’m going to celebrate that stuff instead of having a parade for what’s going wrong.’ It’s a process that takes time and commitment, but if we stick to it long enough, somewhere along the way we learn that God wants us to be happy. I don’t know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago. So it’s all about finding joy in our lives.”

God and music played a big part in the young Jarreau’s formative years. His father was a minister and singer, and his mother was the church pianist. He began singing in the church choir at age four, joining a musical family affair that also included his five brothers, and before long he found himself performing in fundraising musicals and harmonizing on street corners, sometimes alone, sometimes with his neighborhood friends.

“Singing was autonomic for me. It was just something that came naturally – I think I came out of the chute singing! I’d sing on the way to school, either alone or with some of my classmates, and what came out of those little sessions was pure doo-wop, although we didn’t call it doo-wop at the time. That was before anyone had coined the term.” – Al Jarreau

Music was big, but sports also influenced Jarreau. The Milwaukee Braves relocated from Boston in ’53, and a year later Hank Aaron made his rookie debut, embarking on an iconic career of his own. Jarreau was still a teenager when Aaron led Milwaukee to its first and only World Series championship, in 1957, defeating the mighty New York Yankees and touching off a wild celebration in the city.

“By the time I was 15 or 16, I had fairy-tale dreams of playing professional baseball,” Jarreau says. “I couldn’t help it, I enjoyed baseball tremendously, and Hank Aaron had a lot to do with that. He was the player we all wanted to be like, you dig? I was too young at the time to have any sort of friendship with him, so I watched him and cheered for him just like everybody else. Boy, he was something special. That ’57 championship team was something special. The Braves at that time also had Eddie Mathews, who was one of the biggest names in baseball. He’d won a home run title by ’57 and was on the first cover of Sports Illustrated. Casey Stengel was the New York manager at the time, and I remember when he called us bush league. So, it was special for us Milwaukeeans to beat the Yankees’ asses in the World Series [laughs].

Jammin' - Jarreau and the great George Benson share the stage

Jammin’ – Jarreau and his good friend, the great George Benson, share the stage

“It’s safe to say that I was preoccupied with baseball – but do you want to know something? I should have learned how to play piano instead, because my mother was a piano teacher and that would have been the greatest help in my life as a singer. I just couldn’t get that baseball glove off my hand long enough to sit down and play. But I have no regrets; some of the most important times of my life were with a baseball glove on my hand, at the side of my house, with me and my younger brother throwing the ball on the ground, like infield practice, then picking it up and making the turn to second base.”

There was no inkling of what was to come as Jarreau made his way through Lincoln High School. He was a decent student, outgoing, well-liked…practically indistinguishable from most students across the land. Popular, he was the student council president and Lincoln’s delegate at something called Badger Boys State. He played high school basketball. Baseball. He ran cross country, too. And he sang; his voice, unique in every sense of the word, got him gigs with performers a decade older. Still, nothing about him suggested that he might one day blow up, that he would write and sing the Grammy-nominated theme song for the hit TV series Moonlighting. Instead, Jarreau simply graduated and headed off to Wisconsin’s highly-respected Ripon College.

At Ripon, Jarreau majored in psychology and played on the men’s basketball team. It was a crossroads period on the nation’s history; the 1950s economy boomed, the Cold War boiled, and the 1960s emerged filled with omens, signals clear and murky of a changing civil rights landscape, of what rock and roll was about to become, and of where the Vietnam War was about to take us. Jarreau’s college experience was equally choppy, especially in the early going; where basketball felt like a jam session, the classroom felt more like a Vietcong ambush.

“I was a bad student. I almost quit, but my coaches reached out and dragged me along. I had to let go of two sports that I loved – baseball and cross country – and focus on basketball. I picked up a basketball scholarship in the second semester of my freshman year, which was very timely, because I lost my academic scholarship the first semester. I didn’t make my grades – I didn’t make my grades my whole first year, in fact. I was borderline flunking stuff. I think they passed me because I had a nice smile [laughs].” – Al Jarreau

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and looking back I just wasn’t ready for the university. I was a high school star in my little community in Milwaukee – I was knocking the top off of the grading curve and doing extremely well academically – but when I went off to college I was suddenly mixed in with students who were way beyond trigonometry. These were students who had four years of language by the time they got to college. That wasn’t me. I suddenly found myself in a setting with high-powered young people – Harrison Ford went to Ripon during the same time period – and it didn’t take me long to realize that the vast majority of these kids were way more prepared for college than me. These students had parents who’d committed the resources to make sure of that. My mom and dad were committed to my education, too, but their financial situation was much different. They were laborers. My dad was a minister, but, after separating from the church, which broke his heart, he went to night school to become a welder. That’s the only work that I saw my daddy do. He’d come home with burns and cuts and bruises from working on the assembly line. My dad was insistent that I go to college, but he wasn’t coming home and talking to me about the importance of four years of advanced math, four years of language, and so forth.

Singer Al Jarreau, center, poses with Johnny Grant, left, and Leron Gubler at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame March 6, 2001 in Hollywood, CA. (Photo by Jason Kirk/Newsmakers)

“I eventually learned what I needed to do to succeed academically. I never became a star student in college, but I got through. I got Cs and the occasional B when I really needed it [laughs]. I remember flunking French, and then realizing that I needed flash cards and repetition. Well, I took the class again and knocked the top off the curve. And that’s part of figuring out what you need as a student to succeed. My wife sees something once and she’s got it. She’s so intelligent – you say something to her once and that’s it. That’s not me.”

Jarreau buckled down in school but continued to feel the tug of singing’s gravitational pull. He used his free time to perform locally with a group called The Indigos, filling his weekends and holidays by generating buzz at the local clubs.

“Singing was still very much a fun endeavor. I felt at home on the stage, and I enjoyed entertaining people, but, at that point in my life, school was still my main gig.” – Al Jarreau

Tamping down the urge to sing professionally, Jarreau headed off to the University of Iowa. It was there that he earned his Master’s Degree in Vocational Rehabilitation. He took his first job soon after, working as a counselor in San Francisco. It was a job he held for four years, from 1964-68, working with war veterans and others who needed help. He made a good salary, better than most young professionals at the time, but he eventually became disillusioned.

“I was feeling bad about my performance as a counselor,” he says. “I had a huge caseload, and it was overwhelming. It really made me pause and think about what my real career should be, and whether I was really cut out for the traditional 9-to-5 job and all of the paperwork that goes along with it. I also knew I wanted to be happy in my professional life, and I was happiest when I was performing, so that really helped guide my decisions and shape my future.”

In a serendipitous twist, Jarreau moonlighted in a jazz trio headlined by a young George Duke, who would later go on to play with everyone from Frank Zappa to Miles Davis to Michael Jackson. It was a turning point from which Jarreau knew there was no return, almost as if he were standing at the edge of a pool, toes curling the concrete, torso leaning forward ever so slightly, his body weight slowly giving way to gravity.

Ready or not, a restless Al Jarreau was about to take the plunge.

~ ~ ~

Barbra Streisand knows a thing or two about originality, and about taking chances and trusting your intuition. Streisand burst onto the scene by staying true to herself and by navigating show business largely on intuition.

“I guess if you have an original take on life, or something about you is original, you don’t have to study people who came before you,” she once said, when asked about the subject. “You don’t have to mimic anybody. You just have a gut feeling inside, an instinct that tells you what’s right for you, and you can’t do it in any other way.”

A young Al Jarreau, circa late-1960s San Francisco, already knew he had a unique voice. He just needed the right platform to showcase it.

Enter George Duke at the Half Note.

“Musically, San Francisco was a happening place during that era. There was this huge group of singers and performers coming out of the Bay area – you had Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead. Of course, the Haight-Ashbury district, along with Berkeley, were the impetus for this new revolution in thinking and music. And boy, I was right there in the middle of it. I walked to work in the morning right past Haight-Ashbury.” – Al Jarreau

“I met George Duke at the Half Note, a popular nightclub at the time. He was doing matinees on Sundays, and all the local musicians were coming in to play with this brilliant young jazz piano player. Well, I dropped in one Sunday to see what he was all about, and I got to sing with him. We clicked, man. We were so in synch that the club owner asked me if I’d like to sing with him regularly. He didn’t have to ask me twice. George and I held fort a couple nights a week at the Half Note.

“George and I also developed a friendship that would last a lifetime. We met when we were both puppies in San Francisco – the only person who knew George longer than I knew George is the preacher who baptized him and his mama [laughs]. George was one of the swingingest keyboard players that has ever touched the keyboard. I tell people all the time that I went to ‘Duke’ University to study swing!”

Those initial jam sessions turned into a three-year stint with the George Duke Trio, raising Jarreau’s profile and leading him to acoustic guitarist Julio Martinez and a regular gig playing at a hot Sausalito nightclub called Gatsby’s. The duo gained a healthy dose of street cred in jazz circles, from fans and critics alike – none of which would have been possible without his time with Duke.

Friends for life: Al Jarreau and George Duke share the stage years after both hit it big.

Friends, brothers: Al Jarreau and the late George Duke share the stage years after both hit it big.

“You could say that George and I were kicked out of the nest…we had performed together for three years at the Half Note, and I was still working my job as a rehabilitation counselor. I sang at night for pennies, and on good nights for ten or fifteen dollars…and a lot of nights for nothing, except for the experience of sharing the joy of music. When Half Note closed, that’s when we got kicked out of the nest. That was 1968, and we were forced to fly, and that’s when we decided to do music full-time. “George took a different route and finished his degree in music, which was part of his greater plan because, as it turned out, it allowed him to be ready for his opportunity. So when Frank Zappa called, off George went. It was the beginning of an enormous career for George. For me, those days were the just the beginnings of an uncelebrated and an uncertain career. I wasn’t joining an established musician as the star piano player with a great like Frank Zappa. George got exposure during those times that ensured that he, at some point, would have a career of his own. I made the decision that I was going to take my chances and be a musician full-time. It wasn’t an untutored decision. And it turned out to be a smart decision.”

History teaches us that the ancient Vikings, upon reaching uncharted land, would burn their ships as a show of their commitment. Does Jarreau see a little Nordic spirit in his own decision to quit his day job?

“Oh man, I like that analogy!” he says, laughing heartily. “It was just like that in so many ways. I knew there would be no turning back…the time had come for me to burn that 9-to-5 ship and move on! And for the record, I’m a Packers fan. I have to get that out there before the people back home burn my ship [laughs]. Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr. Brett Favre. The Vikings are a fine football team, but I’m a lifelong Cheesehead, man.”

~ ~ ~

Jarreau burned his ship in Los Angeles, in 1969, in the same spring Bill Russell capped a brilliant career with the Boston Celtics by defeating the heavily favored Lakers in seven games to win the NBA Championship. The Lakers would eventually retool by trading for Milwaukee Bucks All-Star center Lew Alcindor, who by that time was better known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The trade would decimate Jarreau’s beloved Bucks and touch off the glitzy, Showtime era in LA, with stars like Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton sitting courtside and the Laker Girls taking cheerleading to a whole new level. Abdul-Jabber, a huge jazz enthusiast, would later meet Jarreau at the Los Angeles Forum, where Jarreau would sing the national anthem. Convergent paths, ironic twists, the stuff of Hollywood scripts…and yet the world knew neither Jarreau nor Abdul-Jabbar in the spring on ’69, because neither of them existed, at least not in the context that we know them today. Sure, Jarreau had carved out a name for himself among the Bay Area jazz aficionados, and Alcindor was a practicing Muslim and a burgeoning basketball star, but neither man had taken the leaps that would make them the household names they are today.

“That was an amazing period in my life. All of the things that I’d dreamed about were beginning to manifest, including making music my only true profession. That’s when I really began chasing the brass ring in earnest. I wanted to record. I didn’t care what category they put me in, I was going to write my own music. That was the We Got By era.” – Al Jarreau

We Got By was Jarreau’s critically-acclaimed debut album, released in 1975. He was 35 years old, ancient by pop standards, and proof positive that a willingness to grind and take chances can pay off, as long as a healthy dose of talent is injected into the formula. To get there, Jarreau headlined in such L.A. hot spots as Dino’s, The Troubadour, and Bitter End West. He continued perfecting his unique vocals and engaging stage presence, and he jumped at every opportunity to perform on TV – appearing on shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore, and David Frost. Unknown when he arrived in Los Angeles, Jarreau was suddenly ubiquitous.

“My swimming upstream began in San Francisco and continued when I arrived in Los Angeles,” he says quickly. “That was very important. I developed some important muscles for swimming against the tide, which has served me well in my career. By that I mean working hard in all facets of my profession, taking nothing for granted, and knowing I didn’t have anything handed to me. I knew I wasn’t the king or queen bee in this profession. I was a worker bee. I had to get out there in front of whoever would listen to me, and being in L.A. helped greatly. Bigger clubs, television exposure; I took full advantage of the platforms available to me at the time.”

Those platforms included the famed Improv, where Jarreau would sing between the acts of such rising-star comics as Bette Midler, Jimmie Walker, and a young John Belushi. Jarreau also landed a singing spot on a new late-night sketch comedy and variety show, of which Belushi would ride to stardom.

“As if I didn’t have enough to keep me smiling, I got to be around some of the funniest comedians in the business. Performing at the Improv, and during the first season of Saturday Night Live, those things were all part of my journey – part of paying my dues.” – Al Jarreau

“Somewhere along the line a certain equilibrium develops. As an artist you figure out what your status is, how the industry perceives you, and where you’re going to fit in the big scheme of things. For me it meant being that worker bee. That’s not a knock on me – I’ve had a great career. It’s a tough business. You’ve got your first-tier people like Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus, who can sell 20,000 seats, but you can’t hear anything other than screaming 12-year-olds and their mothers. The industry goes after that tier, and if you can’t do that, they tend to forget about you. But there are three or four other tiers of great musicians. They’re not teeny boppers. It’s adult music, and a bunch of people still do get it.”

Part of the problem, at least early on, was trying to figure out where to slot Jarreau’s music. While the critics loved We Got By, a bit of an identity crisis dogged both the album and the artist, at least in minds of the deejays controlling the airwaves.

“I was this this strange kind of fusion of jazz, pop and R&B,” Jarreau recalls. “At the beginning of my recording career in 1975, I think people had a hard time figuring me out, because back then artists were either country or pop or rock or whatever. You didn’t have crossover artists like you do today – the Darius Ruckers, the Taylor Swifts and the like. People couldn’t figure me out. The pop stations thought I was a jazzer who didn’t have a feel for pop, so it was hard to get my records played on pop stations. Similarly, black urban radio didn’t understand my R&B roots. They thought I was strictly a jazz singer. I felt pigeonholed.”

Glow was released the following year, in 1976, and climbed as high as #9 on the Billboard Jazz 100. The album was also #32 on the R&B charts, underscoring Jarreau’s versatility. It also helped land him multi-album deal with Warner Brothers, one of the biggest labels going.

“There was some financial security that came along with that,” he says, “but I never went into the music business focused on the money. It’s the intrinsic part of the work that is thrilling for me. You can’t pay me for that. If you happen to give me some money, fine, but your money does not inspire the initial creative thrust. The joy is in making something when there was nothing five minutes before, when the air was empty until I started singing. To go from that empty space to then having created something, that’s what it’s all about, you dig?”

The deal with Warner coincided, coincidentally, with Warner signing another Midwest artist to a major deal.

From student-athlete to Grammy winner: Al Jarreau has gone from starter on the Ripon College basketball team to a 7-time Grammy Award-winning singer.

“I did a date at Northrop (University of Minnesota) many, many years ago, when Prince first came on the scene,” Jarreau says with a smile. “Prince walked over, and we looked at each other, and then shook hands and hugged. There was this little smile between us, because we were both on the Warner label, and Prince was just coming onto the scene. He wasn’t a household name yet, and hadn’t become one of the greatest artists in history. He came over to me and said hello, and then he just stood there for a long second without saying another word. And then he finally said, ‘My name is Prince, and I’m comin’ to, Al!’ I could tell he was going to be great. Well, he passed me going fast!”

Critical success arrived in consecutive years, in 1977 and 1978, as Jarreau was recognized with Grammy Awards in the Best Jazz Vocal Performance category for Look to the Rainbow, a live album that stamped him as jazz’s preeminent scat singer and brought him international attention in Europe, and All Fly Home, which reached #5 on Billboard’s Jazz 100.

“Humbling, gratifying, exhilarating,” he says. “I didn’t set out to win awards, I wanted to make music and make my audiences happy. To win a Grammy that late into the game, boy, I think I appreciated it more than if I’d won it in my twenties. I’d come a long way from singing polkas in my bedroom as a youngster back in Milwaukee.”

By 1981 Jarreau had landed his first #1 jazz album, This Time (1980), and had followed that up with his most commercially successful album to date, Breakin’ Away, which reached #1 on both the Billboard Jazz and R&B 100 lists. It also topped out at #9 on the Pop charts, thanks in large part to the monster hit We’re In This Love Together.

“The success of Breakin’ Away meant a lot, you dig? That was really an important explosion for me. I started working with [producer] Jay Gradon, and I quickly realized that, if you get out of the way and you allow the right people to remind you of who you are, then good things can happen. It’s all about perspective. Jay would say viagra belgique to me, ‘Hey Al, man, you’re a great R&B singer. You gotta let the people hear you singing R&B. You’re a great pop singer, man. You don’t have to turn everything into a platform for a jazz song. You can do the jazz thing, but, man, just sing the R&B song like a good R&B singer and let people hear your R&B voice.’ And that’s what happened.” – Al Jarreau

It seems that all hit songs have a backstory. Is there a We’re In This Love Together backstory?

“Well, I didn’t write it, although I easily could have, that’s probably the main thing. I was in the studio with Jay, when someone from my management office called me in the studio and said, ‘Stop the presses, you need to hear this! I got a song here that came to the office and I think you ought to hear it!’ So I listened to that song that night, and we stopped what we were doing. We both knew a great piece of music, and that’s exactly what it was – a great piece of music. Professionally, it was the song that crushed the jazzer pigeonhole and helped me to find an R&B and pop audience. That song is pure ditty; there is nothing significant being said in that song, it’s just a nice, cute little love song with a back-beat. But, boy, did it put me on the map.

Jarreau becomes a household name after his breakthrough album brings him commercial and critical success.

On the map indeed. By ’81 Jarreau was an international icon and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was equally well-known across the globe, both with jazz running through their veins, both leaving an imprint on pop culture as we know it. Today, Abdul-Jabbar points to Jarreau’s rendition of the national anthem as his favorite. Coming from a man who played in a record 1,560 NBA games, that’s quite a compliment.

“I knew Kareem was a jazz enthusiast,” Jarreau says. But to hear that his favorite jazz anthem was performed by Al Jarreau, and to think that maybe, just maybe, it made him play better…wow! During the Lakers’ Showtime days, there must have been four or five occasions when they asked me to come and sing the national anthem at the Forum. I love hearing that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says his favorite was my version. I’m speechless.

“I will tell you – my version is straight ahead. There’s a time for your voice to express itself in whatever qualities that it has, but that’s not the time to get cute. Sing the song. That high note at the end, during the line ‘the land of the free’, that’s my note. People may not realize it, but that note is all mine [laughs]. I’ve been listening to national anthems since I was four years old, and nobody sang a high note on ‘free’ like I did. But now everybody does it, or looks to do it, in a similar kind of fashion. So he’s right – I had a pretty cool version. But it was simple, man, and sung with a big, baritone voice.

“Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – what a great figure he cut through the history of sports.”

~ ~ ~

There were plenty of other highlights during the eighties, including two chart-topping jazz albums and three more Grammys. He was part of the historic, quadruple platinum We Are The World, co-written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie. He sang a duet with Natalie Cole as part of HBO’s Comic Relief. And he sung and wrote the lyrics for the Grammy-nominated theme to the 1980s American television show Moonlighting.

Jarreau backed away from studio work during the nineties, but he certainly wasn’t slowing down.

History made: Al Jarreau takes part in the recording of ‘We Are The World’, written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, and produced by Quincy Jones and Michael Omartian for the album ‘We Are the World’. With sales in excess of 20 million copies, it is one of the fewer than 30 all-time singles to have sold at least 10 million copies worldwide.

“I was still touring,” he says. “In fact, I toured more than I ever had, so I kept in touch with my audience. I focused on my symphony program, which included my music and that of other people too. I performed on the Broadway production of Grease. Oh man, I was busier than ever! It took me back to my roots, which is what I’ve always done – perform live. That’s where my bread has always been buttered. I’d wrapped up my contract with Warner Brothers, and I was shopping for a record deal, so I was very comfortable touring more than ever.”

Jarreau picked up a couple more Grammys along the way, bringing his current haul to seven. One of those was for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance, which he won in 2006 with his good friend, the legendary George Benson.

“We did that record in five weeks, working around our touring schedules,” he says. “George Benson, what a wonderful human being. We should have done that album ten years earlier, but we were both so busy with our own projects. I’m just happy we were able to make it happen, dig?”

~ ~ ~

Time marches on.

One minute you’re a boy signing on a street corner, dreaming, the next you’re at the end of a magnificent career. One minute nobody knows who you are, the next you’ve got your very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 2010, Jarreau suffered a sudden attack of shortness of breath backstage at a venue in the French Alps, a health scare that later required hospitalization, as well as a routine medical procedure to correct a heart arrhythmia at a cardiac center in Marseille, France. Erroneous reports of how the singer had collapsed and fallen off stage during a performance went viral on the Internet and ran rampant in the international media.

Jarreau bounced back, addressing the scare – and the false rumors – with his trademark humor.

“Well, my hundred meter times aren’t the same now, but I think I can still go to deep short and throw runners out at first base.” He laughs, and then adds: “When you’re in your seventies, parts wear out, you know. So I had this situation going on in my heart, called atrial fibrillation, and I had a procedure in the South of France to address it. The procedure takes less than 20 minutes. They go in and zap cells with an electric current to settle things down. I went under the anesthetic and I came back, my heart was normal, my blood pressure was normal, and my heart rate was very normal.

“You know, I’ve been saying that what I need is an Internet scandal to generate some publicity. Fake my death, and then come back and sell more records than ever. That’s got to be better than getting caught with five hookers in your hotel room and throwing furniture out the window [laughs].”

~ ~ ~

Time marches on.

Sadly, Duke passed away in 2013, but Jarreau quickly decided that the best way to honor his friend was with a tribute album. My Old Friend – Celebrating George Duke was released on the first anniversary of the Grammy-winning keyboardist’s death, and brings together a collection of talented musicians and singers, some who are among the most recognizable names in the business.

“This tribute record about George, I’m just tickled about it, and I’m just thrilled that so many people together on this record – Kenny G, Jeffrey Osborne, the incomparable Lalah Hathaway to name a few,” Jarreau says. “Boney James, man – we got Boney James to come and lay hands on this record. Boney was terrific. I’ve known Boney a long time, but I’d never spent any time in the studio with him. We’ve played some dates onstage together, and I’ve always remarked at his reach. What a talent!

“There’s something special about connecting with an audience, and Boney is something to see. Kenny G is the same way. The late Hiram Bullock was masterful at it. The reach that those guys make – they leave the stage, man. They go out into the audience and spend time playing for them. They touch the fans with their hands. Boney is one of those guys. It’s a marvelous thing to see.” – Al Jarreau

“I used to do the same thing – when I could [laughs]. I have trouble getting up and down stairs these days. But to be able to go out into the audience, spot the nap on their blue suede shoes and smell their perfume, that’s how close I want to be to the audience. I want to see the color of their eyes. That’s the intimacy that I shoot for in this music, whether it’s recorded or not. And likewise, if I’m doing my job, the audience should be able to see the color of my eyes, and see the nap on the blue suede shoes that I’m wearing onstage. It doesn’t mean that you have to be right in the first row, it just means that the situation in which we do the music allows for that kind of intimacy, and the artist onstage opens up his shirt and shows you his heart. That’s the deal.”

Were there any pleasant surprises?

Al Jarreau with Jeffrey Osborne, who appeared on ‘My Old Friend – Celebrating George Duke’

“It was joyous occasion working on this project with the people who came forward,” Jarreau says. “Jeffrey Osborne was a part of that experience. He is someone who just makes you laugh and makes you happy. What a beautiful heart; he hasn’t changed one bit from who he was when he was just starting out. And what a brilliant singer. Oh my! We don’t hear from Jeffrey Osborne from one moment to the next on the radio, and that’s a shame. He’s a brilliant singer. He’s still healthy and strong – Jeffrey can run full court anytime you want to run, and he’s in his sixties. He has that kind of vigor and health and vitality, and it shines through when he sings.”

~ ~ ~

Time marches on.

Jarreau may move a little slower these days, but his mind is as sharp as ever. One of his favorite sensations, he says, is going to bed with a fresh melody in his mind and waking up the next day ready to see where it goes.

“Visualization is such an important part of the creative process,” he says. “It’s called creative visualization. Old folks call it prayer. You’ve got to visualize it in the morning, and in the afternoon, no matter who you are or what your dreams might be. You’ve got to see that red leather chair in your law office – you’ve got to know what it smells like as you head off to pre-law school. You’ve got to see that stuff. You’ve got to see it in your future, and yeah, I did see it. It was part of my dream. Behind the dream is some high-tech stuff, and it’s called creative visualization. You need to teach that to your kids, they need to see where they want to be. Some of the people who make that work the best are athletes. The basketball player who stands at the foul line, talking to himself or herself, and looking at that basket, watching the ball go through. You dig it? The high jumper standing at the edge of the runway, imagining himself jumping over the bar, he’s in another creative space. The sprinter who settles into the block, he’s talking to himself – he looks like a crazy person. He’s staring down the track, seeing himself and where he needs to be at ten meters, at fifteen meters, at the finish. For singers, we visualize in order to create. It’s a beautiful process, man. Where there was nothing, now there’s a song.”

~ ~ ~

Time marches on.

How many performers in their seventies still bring it, still have the same passion, still crave the same connection when they’ve been singing for audiences their entire lives? One would think that the spontaneous fan requests would eventually grow tiresome, but Jarreau feeds off the energy, whether he’s performing before a packed house or taking a trip down memory lane with an interviewer’s spouse.

“I have a request,” my wife says as we prepare to wrap. She tells Jarreau that she’s a big fan, and that she remembers his appearance on Saturday Night Live, to which he replies, “Oh my, don’t tell anybody that, Melanie – they may try to roll me out of here in a wheelchair.” She laughs along with him, and then asks him if he’d hum a few bars of We’re In This Love Together.

That’s all it takes. Jarreau immediately uncorks an abbreviated, acapella sample of the popular Moonlighting theme song. He goes all the way through the chorus, and then follows that with another twenty seconds of his trademark scat singing, his voice as smooth as ever.

Just like that, another fan’s wish granted.

Another memory made.

~ ~ ~

Time marches on.

Jarreau says he has no intention of slowing down. Check his itinerary; he’s in Chile one minute, Brazil the next, and Argentina after that. Meanwhile, he is still writing new music, and has plans to make another record.

Still going strong: Jarreau continues to tour and record.

Still going strong: The iconic Jarreau continues to tour and record.

“I’m still in love with this music,” he says with a smile. “I know you can feel it. It’s such a blessing to be counted amongst the folks who’ve been given the opportunity to bring a little joy to people…and for that to be my life’s work? Oh, for heaven’s sake! I wake up every morning, happy. I wake up saying, ‘Yes! Thank you, Father.’ I’m just so thankful that this wonderful God of our universe allows me to have a brain, and a heart, and to have the ability to think. To be able to have a consciousness, to be able to see and hear what’s going on in this universe, and to be able to talk about this wonderful place that we call existence, and to comment on it – and, hopefully, to be an uplifting voice in it…a voice of creation, and goodness, and growth, and expansion, and not the opposite. That’s where I want to be. Once you get that full of the joy in the work, then it’s a marvelous thing.”

Film & TV, Music

Carol Woods – Show Stopper

By: Michael D. McClellan | Broadway. Mecca of the theatre universe. If you grew up dreaming of a stage career, chances are you’ve dreamt of performing in one of New York City’s illustrious show houses, the electricity of a live audience alternately jangling your nerves and juicing you up, the sellout crowd an affirmation of the commitment to your craft, the applause-soaked curtain call a validation of your God-given talent. In this dream world you’ve got what it takes – the chops, the moxie, that mysterious, elusive and coveted ‘It Factor’ that separates you from the pack and puts your name up in lights. You are equal parts charismatic force of nature and God’s gift to thespians, and you’ve straight up proven the Sinatra maxim right – that you can make it anywhere, because you’ve made it right here, in Gotham, and you’ve done it with a chutzpah that borders on the absurd.

And then, somewhere along the line, reality sets in: Maybe you don’t have the pipes you thought you had. Or you can’t dance like Baryshnikov after all. Or you don’t have the drive that it takes to make it, or you can’t handle the rejection that comes with trying to break into show biz, or you aren’t willing to pay your dues like the grinders who sacrifice so much to make it look so damned easy. The dream atrophies, and you move on with your life. That’s just how the world works for the rest of us, the ninety-nine percent who fantasize about a career in the performing arts, only to see those outsized hopes and dreams end up as creative road kill. We come to terms with reality and then we buy a ticket and go enjoy the show like everyone else.

Unless you’re someone like Carol Woods.

Woods has forged a remarkable career as a singer and an actress when she could have just as easily taken the path of least resistance. She could have been a nurse, and there’s no question she would have been damned good at it, and the world would have been a better place because of her care of the sick and afflicted. But nursing wasn’t Woods true calling, even if she didn’t realize it herself at the time.

“I wanted to be a nurse. Singing was something that I did in church, and at the time I didn’t think it was something that could pay the bills. I pictured myself working in a hospital my whole career. I’m glad it didn’t work out that way.” – Carol Woods

Without a doubt, Carol Woods was put on this earth to perform. She’s been knocked on the seat of her pants umpteen times only to get back up, dust herself off and kick disappointment’s ass in the process. Adversity? Woods has been there. Done that. Hers is a story of struggle and sacrifice, of personal loss and redemption, of trusting that heavenly voice to transport her safely through some of the darkest places imaginable. It’s hard to get much darker than burying a son. Woods knows. She’s had to find her way out of those depths, remaking life after death has proven itself so cold and unfair. She’s had to pour her grief into the lyrics of the songs she sings, searching for answers and meaning when neither seem possible.

…and in my hour of darkness…

…she is standing right in front of me…

…speaking words of wisdom…let it be…let it be…

Yes, life has tested Woods in ways that we cannot possibly comprehend, but, thankfully, the journey has been filled with more blessings than anguish. The gifted performer has accumulated a lifetime of stories and treasured friendships, hanging with the late Freddie Mercury, acting alongside Martin Short, and sharing a Vegas stage with Liza Minnelli among them. And if you’ve caught the Broadway production of Chicago over the past decade and a half, chances are you’ve caught Woods in character, breathing life into her signature role as Matron Mama Morton.

Carol Woods in her signature role as Matron Mama Morton in the Broadway production of the musical Chicago.

The genesis of Woods’ strength – as an entertainer struggling to make it in show business, and later, as a mother trying to make sense of a life cut short – can be traced to her childhood, and the influence of being raised in the church. Her passion for music also got its start during those Sunday morning services, where gospel grabbed hold and refused to let go, eventually morphing into R&B, and then later into jazz, pop and the show tunes that have come to define her career.

“I grew up in church,” Woods recalls quickly, her commanding voice both warm and infectious. “That’s my foundation – as soon as I could talk, I was singing. Everybody in our family was musical, so that’s really where it all started. My grandmother and grandfather migrated from the West Indies to Harlem in the early 1900s, before moving to Jamaica, New York, which is part of Queens. They bought a fifty year-old house, and then rented the bottom floor of the house next door and made that into a small church. They called it ‘The Friendly Church’.”

Born on November 13, 1943, Woods’ childhood was heavily influenced by that friendly little church next door. Whether it was choir practice, Sunday School or evening worship, Woods was in church every day of the week except for Monday, when the doors were closed and everyone involved took the time to exhale. On Sundays, Woods’ grandmother cooked for the entire congregation.

“Our grandfather raised our fruits and our vegetables,” Woods says. “So a lot of the ingredients were homegrown. We had fruit trees. We had a pond full of fish in front of the house. It was a great place to grow up. It was like a little slice of country living in Jamaica, New York.

It was a simpler time back then, more Wonder Years than Breaking Bad, an age of innocence that brings a smile to Woods’ face, and with it a flood of memories.

“Funny story,” says Woods. “In our church, you couldn’t have a boyfriend unless you were engaged, so I got engaged when I was thirteen years old [laughs]. My boyfriend asked me to marry him, and I said yes. Of course, we didn’t get married, and there was no hanky-panky going on. Maybe a kiss here and there, but nothing intimate – it was innocent, sweet and funny all at the same time.”

Still, Woods tied the knot at an early age.

“I got married at seventeen,” Woods says quickly. “Oh my, I’d like to know what the heck I was doing, Michael. I was a baby!

“I was raised in such a sheltered environment. I got married on June 10, 1961, and there was no honeymoon. I got married on that Saturday, and went to church on Sunday, and didn’t go to work on Monday. I called my girlfriend Peggy and said, ‘Let’s go play handball.’ That was so much fun – and after handball we went over to her house and had a glass of Kool-Aid. We were on the porch, shooting the breeze, and the phone rang. It was my mother. She was screaming her head off, ‘Why aren’t you home?’ I asked her what’s the matter, and she said, ‘You have to come cook dinner for your husband.’ I said, ‘I gotta cook dinner for him?’ I didn’t have a clue! I started crying. I got on my bicycle and I cried all the way home – I don’t even know how I could see. I was in such despair. I thought I had gotten away from the cooking, because up until then I had been cooking for a houseful of people. I was living in a fifteen room house and all of my grandfather’s and grandmother’s children were married and had gone on their own way. I was the last cook left in that house!”

The church would prove the source of Woods’ musical influence, as it has for so many other artists. When the Reverend Al Green got down on his knees to belt out Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” at the inaugural concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was doing more than just paying tribute to one of his favorite singers. As Green swooped and soared through Cooke’s song at the Cleveland event on September 1, 1995, he was celebrating the power and enduring influence of black gospel music.

“Gospel music was such an influence on me, because in those days I was just singing gospel, so for me it was all about the gospel singers. Dorothy Norwood. The Reverend James Cleveland. Other gospel singers of that period. I was seventeen at that time. It wasn’t until I was twenty-five that I started singing what you call secular music. And then my influences were people like Billie Holiday, Dionne Warwick, Margaret Whiting, Doris Day, the popular singers from that era.” – Carol Woods

“I love melodic tunes, I love melodies. I always hooked into the melodies, but then later on realized that while the melodies were crucial, it was the lyrics that were the most important. In those days it was the melody that caught me first. But I came to love and appreciate beautiful lyrics. I’m a fan of Melissa Manchester – I met Melissa in New York at the 92^nd Street Y. This was years ago. She’s a lovely lady. Burt Bacharach and Hal David, oh my God. The music that they wrote for Dionne was stellar. That voice of hers was velvet. Just listen to all of that old stuff that she did. Aretha Franklin was one of my idols. Chaka Khan. Beautiful voices – like I said, I love the melodies.”

Growing up, it wasn’t long before Woods realized that she had been given a gift; she could belt those gospel songs as if the heavens had opened up and angels had come down to join us. And while Woods’ divinely rapturous voice got her plenty of attention, she never dreamed of being a singer, at least not at that point in her life. Back then she wanted to be a nurse, remember, so she went to nursing school and got a job at New York’s Queens General Hospital. That’s when reality set in.

“Nurses didn’t make anything back then,” Woods says. “I loved nursing, but the economics just weren’t working for me and my two children.”

She became a postal worker instead. If this seems light years from a career that would later include juicy roles in Broadway productions ranging from Chicago and The Full Monty, it should also underscore the raw, natural talent that would later propel her to the far more exotic worlds of music/cabaret, film and television. Hell, even Einstein started out as a humble patent clerk.

Woods’ destiny was sealed when a friend asked her to sing at an office party. Afterwards, the same friend goaded her into auditioning for his friend who owned a nightclub. It was an epiphany, the ultimate lightbulb moment, but there was a small problem; she didn’t have any material of her own, or any idea of where to start. Almost everything she’d done to that point was gospel music.

“I knew a few popular songs,” Woods recalls. “Songs like Summertime, Stormy Monday Blues and Sunny, but I didn’t have enough material to really go out and perform. So I started at the beginning. Each week I’d learn a few more songs, and eventually got to the point where I could play a complete set.”

~ ~ ~

Between 1965 and 1970, Woods performed with a group known as Carol Woods and the Executives. They recorded just one song called Ooh Baby, which is still in circulation today, but the experience proved to be one of her big breaks. Ooh Baby led to an association with the UK label Ember Records and a number of disco/soul-themed recordings which can now be found on the recently re-issued CD Carol Woods: Out Of The Woods.

Carol Woods: Out of the Woods – 1972

“When I went to England, everything changed,” Woods says. “I recorded Out of the Woods after meeting Jeffrey Kruger, who owned the independent record label Ember Records. Jeffrey worked with some of the biggest names in the music business, people like Marvin Gaye and Barry White. He even worked with country music performers like Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Tammy Wynette. He was very well-connected.

“I went over and I did a tour of England – I opened for Gladys Knight and the Pips in London and Amsterdam. I opened for Glen Campbell in London; that was at the London Palladium. I don’t think Glen was too happy about that, because the kind of music I was singing wasn’t country music. Glen didn’t think it worked, but Jeffrey thought it was a good fit.” – Carol Woods

It was during this time that Carol was introduced to a future rock icon, Freddie Mercury of an up-and-coming band named Queen.

“We really hit it off,” Woods says. “We met in the sixties, right before Queen became a global success, and our friendship lasted until his passing.

“I went back to England in 1987 to do a show called Blues in the Night, which started its run at the Domnar Warehouse in London before moving to the Piccadilly Theatre. Initially I didn’t want to go back to Europe, but I’m glad that I did because the show was a great success and I was nominated for an Olivier Award. Freddie Mercury showed up on opening night and fell in love with my performance. He enjoyed it so much that he just kept coming back. He was a sweetheart; he would come to my dressing room with a bottle of Joly Champagne. He would stay and watch the show, and when it came time for me to sing a song called Wasted Life Blues, he would pop the champagne, pour two glasses and wait in the left wing for me to finish my performance. When I got through singing, I would exit stage left and celebrate by taking a sip of champagne.

While touring in England during the late 1960s, Carol Woods developed a friendship with Queen frontman Freddie Mercury.

“Freddie was a great guy – generous to a fault, because he would be so accommodating to friends and family. I’d spend Christmas and Thanksgiving at his place. Queen would be there. Freddie would be at the piano, or someone from the band would be at the piano, and everyone would sit around and sing songs. It was a great time. I’m so thankful that I got that chance to spend time with him in ‘87, because at the time I didn’t know that he was sick and that he wouldn’t be with us much longer. The time that we spent together was just priceless.”

Woods has another Freddie Mercury memory that she cherishes.

“I was really, really lucky to be asked to do background for him on the album ‘Barcelona’, with Montserrat Caballé, a world renowned operatic soprano. So I got credit for performing on that album with him, and that’s something that I will always cherish. And it’s a fabulous album.”

Despite her career’s early forward progress, Woods found herself struggling to make ends meet. She was working, but the money was anything but steady and she had the wellbeing of her children to consider.

“I stayed in England and did those tours, because I was a professional and I wanted to fulfill my obligations,” Woods reflects. “And then I flew back home. It was time. I was disenchanted with the music business because I didn’t have any money. The money that I was supposed to be making just wasn’t there – when I came back to the States and met with my managers in New York, there was no money. What I made I spent just living over there. So I just stepped out of the music business for a couple of years. I was done. I went back to doing my nursing; the way I looked at it, I was a nurse before I got into this and I could do it again, so I fell back to nursing during that period when I returned from Europe until I got back into the business. It was the right thing for me to do at the time, and given the circumstances of my life back then. I knew the money was going to be there every week – with benefits.”

The self-imposed hiatus didn’t last long; to say that show business was in Woods’ blood is as true as saying she needed air in her lungs to survive. She was working a 9-to-5, banking a steady paycheck and feeling much more comfortable with the stability in her life, but she couldn’t walk away cold turkey. Not with performing before live audiences such a significant part of her DNA. Imagine Johannes Vermeer not painting, or Steve Jobs not inventing, or Howard Stern not shocking. Try as she might, Woods just couldn’t stay away.

“I actually got back into the business by chance,” she says, smiling. “I went to a nightclub on a Saturday night with my boyfriend at the time, because he wanted to see a new group perform. When I got there I couldn’t believe my eyes – these guys were all in my band before I got out of the business. They were at this club to play a set, only I didn’t know they were going to be there. Well, they asked me to come up on the stage and join them, to sing a song, so I got up and did a couple of numbers with them. It was like I’d never left. I was hooked all over again.”

Woods’ next big break came when her voice caught the attention of New York’s theatre community.

“My theatre career started in the ‘70s,” Woods says, “at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn. It hadn’t been open long – it was a new, Off-Broadway black playhouse, with actors such as Samuel L. Jackson and Debbie Allen developing their crafts during those early years. Marjorie Moon was the Executive Director at the Billie Holiday, I think she started there in 1973, a year after the Billie Holiday Theatre opened. I believe she’s still there today. Wonderful woman, and very talented. I performed in a show called Young, Gifted and Broke, which was funny and ironic, because we were all young, gifted and broke [laughs]. Mikell Pinkney was the director. Weldon Irvine was the one who wrote the music for the show, he was a very gifted composer who wrote everything from jazz, rhythm & blues, gospel, funk and hip hop during his career. He also co-wrote Young, Gifted & Black with Nina Simone. Young, Gifted and Broke was my first experience in theatre, and everything just snowballed from there.”

Theatre suited Woods’ oversized personality equally powerful voice to a T, but so did cabaret. She continued to sing all over New York City, taking the stage at places as varied as the Blue Coronet in Brooklyn, where Miles Davis and the Miles Davis Quintet also performed, and the Red Carpet in Queens. Yes, the up-and-coming Woods was everywhere back in those days, nightclubs and concert halls alike. It was exciting work, and put her onstage with a wide range of genius talent.

“I performed in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan. The Baby Grand in Brooklyn. The Baby Grand in Manhattan. I worked with some of the greats – Dizzy Gillespie in Jersey, Horace Silver, Mongo Santamaria. Brilliant performers. I did a lot of things that I don’t even talk about.” – Carol Woods

So many stories. A life made rich by memories and relationships, friendships and fun times.

Carol Woods: “Oh my, there are too many great times to count. The theatre world is like one big family. I did One Mo’ Time – I did that at the Village Gate, which is a nightclub at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village, and also in Japan. In London. All over the country – in New Orleans. I played Ma Reed and Big Bertha. At the Village Gate, I remember getting ready to go out for my first entrance, and my first line when I open the door is, ‘Man, what did I tell you people?’ So I open the door, and I get a whiff of something that is so vile and so foul, and I almost puked. Somebody made a fart. It was Bruce Strickland, and he let one out just before I went onstage – I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong [laughs]. What was I to do? The audience is right at your footsteps, at your feet, they’re right there, that’s the way the seating was at the old Village Gate. Everyone was right up close. I just turned around and walked out so that I could breathe. It was horrible!”

Through the years, Woods has shared the stage with some of the funniest people in the business. She played Mrs. Crosby in The Goodbye Girl, with funnyman Martin Short as part of the cast. As you might imagine, some of this production’s best high jinx and humorous improv was saved for offstage.

Count Martin Short among those who have shared the stage with Carol Woods.

Count good friend Martin Short among those who have shared the stage with Carol Woods.

“Oh, I loved that show and I loved the people,” Woods says. “Me and Martin Short had so much fun with Bernadette Peters. We laughed all of the time. Martin used to pull pranks on me and I used to pull pranks on him. It was so funny. Stunt-wise, there was one time when he rigged my dressing room with a water hose – he literally rigged it to the water fountain. He put a hole in the wall, and ran the hose right underneath my dressing table, so that when I sat down, the water from the hose would just wet me all up. I screamed like you wouldn’t believe! And as you might imagine, he laughed so hard at my expense, and then he ran away like a scared schoolchild [laughs]! Martin Short and I had a lot of fun with that show. I love him dearly.”

Woods also performed in the musical Follies. She chuckles at the thought.

“It was at the old Belasco Theatre,” she says, “and I remember the uniqueness in how the set was built. They had designed it like you were actually in a nightclub. There were plenty of good times to be had; I used to walk around the theatre with this little purse, and I always stuffed it with food for the cast. Louis Zorich, who is Olympia Dukakis’ husband, would help me hand the food out to the waiters – there were waiters who would come around with hors d’oeuvres on their trays, but everybody liked my cooking better [laughs]. I would bring fried chicken, take it out of my purse and put it on the tray. Bruce Kimmel, the producer, would scream out, ‘What does she have tonight?’ I would bring fried chicken, colored greens, cornbread…good home cooking. I did the same thing during other shows. When I was doing Chicago they sewed up my pocketbook, because I used to put fried chicken in my pocketbook – but I would have it in aluminum foil. They sewed my pockets up!”

The more we talk, the more it becomes clear that having a sense of humor is one of a performer’s greatest assets when it comes to breaking into show business staying there. Talent is a prerequisite, that must-have element that every singer, dancer and actor must have in order to succeed. But if you’re going to hang around as long as someone like Carol Woods has, then you’ve got to be able to roll with the punches.

“Every business is hard, it all depends on how much you love it,” Woods says. “You have to put your shoulder to the wheel. I worked my fingers to the bone to get to where I am. Kids today want it so much, and they are quadruple threats. They work so hard.

“My thing is, when I went away and came back with no money, I put things in perspective. I quickly learned to put God first, then family, and then everything else comes after that. So I worked hard, but I also knew that there were things that were more important than work. Because without God, where are we? Without our families, where are we?” – Carol Woods

“Through the years I’ve encountered people that helped me survive and grow in this business, how to get started on the right foot, how to set goals and achieve them. And I listened, because I’m a good listener. That’s what you have to be able to do. If you’re a good listener, you learn, and a lot of people can’t do that. Those are the people who get knocked down and don’t know how to get back up. They don’t have a contingency plan, or a path forward.

“You need a mentor – I recommend that highly. I met Margaret Whiting in 1983 after I got to do One Mo’ Time at the Village Gate. I was working in a show with her called Taking My Turn at the Entermedia Theatre on Second Avenue in New York City. She asked me to play in her troupe – they were paying a tribute to her friend, singer/lyricist Johnny Mercer. The late, great Johnny Hartman was in the group. So she asked me to join the troupe, which I did, and Margaret taught me so many things – about business, about phrasing, about how to turn a lyric. Everybody that I’ve met has given me a bit of this and a bit of that, and it’s turned out really great. The education, the experience that I’ve gained throughout my life, it’s all played a part in where I am today.”

Perhaps forgotten now, Whiting was a pop music star in the 1940s, while Mercer was a man ahead of his time, forming Capitol Records in 1942 and guiding it to a preeminent place in the music industry. Whiting was frequently featured on the label in those early years, first recording My Ideal, followed by the hit song That Old Black Magic. Whiting’s Moonlight in Vermont sold two million copies in the first year, and A Tree in the Meadow was her second million-seller. So when it came to choosing a mentor, it’s safe to say that Carol Woods knew what she was doing.

“Margaret Whiting was someone who I looked up to and admired greatly,” Woods says. “She recorded more than five hundred songs during her long career. She was so versatile, which is something that resonated with me – she continued to record music after she moved from California to New York, but she also concentrated more and more on live performances, at venues like Arci’s Place, The Ballroom, Michael’s Pub and Danny’s Skylight Room. She did radio at one point in her career. She did TV. It helped me to chart my own career and taught me to keep my options open. And it’s paid off – I’ve been able to record music, act on Broadway, work in film, and hold concerts like An Evening With Carol Woods at Carnegie Hall. It’s been a good run, Michael. I’ve been very blessed to have a mentor like Margaret Whiting.”

Woods’ signature role, and easily her longest running engagement, has been that of Matron Mama Morton in the Broadway production of Chicago at the Ambassador Theater.

“I played Matron Mama Morton for seventeen years,” Woods says proudly. “I truly enjoyed myself for seventeen years – we had our ups and downs, but my ups were much, much greater than my downs. Things work out, if you’re willing to work hard and pay your dues. I just think the opportunity perform in Chicago was like that, because of everything going on in my life. I needed that role more than it needed me – I lost a son in 2005, and he left six children behind. And I have a daughter who has three children, and I had to help to support them. I’m convinced that God gave me a job that lasted as long as it did, and that His hand allowed me to help take care of my family financially. Think about it – how many people can say that they were able to work on Broadway, in the same role, for seventeen years? You just don’t see that kind of stability in this business. So, I firmly believe that this was God’s hand at work.

Seventeen Years On: Carol Woods played the role of Matron Mama Morton in the Broadway production of Chicago the Musical.

“And it has been not only been a financial blessing, it has been an artistic blessing as well. I grew by leaps and bounds with my acting and singing, just by being around all of these wonderful people that I’ve had the opportunity to work with. And Barry and Fran Weissler were great producers, simply the best. They gave a lot of people work.”

Was she ever involved in a production that she didn’t particularly enjoy?

Woods pauses to reflect, and then: “Smokey Joe’s Café. Oh Lord have mercy, that was a rough one because I joined the production as a replacement when B.J. Crosby had to have surgery. It was hard working with that company – I didn’t have as much fun as I had with other companies. It was just different, that’s all I really want to say. I don’t want to gossip. I’m not a kiss-and-tell kind of girl [laughs].”

One of Woods’ highlights was being nominated for an Olivier Award for her performance in Blues in the Night, Britain’s equivalent to the Tony Award. Pretty heady stuff, and plenty reason to be proud.

Woods: “Let me tell you something, Michael, it was a great honor, because I’ve not yet been recognized for my work on Broadway. I haven’t been nominated for a Tony, I haven’t won a Tony, so even though I didn’t win the Olivier I was just so happy to have been nominated. I remember the morning that the committee contacted me. The gentleman on the phone said, ‘Did you hear?’ And I said, ‘Hear what?’ He said, ‘You’ve been nominated for the Olivier Award.’ I was so ecstatic. I really was – I was knocked off my feet.”

Through the years, Woods has also worked in film – she played Aunt Bunny in Eddie Murphy Raw, and she’s appeared in movies such as Across the Universe, The Honeymooners, and Steppin’ Out. Steppin’ Out remains one of her favorites.

“Well I did that show on Broadway,” Woods says. “I worked with Tommy Tune and Marge Champion. Marge taught us yoga every day, and I lost forty-five pounds during that production. The fact that I’d done the play really helped give me an edge when it came time to cast for the movie.

“There are so many great memories when it comes to that movie, Michael. At the end of the show, the night of our wrap party, my granddaughter Leanna was born – on October 26, 1990. I’ll never forget it. We were downstairs at the studio, and somebody said to me, ‘Let’s find out if the baby has been born.’ So we all went upstairs and called the hospital, and I ended up speaking with an Asian lady who told me that the baby had been born. She said ‘It’s a girl.’ I immediately booked two plane tickets for the first flight out of Toronto to New York – my son was actually in Steppin’ Out with me, he played my son in the movie – and the first thing I did in New York was stop at Crazy Eddie and buy a video camera. From there we went to St. Vincent Hospital, video camera in hand. It was such a joyous occasion.

It was her character Rose that helped form a special friendship with the incomparable Liza Minelli.

“We had a ball making Steppin’ Out. I did that movie with Liza Minelli, Shelley Winters and Julie Walters. Jane Krakowski and Bill Irwin were in it, too. It was a star-studded cast. Liza is such a beautiful person – when the movie was finished, she flew some of us to Las Vegas in one of Pia Zadora’s jets.” – Carol Woods

“It was such a surreal experience, flying across the country in a private jet to see Liza perform. I remember her telling me, ‘Carol, when you come to Vegas bring your music, because I’m going to bring you on stage to sing.’

“So on that Friday night she saw me sitting in the audience and she called me to come backstage. She said, ‘Did you bring your music?’ I did. I had my music in my hands. Liza said ‘I want you to sing Come Rain Or Come Shine. I’m going to lead it off, and then I’m going to give you the microphone, and then I want you to blow their socks off.’ I looked at her, dumbfounded. And she said, ‘Do you hear me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah’. I was so embarrassed, but it was all I could get out under the circumstances [laughs]. So Liza said it again, with even more emphasis: ‘I want you to blow their socks off.’

Carol Woods counts Liza Minnelli among those who have had an influence on her career.

“Well, Liza opened up with her number, and then she stopped the show and said she had a friend in the audience named Carol Woods, and that Carol Woods was one of the best singers she’s ever heard. And then she asked me to join her on the stage. You have to understand, Michael, I’m scared to death. I’m shaking!

“Somehow I managed to get out of my chair, and then they helped me get up on the stage. Liza then asked me what I would like to sing. I said, ‘Come Rain Or Come Shine.’ So Liza starts singing it, and then she gives me the microphone and I starting singing…and then, just like that, she sits down on the stage at my feet. At my feet! Tears start streaming down my face. I don’t remember singing that song, I just remember the audience going crazy after I was done, and Liza standing up and hugging me. It was such a special moment. It was so well-received that Liza put me on stage again Saturday and Sunday. That was amazing. Who does that?”

Woods has also worked in TV, with credits ranging from the mid-to-late ‘90s cult sitcom The Parent ‘Hood, to commercial hits such as Law & Order, The Practice, and The Good Wife. When it comes to performing, does she have a favorite platform?

“I love theatre,” she says contemplatively. “I think I’m drawn to it because it’s organized. Every night you know what you’re going to do, and you know what you’re wearing. I like the structure. But it’s hard. You’re doing eight shows a week. There are demands that come with the theatre that don’t come with film and TV.

“Yes, theatre is my favorite, but it’s so hard for me to pick one over another. There are things that I enjoy about them all. I love doing comedy television, because they have a hiatus in the summertime [laughs]! And I love singing. That’s my first gift. I love lifting spirits. One lady, who came to see Blues in the Night in London at the Piccadilly Theatre, left me a note that I’ll never forget. It read, ‘When I came to the theatre I felt blue, and when I left I felt all colors of the rainbow.’ And I think that’s what it’s all about when it comes to being an entertainer. It doesn’t matter what we do – whether we write, sing, act or whatever, I think that’s what our charge is. Artistically, it’s our job to make the audience feel something that they hadn’t expected to feel when they bought a ticket and sat down to watch us perform.”

Of everything Woods has done in her career, perhaps nothing is more personal, or more powerful, than her onstage performance at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards. When Woods took the stage that night to sing the Beatles classic Let It Be, she wasn’t only doing so to help promote the film Across the Universe, a revolutionary rock musical that re-imagines America in the turbulent late-1960s. Woods was singing from a place that few of us could imagine. And if you haven’t seen the Woods audition video for her role in the film, then you haven’t seen the raw, real-life emotion that comes when a mother loses a son.

Carol Woods – Audition Video – Across the Universe

“That audition was so difficult for me, because I had just lost my son in a car accident in January of 2005. I only had one son, and I have one daughter, so both of them are my best friends. The audition came up in June, so it had only been six months since his passing. My son was my favorite fan. He wanted me to make it so bad…he wanted me to be a huge star. I adored him. It was so hard – something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

“I went to this audition after I read what the premise was about – the Detroit riots in the ‘60s, and the unimaginable pain of a mother losing her son. I knew that I had to try. The song was so touching and so personal for me.

“It was something I’ll never forget. I went into the audition with Across the Universe director Julie Taymor, and she told me they were going to videotape me, which I didn’t know about until I got there. I forgot about the camera as soon as I started singing. As I got to the end I got so emotional, because I was thinking about my son, and I just broke down. Afterwards, I explained everything to Julie and I apologized for breaking down – the song was so emotional and it just got the best of me. I got a call when I got home, letting me know that I’d gotten the part. The first day of rehearsal was January 29, which was my son’s birthday.”

Raw emotion was on full display at the Grammy Awards, both on the stage and in the audience. By the time Woods finished singing, everyone was on their feet.

Carol Woods poses in the press room during the 50th annual Grammy awards held at the Staples Center on February 10, 2008 in Los Angeles, California.

“That night was a spiritual release,” Woods says. “I remember getting a call from my manager, telling me that the Grammy’s called, and that they wanted me to sing Let It Be. When I went to Los Angeles, I could feel my son’s presence. When I walked onto that stage I could feel him walking with me. It was something he would have adored, to have the opportunity to be there with me and to see that performance. And even though I didn’t win the Grammy, I was able to pay tribute to my son…and that means more than anything.”

~ ~ ~

As we wrap our interview, I’m struck by something that comedian Steve Martin once said: “I just wanted to be in show business. I didn’t care if I was going to be an actor or a magician or what. Comedy was a point of the least resistance, really. And on the simplest level, I loved comedy.”

Carol Woods could have been a nurse. She could have remained a postal worker. Her life could have gone in any number of directions, but gospel music hooked her during those Sunday morning services at that friendly little church next door, and her life was changed because of it. And our lives have been enriched ever since.

“Right now I’m working on a show called One Hour With You, and I’m using the music from Margaret Whiting’s dad, Richard Whiting. It’s going to be ready next year. I’m working with Debbie Whiting, Margaret’s daughter, who is producing it. It’s my way of giving back to someone who’s helped me. I’m working on this project with Tex Arnold, who was Margaret’s musical director for thirty years, so I have the pleasure of working with him.

“We’re marching forward. I’m going to do the Whiting show and then I’m just going to take it easy. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I want to call the shots.”

Film & TV, Science

David Kaplan – Particle Fever

By: Michael D. McClellan | We humans are a different lot.

An exquisitely beautiful, unquestionably complex lot.

One moment we’re constructing the Great Wall of China, the next we’re writing War and Peace, the next we’re untethered from our atmosphere and taking that historic, giant leap for mankind. We don’t merely exist, we restlessly innovate and incessantly strive to better understand our place in this mysterious thing we call the universe. We sing, we paint, we love, we cry. We challenge assumptions and we push boundaries. Through the millennia we’ve built everything from pyramids to planes, each civilization improving on the last, our imaginations challenging convention and fueling our thirst for knowledge. It’s how we roll. To wit: In the blink of an eye, mankind has gone from harnessing fire to inventing the wheel to exploring the outermost reaches of our solar system, and now a machine exists that turns the lens dramatically inward, one that peers into a strange and unpredictable world inhabited by oddly named things like quarks and leptons.

Theoretical Physicist-turned filmmaker, David Kaplan

The machine – the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC for short – is the rock star of the scientific community, a 17-mile tunnel buried deep beneath the border between Switzerland and France, and home to some of the most advanced electronics on earth. It is also the centerpiece of the brilliant documentary Particle Fever, the award-winning film by Mark Levinson and David Kaplan that takes us on the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson, also known in pop culture as the “God particle”. That’s how big the LHC has become. It transcends science and creates buzz in equal doses, its Q Score on par with entertainers such as Nicole Kidman and Vin Diesel, its street cred bolstered by the media’s sensationalized reporting. Remember the speculation that the LHC, once turned on, might destroy the earth or possibly annihilate the entire universe? Remember the resulting lawsuits filed to prevent it from being revved up? That’s what happens when you have the power to create conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. That’s how you cross the realm of theoretical physics and enter the collective minds of the public at large. That’s how you end up on front page of the New York Times. Trust me, Kanye and Kim would sell the naming rights to their firstborn for this kind of media attention (sorry to be the one to break it to you, North West).

Particle Fever – Promo Poster

Clearly, the LHC has lived up to the hype. The Higgs boson was indeed discovered in 2012 (more on that later), filling a key hole in the Standard Model, which is physics’ explanation of almost everything our universe contains. A machine this important – and science this significant – demanded that a documentary be made, and it was Kaplan, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University, who shepherded the project from germination to the fully formed masterpiece it is today.

“The LHC was very dramatic for all of us in the scientific community. I would tell everyone I knew who was not a physicist, which is all of my family and most of my friends, about what was happening, because the story was so big. Eventually I got good enough at telling the story that people started taking notice, and that’s when I got the idea of making a movie about the LHC.” – David Kaplan

It’s one thing to have an idea for a film – how many of us have sat around over beers, pitching screenplay ideas to our friends? It’s a completely different animal to take on something this bloody ambitious. Especially with no background in film, no Hollywood connections and no money to get it made.

“I bought a camera and started interviewing people,” Kaplan recalls, “but I quickly realized that this was no way to make a movie. I knew I needed a team of people to help me. My sister knew someone in television who introduced me to my first crew, and together we made an eight minute piece which focused on physicists talking about what might happen with the LHC. The crew did a beautiful job editing it, and it became the tool that I used to raise money for the film.”

It wasn’t as if Kaplan started with a bare cupboard. An expert in the field of particle physics, Kaplan is disarmingly articulate and suitably well-connected at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is where the Large Hadron Collider is built. What he needed was a little luck. That would come in the form of Mark Levinson, who shared Kaplan’s vision and who searched him out to collaborate on the project.

CERN – Geneva, Switzerland

“Mark, who has a degree in physics, but didn’t stay in physics, heard that somebody was trying to make a film about particle physics,” Kaplan says. “At the time, I thought that this was another person without money who wanted to make movies, so I wasn’t interested. But he pursued me for a month before we talked by phone, and then I agreed to meet him in person when I got back from my trip to CERN.

“After that meeting I had a better understanding of Mark’s career choice, which was film. He’d found his niche in sound editing, specifically with something called Additional Dialogue Recording, or ADR. This involves editing recordings of actors to correct lines, or to correct sounds in lines. He has worked as a member of post-production teams on films such as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain, so it really was the perfect fit. After that meeting, I agreed that we would be partners and that we’d make this movie together. That was late 2007. By the spring of 2008, I’d raised enough money to green light the project. And just like that, we were a go.”

Timing, the adage goes, is everything, and with the LHC set to go live on September 10, 2008, Kaplan’s timing proved impeccable indeed.

“Luckily, the LHC had been delayed” Kaplan says. “Everything came together just in time for Mark and I to fly to Geneva in the summer of 2008 and start filming.”

~ ~ ~

Okay, let’s pump the brakes.

Before we can fully appreciate the making of Kaplan’s movie, we need to take a step back and better understand its subject. What, exactly, is the Large Hadron Collider?

The simplest and most stylized answer is a machine that smashes sub-atomic particles together at incredible speeds, allowing scientists to analyze the data in the hope of answering fundamental questions about the universe in which we live. But when the machine in question represents the biggest scientific experiment mankind has ever attempted, with over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries around the world working for decades to bring it to fruition, the answer goes much deeper – literally, and figuratively.

Imagine a tunnel, circular in shape and 17 miles in circumference. Its interior is 20 feet across. It is deep underground — as deep as 300 feet. In this tunnel lives the largest particle accelerator ever built. It’s job is to accelerate protons, or hydrogen nuclei, at 99.999999 percent the speed of light, a mind-boggling number when you consider that light travels at a pedestrian 671,000,000 miles per hour, or 186,000 miles per second.

A view the Large Hadron Collider’s tunnel, a 17-mile ring beneath the France-Switzerland border.

The accelerated particles go round and round the tunnel, some clockwise, some counterclockwise, traveling together in packs, or beams, with about 100,000,000,000 protons in each beam. The particles circle the tunnel about 10,000 times a second, colliding at four points along the 17 mile ring. Think of these points as giant detectors, which are essentially digital cameras that recreate the conditions that were present less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. The detectors, as you might imagine, are enormous. They are also interestingly named. Atlas, for example, is 46 meters wide, 25 meters in diameter, and 7,000 tons of machine. It sits in an underground cavern that is – gulp! – 10 stories tall. There are approximately 3,000 kilometers of cable and more than 100 million electronic channels involved. It is a scientific marvel.

For Kaplan, the challenge was simple: How do you tell the story of something so incredibly complex, and yet do it in a way that it could be understood and appreciated by the masses?

“I decided that I didn’t want to be in any of the shoots,” Kaplan says. “I was going to play the role of physicist, and Mark was going to be behind the camera. That would feed both of our strengths. It would also allow me to interact with people, because the whole idea was to have the audience live through the experience with me.”

The film is a linear telling of the LHC, from first beam to first collision to the historic discovery of the Higgs boson, the theorized sub-atomic particle thought to comprise the Higgs field. Physicists have long pointed to the Higgs field as the fabric that slowed certain energies immediately after the Big Bang, creating mass and matter in the process. If true, it is the Higgs field that led to the formation of everything in our known universe: Galaxies, black holes, stars, planets…even you and me.

What about the film? Was there a metaphorical Higgs field that gave Particle Fever the critical mass it needed to get made?

“To use that analogy, I would say the Higgs boson was Walter Murch. In the mid-80s, Mark was doing post-production work on The Unbearable Likeness of Being, of which Walter Murch was editing. Walter had discovered that someone in the building had a PhD in physics, and desperately wanted to talk to him about string theory. And that’s how Mark and Walter met.” – David Kaplan

Murch, it should be said, is the Oscar-winning film editor with such credits as The Godfather, American Graffiti, and Apocalypse Now on his résumé. He has worked with legendary directors Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. How were Levinson and Kaplan able to lure such a heavyweight into the mix?

“We had filmed for a few years, and had hired an editor,” Kaplan says. “Her name is Mona Davis, and she’s a traditional documentary film editor. She’s quite good. We’d gotten about eighteen months of editing under our belt, and that’s when I decided we needed someone more inspired by the physics. Mona was great in terms of bringing a lot of the human story out, but she didn’t care very much about the physics. As a result, her approach didn’t really allow us to incorporate the physics into the narrative. So we decided to part ways on mutual terms.

“That’s when Mark reached out to Walter. We had been sending him clips from our film all along, and Walter was getting excited about it. So he thought about it for a few weeks, and a big project that he was going to do just happened to fall through. That’s when he decided to step in and help us. We’d gotten very lucky yet again.

“He agreed to do three months of editing, to help clean it up. Well, three months turned into fifteen months, during which time the Higgs boson went from evidence, given in one lecture in December of 2011, to a full-fledged discovery of the Higgs boson in July of 2012. Walter incorporated that ending into the film. Even for Walter, it was a very difficult movie to edit, because of what it took to illustrate complicated physics in an honest, yet completely understandable and compelling way. I only realized after the fact that it took a genius like Walter to actually cut this film.”

Watching Particle Fever, one can’t help but grasp the historical significance of the experiments taking place at the LHC. The 99 minutes that unfold onscreen are, arguably, in the same rarified air as Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk. Does Kaplan see it the same way?

“To quote the great philosopher, Yogi Berra,” Kaplan says, “it’s very hard to make predictions, especially about the future [laughs]. I think it’s too close to my heart to be able to make that prediction. But everybody around me, even from the very early stages of making this film, saw this as something that would last for a long time. It’s really the first documentary of a major scientific discovery as it happens in real time.”

~ ~ ~

Need additional evidence that the Large Hadron Collider has secured its rightful place in pop culture? Consider the curious case of Eloi Cole, the would-be saboteur arrested on April 1, 2010 at the LHC, after making the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Cole, a strangely dressed young man (tweed, head to toe), said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world. His goal? Disrupt the LHC’s particle collisions by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment’s vending machines. Following his arrest, Cole mysteriously disappeared from his cell, as if vanishing into the ether.

A real-life security breach? An April Fool’s ruse propagated by CERN and broadcast worldwide? The better question: What is it about the LHC that fascinates us so?

“I have no idea,” Kaplan says, laughing. “There are many things about the project that are overwhelming. You have 10,000 people from over 100 countries working on it, so that makes it the biggest worldwide collaboration of any kind. This includes people collaborating who never collaborate because they don’t have official political relationships with each other.

“It demonstrates that something this pure – simply trying to understand physical reality and gain a better description of us in the universe – is something at an inspiring enough level that it will bring people together. I like to say that people at CERN speak physics first, and that their second language is whatever they grew up speaking. People at CERN relate to one another in this way because we all follow the same credo – ‘What is the truth?’ In this case, it’s the truth about the physical laws that govern us, and it goes well beyond provincial issues or identity.”

The Large Hadron Collider

Particle Fever stays true to the physics, but it also captures the human emotions that come with the highs and lows in the months leading up to the discovery of the Higgs boson. It accomplishes this by telling the inside story of six brilliant scientists seeking to unravel the mysteries of the universe, giving us an inside look at some of the most respected names in the field. They center us emotionally, and give us reason to care.

A good, old-fashioned crisis never hurts, either. It comes in the form of a helium leak, which jeopardizes the experiment and provides dramatic tension in the film.

If there were a book titled Large Hadron Collider for Dummies, it would explain that there are four main ingredients that comprise the accelerator: Particles to accelerate. A pipe to hold them. Superconducting magnets to steer them. And a refrigeration system to keep the magnets extremely cold, and therefore very powerful. That’s where the helium comes in. And that helium, as you might suspect, is critical in keeping the magnets from overheating.

Ergo, the worldwide angst created by the leak as the LHC was about to go live.

“There are two main components to the LHC,” Kaplan explains. “One is the accelerator that you just described. And then there are the detectors, which are the points around the ring where the beams collide. So the first thing you need to do is get the beams going. And then you need to be able to aim them, so that they will collide with each other inside the detectors. Finally, you have the collisions themselves.

“So the first beam that occurs in the movie is our attempt to get one beam going around one of the tubes, just to see if the accelerator itself works. There was a decision made immediately after that great success of achieving first beam; instead of having collisions occur at low energies, they wanted to see if they could ramp up the magnets, to see if they could go to high energies. This would be necessary later anyway, because you need a beam at high energy in order to discover things like the Higgs. It turned out that there was a fault in the last sector of magnets that they tested. When they ramped up that sector, one of those magnets overheated and blew up.” – David Kaplan

Blew up?

The biggest, most powerful microscope in the history of science, falling flat on its face from the very outset? An epic fail with the entire world watching?

“All of the magnets around the ring are superconducting electromagnets,” Kaplan says. “They use an electrical current to create a magnetic field. And if you use a lot of electrical current, then you generate a lot of magnetic field, which can then be used to bend very powerful beams of protons.

“To have enough electric current, you also need the wires to be superconducting, which requires that you bring the materials to very cold temperatures – just a bit colder than deep space. That’s -271 degrees Celsius. And in order to do that, you need tons of liquefied helium pumping through the 17 mile ring, just to keep the wires cool.

“Between the magnets you have blocks of copper. One of the blocks was faulty, causing it to heat up. This caused the helium to heat up and start to boil off – to go from liquid to gas. The copper melted so quickly that it destroyed the failsafe mechanism, and the helium couldn’t be released through the relief valve fast enough.

“Anywhere from two to ten tons of liquid helium turned to gas almost instantly, and blew up. It ripped a seven ton magnet out of the concrete and threw it across the tunnel. And apparently, it also blew an 18” thick steel door off of its hinges, filling the tunnel with helium gas.”

The film expertly captures the resulting tension in the control room, as scientists scramble to understand what had just gone wrong. A major setback for physics, but also a fulcrum on which the movie’s plot would pivot.

“On top, nobody knew what had happened, other than there was a significant fault and it had stopped working,” Kaplan says, reflecting on the 12, 000 amps of current that created the film’s crisis moment. “But they couldn’t send people down there, because there wasn’t any oxygen in that part of the tunnel – it was dominated by helium – and it was also incredibly cold. So they had to wait a number of days before conditions allowed a fire crew to go down and see what happened. That footage in the tunnel – in the dark, with the light shining – is the first footage of the magnets and the machine, when they were discovering what had actually happened.”

A significant blow, given that any repairs would take a minimum of two months to complete. Consider: It takes three weeks to warm up the machine, and another three weeks to cool it back down. That’s six weeks, plus whatever time is needed to perform the repairs.

“Word started getting out about how bad it was,” Kaplan says. “People were devastated. It was a shock to go from anticipating collisions in a week, and all the euphoria that came with first beam, to not being sure when the LHC was going to be turned back on again.”

Particle Fever conveys this wrenching uncertainty with aplomb. It also gives us a glimpse into the project’s collective human spirit, and the never-say-die attitude that helps the scientific community overcome the helium setback to reach new heights.

“People went back and did a lot of boring calibration of the machine using cosmic rays, and improving the computing. The amazing thing is that, fourteen months later when it finally did turn on, they got the beams going and they got first collisions. And then, four or five months after that, they finally brought the collisions to high energies safely – not as high as they had planned, but still quite high. The machine at that point worked perfectly. The detectors were calibrated perfectly and understood incredibly well, because everyone used the fourteen months of downtime to make improvements. So in the end, that was the benefit of having the plug pulled for more than a year. All of these people who were prepared to analyze data instead spent the time improving their analysis tools in the detector.” – David Kaplan

~ ~ ~

The story goes like this: The universe exploded 13.7 billion years ago, in an immensely hot, dense state, much smaller than a single atom. It began to expand about a million, billion, billion, billion billionth of a second after the Big Bang. Gravity immediately separated away from the other forces. The universe then underwent an exponential expansion, which physicists refer to as cosmic inflation, and in about the first billionth of a second or so, the Higgs field kicked in, and exotically named particles like quarks, W bosons and electrons acquired mass.

The universe continued to expand and cool, containing only hydrogen and helium. After about 400 thousand years, light began to travel through the universe. After about 200 million years, the first stars formed, and that hydrogen and helium began to cook into the heavier elements. Then came the elements of life – the carbon, oxygen and iron needed to make us up.

Fast forward: Man arrives on the scene with a deep desire to understand how things work. Physics splits into two camps– the theoretical physicists, who work in the abstract world of theories and what-ifs, and the experimental physicists, who attempt to prove or disprove the abstract ruminations of their theoretical counterparts. It’s a symbiotic relationship, a yin-yang relationship, a matter-antimatter relationship. Picture Bernie Taupin writing the lyrics and Elton John taking those lyrics and creating the song, and you have a pop culture analogy suitable to the LHC’s rock star status.

It was in 1964 that one such theoretical physicist – Dr. Peter Higgs, then a 35-year old assistant professor at the University of Edinburgh – predicted the existence of a new particle that would ultimately bear his name. Half a century later, on July 4, 2012, Higgs pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away a tear as he sat in a lecture hall at CERN, and heard that his particle had finally been found.

For Levinson, Kaplan and the rest of the Particle Fever team, the discovery of the Higgs boson provided a pinch-me finale that none of them had dared dreamed possible. Sure, Kaplan was confident that the LHC would reveal the Higgs boson at some point – otherwise, everything we know about the Standard Model would be called into question. But to have it confirmed so soon? And to be able to include this historic footage in the film?

Photo Op: Particle Fever has taken David Kaplan (left) from theoretical physicist to critical acclaim as a filmmaker.

Photo Op: Particle Fever has taken David Kaplan (left) from theoretical physicist to critically-acclaimed filmmaker.

“It was almost a boring scientific discovery in some respects,” says Kaplan. “The vast majority of physicists felt that the Higgs would be discovered at the LHC, but we knew that there would be other physics there, too, which could make it harder to see. We were looking for things beyond the Standard Model, more speculative theories that we wanted to see confirmed or ruled out. We thought it would take years for the machine to see the Higgs.

“That started to change after the accident, when the machine had to run at lower energies. They discovered that the rate of collisions was happening much faster than they had predicted. The Higgs wasn’t the heaviest particle or the most energetic particle that they were looking for, but it is produced very rarely at those energies. Ultimately, it wasn’t the highest energy that revealed the Higgs, but the sheer volume of collisions generated.”

The collisions represented the intersection of the theoretical and experimental worlds of physics, the taking of the abstract idea and actually testing it in the real world – and doing so on the grandest of scales. For Kaplan, it was a surreal culmination decades in the making.

Kaplan: “As a theoretical physicist, the Higgs was always something that was written on a piece of paper. It was part of our theories, and it was part of the things we worked with. We had theories predicting different masses, or how the Higgs would work together with different particles in different ways, but when you’re writing a theory you never think that you’re describing the universe. You can’t. It would freeze you. It’s a toy; you’re just thinking of what the universe could do. So, you’re in a different mindset when you’re theorizing. It allows you to be nimble and creative, instead of writing down exactly what must be true. You need to be more speculative in the theory stage. And here we were, actually conducting experiments to test those theories.”

What was it like to be David Kaplan, theoretical physicist turned movie maker, during the time between the resumption of the collisions and the announcement of the Higgs boson?

“It was a rollercoaster of emotion,” he says quickly. “Both in terms of the physics and the movie. Would we capture it? Would we not? In December, 2011, they decided they had enough data – that there was evidence to suggest that the Higgs had been detected. In June, 2012, we started hearing rumors that CERN would make another announcement about the Higgs. At that point I thought I wouldn’t care that much, but as the days got closer to the announcement I found myself getting very excited. So I drove up to Princeton and watched the announcement with Nima, who is one of the theorists featured in the film, along with about twenty-five other people. It was broadcast live from CERN, so it was about three o’clock in the morning for us.

“It was an overwhelming moment, because this thing went from an abstract idea to an actual physical particle. We’re not just telling stories anymore. Collectively, the field of physics had figured out something that is true about the universe. Imagine, this abstract mathematical idea has been debated for years. As a theorist you’re confident it’s there, because it holds the theory together, but to see it all come together and actually work – to prove that it really exists in nature, and that we’ve just never seen it until now…it was overwhelmingly positive, and in that moment it was also shocking and surreal.

“Part of the reason I wanted to make the movie was simply due to the edge of knowledge in which we’re working. The experiments are challenging for physics reasons, for engineering reasons, for political reasons…and these are also very expensive projects that require massive collaboration from all over the world. So they’re becoming much more rare. Science funding has been decreasing for the past thirty years. Everything’s tight. It’s hard to predict when the next breakthrough will occur. To be able to capture this discovery in the film was as emotional for the team as it was for all of the scientists who collaborated to discover the Higgs.”

~ ~ ~

The sex appeal of the Large Hadron Collider may not stack up with Beyoncé, but it’s close. And everyone, it seems, is digging the Higgs. There are t-shirts, coffee mugs and plenty of other trinkets to geek out your world, all with the click of a mouse.

In the wake of the Higgs discovery, a couple of other terms have been gaining public mindshare: Multiverse and supersymmetry. Both are directly linked to the discovery of the Higgs boson and the science that will surely follow, and the mass of the Higgs plays a key role in both theories. The Higgs weighed in at around 125 GeV (giga-electron-volts), smack dab in the middle of two schools of thought. The film – and the physics – leaves us at a fork in the road.

Supersymmetry theory suggests that when the universe was created, there was also the same number of theoretical ‘super particles’ created. Think of a superparticle is the supersymmetric copy of its counterpart – that is, regular matter. If this theory is true, it would at least double the number of particles in the universe.

“There are deep mysteries about the Higgs, and we really don’t understand it,” Kaplan says. “We need to understand much more to understand where the Higgs came from, how it ended up there, and how it ended up creating matter in the first place. Supersymmetry in a sense lends a lot more information about the story, and suggests that we will see more things. The Higgs isn’t alone. There are a number of other particles that live around the same energy, maybe slightly heavier, and if we have enough energy to produce them, then we’ll understand more to the story.

“The multiverse is suggestive that there are no other particles besides the Higgs that are accessible to us. In a sense, the Higgs ended up doing what it did in the Standard Model by accident. There are parts of the greater universe where the Higgs doesn’t give mass to particles, and doesn’t create matter. So the multiverse is a broader idea that the laws of physics are different in different parts of a much vaster multiverse.” – David Kaplan

So, if Kaplan were a betting man, which way would he lean?

“The real indicator of which one is right is whether we see new particles in a collider. So far we haven’t, but the LHC was running at less energy. We’d hope that the mass of the Higgs would be the indicator of which way it would go, but it really didn’t give us the information we expected. If I had to guess, I’d guess we were a little bit more multiverse than supersymmetry.”

~ ~ ~

While the discovery of the Higgs boson won Peter Higgs a Nobel Prize for Physics, it was also a huge triumph for the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider. Kaplan, however, is quick to point out that the celebration should be enjoyed by many.

“I think the hubbub over Peter Higgs is a little much,” he says. “It’s sort of missing the point. He is representative of something that’s going on all the time, which is that there are lots of theorists working on abstract things, and that it is all necessary for anybody to end up figuring out what is going on.

“Ironically, he thought it could be applied to something called the strong nuclear force. He turned out to be wrong. It didn’t work. A few years later, Steven Weinberg applied it to the weak nuclear force, and there it did work. But having Higgs receive the Nobel Prize provided the perfect ending for the film.

Peter Higgs and François Englert: Nobel Prize Winners

“With that said, the fact that Higgs and François Englert shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery is fun for me. You never know when something you’re working on is going to be all-important, and the center of a real theory that describes the universe. Again, it requires everybody in the field contributing. I really love the fact that this is not just the genius of the field who now finally gets rewarded. Peter Higgs was simply a member of the theory community from the 60s who worked on this for a few months and then moved on to other things.”

~ ~ ~

Like the discovery of the Higgs boson, the process of creating Particle Fever took the efforts of many, and Kaplan is quick to give credit to all involved. It’s clear, however, that Particle Fever wouldn’t have gotten made without the Kaplan’s vision, passion and dogged determination.

“I don’t want to make movies for a living,” he says. “I just wanted this movie to be made. I think that’s what it takes more broadly – if you see something that you think would be amazing, or cool or interesting if somebody did it, then you do it. In my case, I knew that unless somebody from inside the field made this film, it would never happen. And I knew how crazy it would be for anybody inside the field to take this on. It became a question of ‘If not me, who?’ I felt responsible in a sense. I also had the confidence – unjustified confidence, perhaps – that I could do it. In physics, if you have an idea, and you feel that it’s big, then you don’t let go. So I did it.”

David T. Walker – Noteworthy

“Releasing The Sidewalk was special. The first time I ever heard it on the radio I was driving in my car, and it came on the jazz station here in Los Angeles. Of course I pulled over and took a listen like I’d never heard it before. It was very nice little moment.” – David T. Walker

“Jimi was certainly was a very sensitive person. He was very quiet, and very much an introvert. I got to know him through Little Richard. Unfortunately, Jimi and I never actually worked together, which I would have enjoyed very much – he left this planet way too soon.” – David T. Walker

Al Jarreau – The Gift

“Singing was still very much a fun endeavor. I felt at home on the stage, and I enjoyed entertaining people, but, at that point in my life, school was still my main gig.” – Al Jarreau

“As if I didn’t have enough to keep me smiling, I got to be around some of the funniest comedians in the business. Performing at the Improv, and during the first season of Saturday Night Live, those things were all part of my journey – part of paying my dues.” – Al Jarreau

Carol Woods – Show Stopper

“I wanted to be a nurse. Singing was something that I did in church, and at the time I didn’t think it was something that could pay the bills. I pictured myself working in a hospital my whole career. I’m glad it didn’t work out that way.” – Carol Woods

“I performed in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan. The Baby Grand in Brooklyn. The Baby Grand in Manhattan. I worked with some of the greats – Dizzy Gillespie in Jersey, Horace Silver, Mongo Santamaria. Brilliant performers. I did a lot of things that I don’t even talk about.” – Carol Woods

David Kaplan – Particle Fever

Google Analytics