Smitty: Well, I have to ask you something. I mean, you’ve done so many of these great sessions.
TE: We’ve done about 30, to date about 36 or so, 36 episodes.
Smitty: Wow. How do you sleep at night after something like that? Good grief!
TE: You know, I tell ya, it’s kinda strange. Leading up to the sessions, it’s like playing three dimensional chess. Have you ever seen those three dimensional chess sets?
Smitty: Oh yeah.
TE: Where—and I’ve never played. I have trouble with two dimensional chess. But you’re playing diagonally on different levels and all this, and to put one of these together, sometimes it’s a little chaotic and so leading up to the session it’s a real challenge sometimes because one musician can come in at one o’clock but he has to leave at three and another guy needs to be picked up at the airport at ten of twelve and then he needs his amp picked up, and then he’ll do it, this other guy will do it, and this guy can do it if this other guy doesn’t. To piece it together sometimes is very challenging and I’m not complaining; it’s just that’s where the work really is, so then when we hit, when the session starts, it’s a pleasure from the moment they arrive to the moment they end, and when they do leave, invariably I’m always wishing like oh, geez, I wish I would’ve asked Pat Martino about such and such or, you know, I’m always kinda kicking myself a little bit.
Smitty: Yeah, I’ve done that here. (Both laugh.)
TE: Yeah, but then my camera men are pretty aggressive, so when a session—they’re pretty independent, so I might be working with one camera man working with the drummer and I look over my shoulder and I see that my other camera man is doing a little interview with the bass player, and so I don’t even know as it’s coming down what I’m getting, if you will, until after the fact and then the session’s over with and then next week I’ll log the tapes and look at the source material and I’m pleasantly surprised more often than not that wow, geez, that’s great. I’m glad that we got that comment from such and such. And so editing it is the challenge and editing is just what do we leave out? Because sometimes, well, as you know, at the sessions there’s just so much going on and I can only use 47 minutes of material for the hour-long show, and I gotta tell ya this too, and forgive me if I’m rambling here.
Smitty: No, no, no. I love it.
TE: As nice as some of the episodes do come out, some of the best material never makes it to air because—one case comes to mind. We had a session with Larry Carlton and Joey DeFrancesco and Gerald Veasley, and they did a rendition of “All Blues,” the Miles [Davis] tune. It would just give you goosebumps, but when it was all done it was about 12 minutes long and I was just like oh, man, it’s a little too long and I hate to, in editing, cut down their performance. I’ve done it, I think, twice but I like to use the music they produce as is and they don’t go back in and punch in mistakes or whatever. It is what it is. But this tune was so great and I had them do it again. I said “Oh, that was just killer, guys, but it was just too long” and they did a really nice job in the next version of it. It was, I don’t know, seven minutes long or eight minutes long, and they cut out a solo or something, and it was really still nice but in the back of my mind, every time I see it, I go “Oh, man, if you guys could only hear the other take.” And that’s the case with, really, a lot of the sessions. I mean, we’ve done like it’s what, 36 sessions? And if there are four songs I use from each session, there’s probably two or three songs that I don’t even use from each session so, yeah, I have more great stuff on my shelves that has never been seen as much as there is out there, you know? Which is really kinda neat.
Smitty: Yeah, you’ve got like the Fort Knox of jazz, you know?
TE: There are really some special golden moments and I try, when I can, to accommodate the musicians. When I first got started—I mean, again, I owe so much to Victor Wooten for the inspiration, I just love Victor—but early on I would try to produce these shows and I would reach out to musicians and say “Hey, you wanna come in and do a jam session? I’m not really sure who you’re gonna be playing with yet, but it’s gonna be fun.” And managers and artists would be, their initial reaction was “Well, wait a minute. You want me to come in and just jam with people I don’t know for TV? Uh, I don’t think so. Call me back after you figure out who’s gonna be there.” It was a struggle to put together the musicians. And I say struggle—the world is full of musicians—it just meant more phone calls, but now I have artists and managers and labels proactively calling me saying “Hey, such and such will be in town next month. You wanna do something with him?” So the job of putting the sessions together is…
Smitty: It’s at the other end of the spectrum now, trying to fit everybody in.
TE: Yeah, and it’s a different kind of challenge because it might be that a particular musician is coming through town but I don’t need to produce another episode yet or I can’t find a strong enough supporting cast, and I’ll ask a lot of these musicians when they’re working there and say “When we do this again, is there somebody that you’ve never worked with that you’d really want to play with?” And I mentioned Larry Carlton earlier and Larry has never met nor worked with McCoy Tyner, oddly enough, so I’ve always had in the back of my mind that whenever a session’s coming up or if I can reach out to McCoy and get him in a session, I know that Larry would be the first person I call. I want it to be enjoyable for the musicians.
Because I know that when that session does come together Larry’s gonna play his socks off and we’ll have a wonderful session. It’ll be magical for those guys. So I’m all about trying to—it’s all about the music, Smitty. It’s not about somebody’s marquee name. I’d much rather work with—for the lack of a better word, I’m just gonna call them supporting cast or the supporting players, the guys who are not the headliners but they are fantastic—or case in point, drummer Rayford Griffin. Rayford…I love him. Rayford has become, in addition to a dear friend, just one of my favorite drummers and he plays with everybody. You know Rayford.
Smitty: Oh yeah.
TE: And he’s done, I don’t know, four or five different episodes with me and he’s just a monster. There’s a lotta players like that who don’t get the recognition. And a lot of these musicians have done it three, four, five times because it’s important, much like a stereo system where your stereo is only as strong as your weakest component. I don’t wanna put together a band of four A-List cats and then bring in a drummer who just started taking lessons two weeks ago because the session will just nosedive, so I try to keep the bar high and if it is a bluegrass player with a rock player, let them be experienced and I know in my mind—if I know them personally, I know that they are at a level where they can adapt to one another.
I remember one session—and again I keep going back to Victor Wooten—but there was one session where after the session, and Victor was on it, I had said “Oh, man, Victor, I was about to invite a violin player from the Philadelphia Orchestra. Now, of course, the Philadelphia Orchestra is one of the finest orchestras in the world, so the musicianship of all those guys in the orchestra is fabulous, but I was just concerned that maybe this violinist wasn’t into the whole jazz improv way of doing things. He might be technically proficient and wonderful but he would have a difficult time adjusting to the rest of these jazz cats. And I said “You know, Vic, I almost called this violin player but I was just concerned about him not being able to adapt” and Vic said “You know, Tom, it’s not about him adapting to us as much as it’s us adapting to him, so next time invite him.”
Smitty: How cool.
TE: And I was like “Okay.” And it’s that attitude that was so refreshing, you know?
Smitty: Yeah, absolutely, man. Well, I just wanna say that this has got to be such a relaxed thing for the musicians because I noticed the smiles on everyone’s face and how much they really got into the music once they started to play. The cameras didn’t bother them at all and between sessions there was some food and you always have great food there for everybody to eat, some snacks, and then they get to come back into the studio and listen to just a snippet of the session. I mean, it was just a great experience and I think in some respects for the artists it’s like a sightseeing tour of their own craft. It’s an opportunity to hear what they do in a different setting, in a more relaxed setting. I thought it was just a fantastic thing.
TE: Oh, thank you. You know, that’s a keen observation. I sometimes take it for granted because as the sessions happen, I am kind of oblivious because I don’t even hear half the stuff that’s going down because I’m making sure that the cameras have enough tape stock and making sure that they’re recording in the studio. I keep one ear and one eye on the musicians but the other ear and eye are on the technical side, so I don’t fully appreciate it until I’m in the editing suite, and you’re right, though. They seem to enjoy it and it’s interesting to see the musicians—well, actually, there’s another musician—because little stories like this probably help a little bit.
Smitty: Yeah.
TE: Oteil Burbridge is the bass player for the Allman Brothers Band, but Oteil is a wonderful, wonderful jazz bass player but he’s well unrecognized as such because his bread and butter gig is the Allman Brothers and that’s blues rock, but he is in the same class of bass player as Jimmy Haslip and Victor Wooten, just a real monster on the instrument, and Oteil was saying that what he really liked about being on the show was that typically when he’s on television, whether it’s on the Tonight Show or Jimmy Kimmel and it’s with the Allman Brothers, that the television exposure that they have, they’re expected to either play the hit that everybody knows or else certainly play in the genre that people know them as, so Oteil’s playing Allman Brothers stuff every time he’s on television, which is great for the Allman Brothers and great for Oteil, but he said what’s fresh, what he loves about Studio Jams is that he can come in and just play what he wants, and that’s how I want it to be, you know?
A lot of people have asked me “Geez, can I come to the session?” or “You should sell tickets to this and have a little audience and that would be cool” but I don’t think I will ever have an audience for the reason that I think it’s too risky. I want the musicians, their mindset to be “Hey, I’m coming to play and have fun with my musical friends” and that’s what it is. You add an audience in there and then suddenly it’s a gig.
