Smitty: (Laughs.) Which is a great song.
PW: (Laughs.) That one I went back and forth with. I kept thinking to myself, “How do I take it from the very pop way Burt Bacharach did it and make it different? How do I make it modern and yet keep the feel and not make it sound too different?” So I tried different approaches with that, the one thing I was going to do is….I had done a track where it was kinda like I did more of a straight ahead jazz kind of groove to it and I sort of felt…. “You know, this is okay but it’s just not really there for me yet with that,” so I threw that away and then I was listening to Carlos Santana one day and I said, “I love, of course, the Latin feel that Santana has in his music, it’s just so sexy to me” and I’m thinking—and she is talking about “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” You know what I mean?
Smitty: Yeah.
PW: Which is very Latin, and I remember saying, “Okay, it’s gotta have a Latin flavor. With the title of the song, it’s just gotta keep that kind of groove,” so then I came up with that little Santana Latin kind of funk groove for that song and I loved it. So I got excited about that. And then when I did a couple of the other tracks, “A House Is Not A Home” and “Anyone Who Had A Heart,” basically those two I just did the rendition that Luther Vandross did because I was like, you know, they’re so cold blooded the way he did them, I can’t even imagine doing them any better.
Smitty: Oh yeah.
PW: But now that was a challenge because now Luther, the way he sang those songs, he’s so smooth. I was in the studio for hours trying to play what he sang on the saxophone and deliver it the way he did and I had to rethink the whole thing. I just had to listen to what he’s singing.
Smitty: Yeah, he had such a unique delivery.
PW: Yes, didn’t he?
Smitty: Yeah, and so that’s extraordinary in itself, you know?
PW: Yeah, yeah, so those two songs were, like I said, I just basically redid what Luther did with his arrangements, but the challenge there was trying to take a song and make it just as sensual as Luther Vandross on the saxophone.
Smitty: Yeah, and that’s quite a feat because he had delivered that in such a unique and rare art kind of way.
PW: Yes. Luther could take a song and you would hear his version and some of the songs I didn’t even know somebody else had written them years before and recorded them.
Smitty: Yeah, he just took over, didn’t he? (Laughs.)
PW: Yeah. (Laughs.) I was like “Oh wow, somebody else did this song?” Couldn’t even imagine. He just made it so Luther, so unique.
Smitty: Yeah, some of the songs he did, we just started calling them Luther Vandross songs.
PW: Yeah, yeah! As a matter of fact, I did an interview with someone a few days ago and we were having a conversation about this and she was saying that “When I listened to your arrangements of these songs, it’s like they sound the same but yet they do sound new like you’ve made them your own,” and it’s like how I feel when I listen to Luther Vandross. I feel like they’re almost different songs. And she was like “So I now know I’m gonna be listening to these songs, this project, a lot.”
Smitty: Well, that’s an interesting observation because I felt the same way because you developed a groove with this record with every song and it’s your stamp, you might say, because they’re great grooves, great melodies that just really give the song another feel.
PW: And speaking of melodies, for instance, “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again.” Actually, yeah, that one but more so than that one, “You’ll Never Get To Heaven If You Break My Heart.” I haven’t played the melody…when it was time for me to record my saxophone, I ran in the studio all quick and I picked up the sax and I started playing the melody and I’m like “Wait a minute, this is not sounding…it’s a simple melody, but I don’t like my approach to it,” so I would come back out and I’d listen to Dionne Warwick’s vocal and how she sang it. I’m like “I need it to just flow a little bit more smooth the way Dionne did it.” She was like butter when she sang it, you know?
Smitty: Yeah.
PW: And I remember playing it over…since I recorded it again and feeling…. “I’ve gotta get this melody, the feel of this melody, right before I record it.” I remember going over it about 15 times myself until I came out with the right approach to that melody and I’m like “I’m too aggressive, I gotta lay back a little bit more and just kinda let it be lazy and slow, a little bit behind the track.”
Smitty: Absolutely. Well, you accomplished it because the melodies and the grooves are just incredible.
PW: Oh, thank you.
Smitty: Did you get curious with what instrument to use, the soprano vs. the alto and that kind of thing?
PW: Oh, definitely, definitely. Sometimes once I come up with the groove of the song and then just listen to the song itself, the original song, I could kinda in my head hear what would sound really good on the alto and what would sound good on the soprano now. Initially I had found myself playing alto on maybe eight of the ten songs and I was thinking that I gotta play soprano on this project. So when I was doing “A House Is Not A Home” I tried it on alto and I didn’t change the key that Luther sang it in so when I played it on alto it just didn’t work well for me because it was in a range that was too high.
So I tried it on tenor and then I started to wonder if it was in a range where it’s too low now because now it’s in the same key that Luther Vandross sang it, but yet I had captured that low range—those things that he did vocally I’m able to hit that on a tenor, so I was glad that I switched over on the tenor with that song. And I didn’t know like “I Say A Little Prayer For You,” I wasn’t sure if I was gonna do that one—I think I had messed around with that on tenor at first and then I didn’t like it because I thought “This needs to sound really feminine and really light and really nice.” So I thought maybe let me try it on soprano. I thought soprano was not great for that and definitely “Alfie” I had to do on the alto.
Smitty: Yes, that’s a great song too.
PW: Yeah, “Alfie”. There are certain songs—with the different saxophones, it does make a difference when you play songs on the different horns because they change the whole feel. Once you switch from one sax to the other, the whole feel of the song changes.
Smitty: Well, I know we’ve really analyzed these songs in great detail and we’ve probably talked about some things that maybe the audience may not quite understand, but let’s put it in perspective because that’s how good this record is…. that you want to talk about every aspect of it.
PW: Oh, great.
Smitty: But if someone asked you to describe the music of Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick, how would you do it?
PW: Oh, I would say the music to me is very magical, very dreamy, very upbeat, and, well, I gotta say, these horns, just when I hear it, it’s something about that music it makes me feel just joy inside. I just feel like it puts me in a good mood. Even the songs that are sad, like “Walk On By” is a very sad song if you listen to the lyrics.
Smitty: Right.
PW: It still makes me feel good even if like oh my God, yeah, it’s talking about, you know, “If you see me walking down the street, and I start to cry.”
