A Conversation with Larry Rosen – HuffPost 9.26.12

Mike Ragogna: Hi, Larry!

Larry Rosen: Hey, how are you, Mike?

MR: I’m good, how are you, sir?

LR: Great. Very good.

MR: Larry, what chose a signing, and when you had an artist, how did you work with them? How did you develop them, record them, all that?

LR: Well, it’s a very personal kind of thing. Dave and I, being musicians, were playing together for many years back in my drummer days and Dave was a pianist and a conductor for Andy Williams, and then we played on records together, so we had a certain sense of what we both like from a musical standpoint of view. That obviously became a very key component of it. The next part, we’d see fine young artists that we were really interested in and we both thought, “This is an artist to deal with,” then we’d decide what kind of music we’d do with this artist, how we would frame the music he or she’s basically doing. So that was how the decisions were made. Early on, we were in the studio with every artist. We actually made the records. I was involved in doing all the engineering and recording and Dave was doing the writing and arranging, but prior to going into the studio, we’d talk about what kind of material we should do with them, what kind of arrangements should there be, who are going to be the other players on the record, and so on, and then we’d go into the studio and make those records. It was really very personalized, especially in the beginning. Then GRP got bigger and bigger and we had bought us way beyond what we had the bandwidth to go in and produce all these records we were making. We brought in additional producers, but at the same time, we stayed in touch with that producer that we’d hire and those artists and worked very closely with what kind of music they were doing and how we were going to market and promote it.

MR: On this new double disc GRP collection, there are so many highlights as far as these artists’ careers. For instance, David Benoit’s “Kei’s Song” is one of those tracks that you’d hear non-stop on “smooth jazz” stations of the time. Now, we talked about the identity of GRP earlier with Dave, and debunked the concept of “smooth jazz.” It seems Jjazz evolved into — I don’t want to say “junior pop” — but it took a cue from what was going on in the pop scene. Would that be accurate?

LR: Well first of all, let me start by saying that three of us are totally in agreement. I don’t like that term at all. I certainly wouldn’t be characterizing anything we’re doing as “smooth jazz.” I never really thought about it from that point of view. That was kind of like a thing that was created by the radio industry somewhere down the path when these kinds of records got an exposure and there was thought to be a very large audience for it and the record sales were very high. All of a sudden, someone created a formula or factory version of what it’s supposed to be, what it wasn’t to start with. There’s so much creativity and there are so many elements in this music and it was narrowed down to this very narrow smooth thing to be played primarily in stores as background music, I think, and it kind of turned a real negative cast on the development of the music. So I agree with you guys. I don’t like that term at all.

MR: The other concept is “GRP — The Digital Master Company.” What inspired your emphasizing the digital recording aspect?

LR: Well, as I said, I got involved in the engineering of these records, and both of us were always very interested in the sound quality of anything we made in music and in general. We were always striving for the best possible sound and looking at technologies that were emerging all the time. We were traveling all around the world presenting this music and being in Japan, who was pretty much on the leading edge at that point technologically as far as audio was concerned. We saw a lot of things that were happening there and we came back to the United States and we met a guy named Dr. Tom Stockham from MIT who developed this whole system to take analog signals and translate them and store them in digital format. We said, “Let’s test this thing out.” We flew the guy and the equipment into New York City for a record while we were doing Dave’s record called Mountain Dance and we said, “We’ll record this the way we normally record analog, and we’ll also record it with this new digital technology we’ve been hearing so much about.” It was used primarily for classical music. When we heard the first playbacks, we were just so blown away by this digital technology, we said, “Wow, this is the way to go,” and from our trips to Japan, we saw that on the horizon. It was going to be two years coming on the market, what was going to be the compact disc, which would be a digital format, so you needed to have digital masters so you didn’t have that analog generation to generation [loss] every time you want to create a new product line. We said, “Let’s just deal with this digital area,” and we got very, very focused on it, and we were obviously one of the first ones to release compact discs in America. It helped formulate the whole company and we did it so much, we created “GRP — The Digital Master Company.” From a marketing perspective, it was really brand marketing from that point.

MR: Well, for a while, everybody began to use complete digital recording as opposed to using the analog to digital route. Then again, there were a lot of the analog-to-digital conversions that were going on.

LR: That is true.

MR: Many analog recordings stayed analog until the last moment, then they were converted to digital.

LR: Yeah, and that’s why on the disks themselves, that was like “AAD,” and very few records would be DDD — digitally recorded, mixed and mastered. We were the DDD part of this thing.

MR: Yeah, and I have to say, GRP projects had a nice dynamic range, considering the limitations of the digital top and bottom.

LR: Absolutely!

MR: You made the most of it. Do you have a couple of stories of your prouder moments of GRP, maybe involving some of the artists?

LR: Well, for us, it happened in a couple of steps, because Dave and I started out producing for various record labels, and that started out with people like Earl Klugh and Noel Pointer and Jon Lucien, and then, eventually, we got into starting our record company with Arista called Arista GRP. At Arista GRP, we started with Dave Valentin who was one of the first artists that signed, and after that, it was Angela Bofill and Tom Browne and so on. There was a lot of funk jazz and Latin jazz all combined together into kind of fusion-y music, it was called that at that particular point. And then with the digital technology, in 1982, which is where we’re getting the 30th anniversary right now, it became GRP as an independent company. At that point, we went out and started to find new artists, but also established artists, and that’s where we found people like Chick Corea and Gary Burton and so on, so there were a lot of well-established artists that we’d bring to the label. But finding young artists or new artists is always an exciting thing, I must say. Diane Schuur was one of those kinds of artists. One day, I happened to see a program from The White House and Dizzy Gillespie was bringing on an artist that he thought deserved more recognition, and that was Jon Faddis. And there was Stan Getz, and he brought on this singer that he found who was Diane Schuur. Well, I heard her sing, and I immediately made a phone call to Stan Getz and to a whole bunch of other people, brought her into New York and signed her, and it was like finding a jewel out there. Those kinds of things, when you make the first record with an artist like that, it’s always an exciting thing.

MR: Yeah, it’s beautiful. There’s so much energy from the artist because they’re all excited about their first project, and you’re all excited about the first project, and it’s nothing but up from there.

LR: It is, you’re absolutely correct.

MR: So cool. Larry, you’re a drummer. How did you resist those impulses?

LR: I tell you, playing is not only a creative endeavor, but there’s also an athletic component to being a musician, too. That’s why musicians play all day long. You talk to Sonny Rollins, he still practices eight hours a day. The reality of it is unless you’re doing that, that’s the only way you can stay at the top level of performing. Once I got involved in producing and engineering and then ultimately running a company, I didn’t have the time to devote to keeping my chops up as it’s called in the music business. If you’re not going to keep your chops up, you might as well just cut it right off, because you don’t want to go out there and play something you don’t feel proud of. So I said, “Look, if I could hire Dave Weckl, Steve Gadd and Harvey Mason and all the greatest drummers in the world, I may as well just stay here and tell them what I’d love to hear and let them do it because they’ll do it better than me anyway at this point.” I don’t have any problem with that. It’s not that I don’t miss playing, but there’s so much creative juice that’s going on in my body all the time with all the things that I do musically that I’m fulfilled on that end.

MR: On the other hand, it’s added to your knowledge and your being, at heart, a musician has brought that much joy working with all these artists, right?

LR: Absolutely. And, of course, the communication, because when you’re producing a record, a show, a TV show, a live performance concert, whatever, when I’m dealing with musicians, I’m speaking the same language. I’m in the band, basically. I’m a guy in the band who can translate exactly what we’re discussing to whatever the medium that we’re presenting it in at that point. I feel a very close relationship with the artists and they feel it as well. It’s the music business speak that you have, being a musician, that cuts through a whole bunch of other nonsense. I’m well versed in that because that’s what I come from. It’s a benefit on all ends.

MR: I bet there’s that dynamic in the marketing and business end as well. For instance, GRP was so influential and successful, it basically took over all of Universal’s jazz departments as it grew and as it started to swallow up labels like MCA’s Acoustic Series.

LR: Right, and then also, we took the Chess label, which was an archival label, and the Impulse label with John Coltrane, and the Decca label, which went back to Louis Armstrong and Ellington Recordings and Ella Fitzgerald, and released all those and re-released them. It’s a lot of fun going back through the history because this music’s all based on the legacy of how one guy learns from the next guy who learns from the next guy and he adds his own piece to it, so you’ve got to pay homage to the tradition and remember those guys who really created this music.

MR: You mentioned John Coltrane and Impulse, Impulse being one of the major jazz labels. Let’s talk about Jazz Roots, speaking of heritage, the concert series you’re overseeing that’s kicking off in September.

LR: I have like five or six concerts going on in cities and performing arts centers all around the country. I’m producing the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal competition at NJPAC in Newark, New Jersey, where Sarah comes from, and in Miami, I started this whole Jazz Roots series to bring jazz to Miami, which we’re doing in a 2,000-seat theater, and I do it in Las Vegas at the new Smith Center, which is just a wonderful, beautiful, magnificent facility. All these jazz concerts around the country that I produce are all tied together with education programs. I want to bring this music to schools and bring young people to the theater to see what this music’s all about and meet these artists. In fact, I had Al Jarreau go through the school system in Atlanta. I was getting emails all day long with pictures showing him with bands and talking to young people. It’s the most rewarding thing you can imagine.

MR: When you look at your career, who you’ve been associated with, who you’ve established in the jazz culture, and the success of GRP, what are your thoughts?

LR: I’m trying to bring this music in these new years of technology. The industry has changed so radically, where we are right now as a business, whether it’s media business associated with it like radio or television or cable or internet or iPods or downloading or uploading or whatever it is, it really is amazing all the platforms that exist out there. So the question is how do you use all of these platforms and all of this technology to just bring this music to more and more people. For me, it’s always connecting the music, the artist, and the audience. That’s really the name of the game. It’s that middle part that keeps changing all the time. The artists want to present their music to audiences, audiences want to receive this stuff. The question is how do you make the connection? That’s kind of a creative endeavor by itself. I think that’s where I’m at, at this point. I’m working on this big project with Quincy Jones on the history of American music. I am just totally blown away by all the research that we’re doing and all the interviews I’ve been shooting with major artists. Seventy major artists. I’ve done interviews now with everybody from Quincy on to Billy Joel, Dave Brubeck, Paul Simon, Norah Jones and Smokey Robinson to talk about music and where did it come from and how did they get turned on by it and what does it mean? What does it mean to our culture? Why does this represent America more than almost anything else does, and it’s respected all over the world. And why do Americans not quite connect the dots together between Louis Armstrong and Jay-Z? Something’s missing here, and I feel I have a mission to fill in the blanks.

MR: Quite a mission. If you don’t mind, can I ask you to fill in some blanks right now, which would be what advice do you have for new artists?

LR: You know, you’ve got to look at the people that came before. I think understanding Duke Ellington and John Coltrane will give you a better insight into where all this should be going and where it’s going to go, because the other influences you have, which are in your life everyday — what you’re hearing on the radio, what you’re seeing on the net, what’s on YouTube — that’s the most current element, but you’ve got to understand the roots of where this all comes from. Then when you go from there, the advice that I have for any artists — and I can tell you this from putting on my record company hat — I always looked for individuality. I remember I had managers that would come and call me up and say, “Look, I have the greatest guitar player, you’ve got to hear him. This guy sounds just like George Benson,” and I’d say, “Why would I want to hear this person, then? There is a George Benson. I want to hear somebody who doesn’t sound like anybody. That’s what I want to hear.” So an individual voice is really a very important thing in music.

MR: When you look at the state of music right now, what do you think?

LR: I think it’s incredibly exciting. I think it’s an exciting time, because the world has gotten so small that the exposure to so many different kinds of rhythms and colors in music are available to everybody. When I see young people and what they’re doing today, they’re really bringing things together. We talked about “fusion” and “smooth jazz.” That’s really coming full circle. There are so many musicians bringing together so many elements that I think are incredibly creative endeavors. I only see a great future for music. I’ve got to tell you, I have people that come to me all the time and say, “Well the music business is nothing like it used to be,” and I say, “Of course it’s not like it used to be!” Everything is moving forward. But it’s not going away, that’s for sure. It’s getting more exciting from my perspective. That’s the way I look at the world.

MR: Yeah, and there’s so many more ways to market and present your music to the public.

LR: Exactly.

MR: All right, let’s go out talking about The GRP All-Star Big Band. Can you spend a few seconds talking about that act? I know it was a conglomeration of the GRP acts, but whose idea was it to bring everybody together and make a record or two like that?

LR: Well, that’s my schtick, you know? “Come on, I want to get all these artists together just like they do with Motown. I want to bring our artists together and present them as one unified team, basically.” It’s not just a whole bunch of separate artists, because they have so much respect for each other. So to bring together an all-star band like this, I thought it was just incredible, because they were all great players and it was just one of those things like, “Leave your ego at the door. Here’s the chart, sit down and play your part. Let’s hit it.” Everybody was blown away in that band playing with each other, so it was tremendously exciting. It was the GRP All-Star Big Band and we made a number of records, won some Grammys, and this track on the collection is “Blue Train,” so talking about respecting the people that came before, this is in honor of John Coltrane.

MR: In honor of Mister Coltrane. Thank you for all your time, Larry. I really appreciate it.

LR: Well thanks Mike, it was a pleasure.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne