A Conversation with Mindi Abair – HuffPost 4.18.14

Mike Ragogna: So Mindi, it seems that you have a new album, Wild Heart, with guest performances by folks like Gregg Allman, Booker T. Jones, Keb’ Mo, Trombone Shorty, ai yi yi, I have to stop there.

Mindi Abair: [laughs] Joe Perry, Max Weinberg… [laughs]

MR: Okay, how the heck did you get this cast of millions on the album?

MA: It’s really been an interesting journey for me. When I started out, my dream was only to be a solo artist. That’s all I wanted. But along the way a different journey crept in. I started as a sideman for people, playing on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. I got picked up off the streets by Bobby Lyle and he hired me for his tour and record and it snowballed from there and I started playing with all kinds of artists, R&B with Teena Marie, jazz with Bobby Lyle and Jonathan Butler to becoming Adam Sandler’s sax player and then the Backstreet Boys for their Millennium tour and Mondy Moore and Duran Duran. In all of this time, I became a solo artist and started putting out records. Wild Heart is my second. I don’t moonlight as much with different artists now, it’s been my band for twelve or thirteen years, but now I pick and choose things carefully. Over the last couple of years, I’ve started playing on American Idol and it really inspired me, being a part of the careers of all of these contestants. Phillip Phillips was the one that I ended up playing with the most. Then right out of there, I played for Aerosmith, I joined them for their Summer tour and that was just insane. Then a really crazy thing happened. I guess if you’re out there enough you put yourself up for really cool things happening, when Clarence Clemons died… I was such a huge fan, and people around me knew it, I put out a couple of Facebook posts and I got a call about possibly playing with Max Weinberg some of Clarence’s parts on the road with him and I just jumped at that chance. All these things put together, that led to playing with Bruce Springsteen for a night, these things put together, it’s just these kinds of things that come across for me that might not if I was not out there as much, but it’s been a real gift to meet different people along the way and gain all these friendships and musical partnerships. But I always thought that it would just be me participating in their careers, I never thought that Joe Perry from Aerosmith would be on my CD. I never thought maybe Max Weinberg would play on my CD. Some things happened along the way and I got very lucky and made some really incredibly friends who gave me some of their mojo on this CD.

MR: Wow. You’ve already had the type of career that most musicians would be so envious of. You know, you could’ve retired after about a quarter of the way through all this and had an amazing career.

MA: [laughs] I can’t stop! I’m having so much fun. Some of these things I’d never dream about. We all make goals and dreams and, “I want to do this,” and “I have my goal to do this by this year,” I always wanted to be a solo artist and I’m that, but what a great chance, to be able to write and record with Gregg Allman. That wasn’t one of my goals, but it happened and it’s such a gift. The same with Max Weinberg and Joe Perry and Booker T. Sometimes you can’t dream it up, you just have to live it out and the journey takes you into some amazing places if you let it.

MR: And there’s Dave Koz. You were part of his Summer Horns extravaganza.

MA: That was an amazing adventure. Dave Koz and I were at dinner, we’ve known each other forever and have been friends forever and played festivals together but never toured together or recorded together, so his thought was to make a record with four saxophonists–I don’t know if this has ever been done, I don’t think it has–a tribute record to the great horn bands and choose songs from Tower Of Power and Chicago and Sly & The Family Stone and Stevie Wonder and all these bands that just made the horn section incredibly famous. So we put together four people…what an incredible lineup. I couldn’t be more honored to be a part of it–Dave Koz, Richard Elliot, Gerald Albright and myself. We called it Summer Horns, we made the record and put it out there and toured all last year, we’re actually touring with it again this year because it was just so fun. It was really amazing to stand shoulder to shoulder with these guys in the studio and then live in each of the performances and just play off of them and become a part of each other’s fabric of how we play music and how we perceive melody and improvisation and all of this. I have to say I’m such a better sax player today than a year ago when we started out on the road together. It’s just really inspiring and a beautiful thing to be pushed every night by these great players. It’s been great.

MR: Do you think having been part of Koz’s Summer Horns affected how you approached Wild Heart creatively?

MA: You know, Wild Heart was really inspired by these last couple of years of dipping my toe into different worlds. I think sometimes you can get so immersed into your own career as a solo artist, you spend over a decade just being you and writing your songs and playing the way you do and reading your own band, it’s such an amazing gift to be able to find yourself in that way and spend so much time being you, but at a certain point it is fun to walk into someone else’s world and be inspired or pushed in a different direction and see where it takes you. I couldn’t say no to Aerosmith. Steven Tyler called me up. Are you kidding me? There are very few bands I would take off from my band and say, “I’m going to be gone for a couple of months, but it’s going to be okay.” Aerosmith is one of those.

MR: Were you thinking about how to best use your guests as they came onto this project?

MA: Actually, this whole record was not based on guests. I didn’t have anyone in mind starting out. But like I said, the last couple of years since I made my last record were really powerful for me. I stood on stage with Springsteen, I stood on stage with Aerosmith, I stood on stage with Summer Horns and these were all instances that you really had to bring everything you had. Standing on stage with Aerosmith in front of fifty thousand plus people a night, you really have to bring your A-game and you have to play with this ridiculous abandon every night. You have to just give a thousand percent because that’s what everyone else gives. They’re out there sweating and bleeding for their audience every night and I thought to myself after a while, “I want to bring this to my music,” and I do that live. We rock live, we’re definitely the rockers of the jazz world in my eyes, live, but I’d never brought it to a recording. That was what inspire dme ot write these songs and to play the way I did. Even when we were recording the songs that I was writing, I was thinking… Like with the song “Kick Ass,” I wrote it with my friend Matthew Hager who has written with me for every CD that I’ve made, but when we started recording it just didn’t have that power, it didn’t have the muscle that I wanted from it, and I’m sitting there trying to figure out, “What’s going to make this work? Why is it not killing me the way it should be?” In my mind I pictured Joe Perry with his shirt ripped open and the wind blowing in his hair, walking down that front runway in front of sixty thousand people screaming and just rocking it, and I was like, “That’s it.” And then I thought to myself, “Wait! I know Joe Perry! I’m going to make a call!” So I did, and he was nice enough to say yes and kill it just the way I had it in my head.

MR: You mentioned seeing yourself as a rocker. So how would you define this album outside of being just jazz?

MA: I don’t think of this record as a jazz album or a rock record or a soul record. What I defined it as in my mind, making it, I looked back to the beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll when saxophone was as integral of an instrument as the guitar, and it was a really cool instrument, and it wasn’t jazz, it was mainstream music and saxophone was just the coolest instrument on the planet in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll. You had people like Junior Walker and King Curtis who were solo artists that were mainstream. I thought, “I want to see this again. I want to be that. I want to be the person that makes a record that Joe Schmo who’s not a jazz aficionado will buy off the street, but he’s going to dig the saxophone and saxophone’s going to be cool to him in this era of recent history where only jazz aficionados like saxophone and saxophone’s a jazz instrument. I would like that to open up a little bit.” I wanted to make the record that would just be a mainstream record that wouldn’t be defined by a certain genre but would follow in the footsteps of King Curtis or Junior Walker or even someone like Clarence Clemons.

MR: If there was one track that you wanted to tell everyone to go to, what would it be?

MA: Yeah, the one song that I’ve been playing for people before this record has come out was the song that Gregg Allman and I wrote. It’s just really beautiful and organic, what an amazing thing to sit with Gregg Allman and write for a couple days at his house. We just had a great time and what an amazing magic he has as a musician and a writer. It was incredible to go into the studio with him because he’s such a master. He just has that “it” factor that he brings to a track. Usually when I record a CD, I slave over it and spend hours and months and don’t sleep for months and work on it and then I never listen to it again, but this record, there are a couple of tracks that I keep pushing play on and the song, “Just Say When,” that Gregg and I worked on I couldn’t be prouder of. It’s a ballad but it just has heart and it makes me feel. Maya Angelou said, “They’ll forget what you said, they’ll forget what you did,” I’ll add something, they’ll forget what you played, “but,” she said, “they’ll remember how you made them feel.” I always want that from a song, whether it’s a total rocker or whether it’s a ballad, but “Just Say When,” it makes me feel, and it brings me to a different place. I think that’s a winner.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

MA: What advice? Hmm, that’s a really good question. I learned a lesson pretty early on that was great for me to learn: When I was in high school I wanted to be in the jazz band, the Florida All-State Jazz Band–I’m from Saint Petersburg, Florida–I thought, “All the cool kids are in the rock band or the jazz band,” so I wanted to try out for it. I started practicing, but I kind of psyched myself out and I figured, “Wow, all these kids are going to audition for this, and there’s so many people that are better than me in Florida, I just know these guys are going to eat me alive, so why am I even trying for this?” I just totally psyched myself out. You know, you’re seventeen years old, you’re going to psych yourself out. So I quit. I was just like, “I’m not even going to do this, I’ll just stay where I’m at, I’m cool.” My father came in and he was like, “All right, you’re going to quit? All right, sure, just quit.” I didn’t like it said that way, so I went back to it. I was like, “All right, I’ll just do it. I’ll go in and I’ll audition.” I went in and I did the audition and I got first chair alto saxophone in the Florida All-State Jazz Band. I came back and I’m like, “Dad, I got it! Oh my God! I got it!” and he goes, “This is a good lesson for you. Sometimes it’s not the most talented people that get what they want, it’s the people that go out there and put themselves on the line and go for it again and again and again that get what they want.” I thought that was the best lesson in the world. I’ve always lived by that. I wanted Gregg Allman on my record, so I asked him, and he said yes. I wanted Booker T. Jones on my record and I could’ve just said, “Oh my gosh, he’d never be on my record.” But I asked and he said yes. Sometimes you just have to go out there and put yourself on the line and believe in yourself and magical things will happen.

MR: Really nicely said. Where do you go from here? How much wilder does your heart get from here?

MA: [laughs] I love that. Boy, who knows? Even a couple of years ago I don’t think I could’ve pictured a record with all of these incredible artists on it helping me out. I don’t know where it goes from here, but I know that I’ve been open to the journey from the beginning of my career until now and some things I never could have even dreamed of have happened. So I’m completely open to the future journey and I’m just going to go for it, make music and have fun and hopefully make more friends like the ones I have now who are making me sound so good on this record, adding so much mojo to it.

MR: Sounds like a plan.

MA: Sometimes not planning is better.

MR: By the way, can you go a little bit into your work with NARAS?

MA: NARAS, if you don’t know, is the company that puts on the Grammys. There are twelve different chapters around the country, I’m the president of the Los Angeles chapter. We’re the largest chapter. It’s been a very inspiring position to be in, to lead the incredible people that are on my board of governers here in Los Angeles and try and use our powers for good, to better our standings. Last week we actually descended on Capitol Hill, about two hundred of us from around the country, all NARAS members. We were briefed and we went into sixty five different meetings with senators and congressmen and lobbied for our rights as creators of music and as artists. We talked about performance issues and lobbied for the songwriters’ equity act and things that will make our lives easier and more equitable as musicians and writers. I think that I love being a part of NARAS because it’s not just about the Grammys, that’s one day a year, but I can give back and I can help the future generation of musicians along with those of us that have been in the business a while. We have outreaches like the Grammy Foundation that reaches out to kids and music educators, I’m sure you’ve seen the music educator award on the Grammys. We go out to kids and talk to them and help inspire them and help them gain resources that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise have. That’s really important to me. I grew up with that, I grew up with school band. We also have MusiCares which reaches out to help musicians. We raise millions of dollars a year to help musicians that may have lost their insurance, may have gone down a bad path with substance abuse and need help or if they need a kidney and they don’t have insurance, what do you do? We really reach out and help. I love being a part of that, and a really active part. It’s something important to me.

MR: I didn’t expect to go into this, but let’s do it. With the sheer amount of people trying to be musicians on a local level or online has so exponentially exploded from the days when the music business started. I don’t think anyone could have predicted it. Boys and girls are introduced to playing instruments now as a natural part of growing up. And that leads to a very visible percentage of the population who have dreams of becoming famous professional musicians. It seems like there’s nothing going on to really help your standard-issue musician who hasn’t broken out yet. What do you do with that huge amount of people out there?

MA: You bring up a great point. Technology has come to the point where we can all make records in our bedroom. We all have the apps, we all have the technology to multi track and to mix records and burn CDs and digitally upload them, so everyone can be a musician, whereas even thirty years ago that technology didn’t exist, people couldn’t make records in their bedroom, they had to get the chance to be signed by a record label, go into a studio, it was a much different path that you had to take. This has opened music and music creation up to the masses, which I think is a beautiful thing. It can only help creativity. It’s a revolution of possibility. But with that revolution of possibility in my estimation comes, “Oh, well how do we get our music heard? How do we get it seen?” That’s what we’re going through right now that people are trying to figure out. “Do I just put it on YouTube? How will someone find me? How will people make it to my music?” There are lots of different philosophies on this. For me, I think that if you make great music, people will find you. I think it’s less about the marketing and the self-promotion and the social media. If you’re great, people will find you and you will rise to the top. Cream always rises to the top. But it is an interesting time in history. Everyone has the same possibility, it’s a level playing field of, “Go make your record, put it on the internet, go play live, go do this or this or this and see what happens,” because those huge machines are only in place for a couple really huge pop stars. Really, it’s mostly indie apart from that total top of the heap Top Forty market. I know my chapter of NARAS does mentoring sessions all the time, we do events that have professional development angles every week and make them available to our members, because that’s something all these members coming in and new artists, people who want to be in this business, didn’t have access to some of the stuff that we did with school band programs or how I went to college for music at Berkeley College Of Music, so we really try and offer that and up their game. It’s only good for all of us that everyone has the tools to succeed.

MR: What about those with the amazing creativity but aren’t great at marketing themselves? It seems like the culture has turned away from allowing artists to be artists and is now asking them to be marketers and producers as well.

MA: It’s very dangerous, because we should be artists and we shouldn’t have to worry about that, but I almost feel like, “Find a best friend who’s a techie. Don’t try and be all things to all people, you’re just going to stifle yourself, I think.”

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne