A Conversation with Lee Ritenour – HuffPost 10.5.12

Mike Ragogna: Lee!

Lee Ritenour: Hey, how you doing, Mike?

MR: Pretty good, how are you?

LR: Just fine. Just fine. I’m excited about the new project that’s out there for all of my fans.

MR: I know, and look at the talent you wrangled for Rhythm Sessions. Considering the material, as far as the compositions and writers, your playing and also the guests and arrangements, this is a pretty ambitious project.

LR: Yeah, I think I’m close to forty-five albums now and it seems like I used almost all my experience from all the previous years to put together these projects. Not necessarily that they start out that way, but with my producing experience and arranging and guitar playing, it gets me excited to put together something fresh that challenges myself and challenges my listeners. So, in the case of Rhythm Sessions, the new record, I wanted to really explore all the different ways that the piano, bass and drums are used in today’s modern world, especially in the jazz-oriented world. With that in mind, I covered some straight ahead jazz, I covered some ballads, I covered more funk, more progressive…I really go quite a few different places with my guitar being the center of it and using the piano, bass and drums as almost the colors for exploring all of this stuff. In the process, I invited so many fantastic, almost legendary-type guys on the project.

MR: Yeah, for instance, on “The Village,” there’s you on guitar, of course, but there’s also George Duke on Fender Rhodes and synthesizer and Stanley Clarke on the bass. There’s Chick Corea’s “Children’s Song #1,” with Chick Corea guesting, and you’ve got Peter Erskine on drums. By the way, nice spin on the phrase “rhythm section” with your album title,Rhythm Session.

LR: Yes, exactly. Challenging myself in the studio and hanging and playing with all great players and younger ones as well, but especially the established ones, the level of the music just goes up. Ninety percent or maybe ninety-five percent of the album was recorded live in the studio together, so it was great in that sense.

MR: How do you feel about recording with musicians vibing together in the same room versus overdub, overdub, overdub?

LR: Well there’s nothing like it, especially when it comes to interacting and recording, playing with other players, and especially great players. The interaction can never be programmed by using loops and machines. Trust me, I’m a total techno geek and I have been there and even on this album if you’ll notice the colors, I used acoustic rhythm sections almost throughout the entire album, and almost everything you hear is recorded playing together and playing off of one another. But then I also do put a modern, fresh approach, there’s a lot of ambient, electronic sweetening done on the project after the fact. We didn’t use synthesizers to pretend we were a horn section or any of that garbage, but we used different kinds of colors to enrich the experience, always keeping my guitar and the rhythm section in mind. But I think you’re right in the sense that a lot of players, and actually even some younger players, who have rock bands, singer-songwriter type groups, soloists, and certainly jazz people already went through the phase of using machines and loops and have opted to go back to the beauty of people interacting. You can only take Pro Tools and Logic Audio and all these programming things so far. I work with some of the top programmers in the world and they can do amazing things with a single laptop computer, but you can never program what happens between four or five people in a room playing off of one another with that spontaneity.

MR: Wonderfully said. Lee, let’s have a little history lesson for everybody. So your new album is for Captain Fingers Productions and I think maybe that’s how we get into your history. Captain Fingers, of course, a nickname from The Mamas And The Papas days, right?

LR: Well, I started very young as a studio player and I was lucky enough to get some sessions when I was very young, one of them being with The Mamas And The Papas when I was about sixteen, and then later, I got to work with Peggy Lee and Lena Horne and Tony Bennett–I was about eighteen then–and then Sérgio Mendes, and from there on, I really started a studio career that was pretty flourishing by the time I was twenty-one. I was very lucky living in Los Angeles and having a lot of training and getting started. Sometimes, when I used to do live gigs, it was like any youngster with a lot of technique; you tend to show it off, so some fans started calling me “Captain Fingers” and that’s how that stuck.

MR: What actually is The Mamas And The Papas story?

LR: That’s a funny story. I was in kind of a crossover rock band at the time, trying to crossover jazz and rock and–this is really dating myself–but I was just a kid and it was the late sixties, and John Phillips from The Mamas And The Papas had agreed somehow to produce a demo or two on this group. So we went up to his studio in Bel Air, and it’s his house. In his mansion he had this incredible full-run professional recording studio. That was seriously impressive for me as a teenager to see that. The demos with the group never went anywhere, but he asked me to stay and do a session with him and a couple of other studio musicians who ended up being Lee Sklar on bass and Ed Greene on drums, who both went on to have amazing studio careers. I looked for that track for years and years to see if it came out and later, I heard that John used to just record constantly. Maybe years later, it came out, but it wasn’t one of the big hits or anything, but it was exciting for me to be on a session that young with that famous of a band.

MR: Yeah, it’s sweet to have been part of LA’s musical scene.

LR: Oh yeah, that was a great time in LA. A lot of fantastic music was being made.

MR: I want to throw out there what most already know, that you were influenced by folks like Wes Montgomery, John McLaughlin and Kenny Burrell. When you look at Lee Ritenour now and the way he’s playing and maybe how you started out, what have the major turns or growth spurts been to get you to Lee Ritenour now from where you’ve started?

LR: It’s interesting that you ask that, because in 2010, I did an album called 6-String Theory, which was all about the guitar and that almost evolved into a little bit of the same approach that I took on the latest record, Rhythm Sessions. In 2010, I did this guitar album where I paid homage to the guitar, and I covered six styles of guitar playing–jazz, rock, blues, acoustic, country and classical, and I’m going to answer your question in a second about the evolution thing. But I invited so many legendary players on that record to celebrate the guitar–B.B. King, George Benson, John Scofield, Slash, Steve Lukather, Joe Bonamassa, Robert Cray, Keb’ Mo’, Taj Mahal, on and on and on. In doing that record, I brought together, really, all of my experiences as a guitar player. When I was a kid, I loved anybody that could play the guitar great, so I was checking out Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burell, Joe Pass, Barney Kessel, all these guys. But then, this guy named Jimi Hendrix comes along and Eric Clapton comes along and Jeff Beck comes along, and at the same time, in Spain, the most famous of guitar players, who the normal fans don’t know, Segovia, was just turning the classical world upside down with the guitar. I ended up studying serious classical guitar with a great classical guitarist, Christopher Parkening. I was also checking out Chet Atkins, I was checking out B.B. King. If you could play, I was listening to it. So, forty years later, I’m still using all those varieties of styles and all those things I dived into that sort of define who Lee Ritenour is, which is sometimes, I’m the chameleon of all chameleons. I think that sort of has to do with my studio background. There’s definitely a Lee Ritenour style, and people who are my fans know what that is, but it’s kept me fresh and kept me young and kept me moving through a long, long career because I had the education and I had the variety and I had the love of music in general. I didn’t just stick with one thing.

MR: You just said that you took music lessons from Christopher Parkening?

LR: Yes. Yes, I studied with him and then went to USC and studied with Parkening there and ended up teaching at USC as well after I left the school.

MR: Lee, the group Fourplay is no stranger to you, you being an original member. How did Fourplay come together?

LR: Bob has probably told the story many times, but Harvey Mason, the drummer, worked a lot with Bob on a lot of recordings, and I think I probably met Bob through Harvey back in the earlier days, and I worked a little bit with Bob, and he worked a little bit with me, but he was back on the East Coast and I was on the West Coast, so we didn’t work together that much. Finally, Bob was doing his album called Grand Piano Canyon, and he invited me and Harvey, and Bob was wanting to come out to LA to record. He said, “Who should we call on bass?” and Harvey and I recommended Nathan East. So the four of us got together for Bob’s recording and it was just magic from the moment it happened. Bob, who had a very high position at Warner Brothers Jazz, said, “Hey I have the opportunity to do something if I want to bring a project to the label. Why don’t we do one group album?” This is a sort of reminder to everyone who starts a band in the way music should be made. It was a confluence of things that happened where I was in between my contract over at GRP Records and Harvey and Nathan were free. Bob had his deal at Warner’s and so the deal came together very quickly, and we made the record from the most innocent and positive perspective you can. We all agreed, “Let’s write a bunch of songs. We’ll get back together in Los Angeles in a couple of months and rehearse and everybody bring as many tunes as they can and we’ll all pick the tunes that we thing work the best.” We got together with Nathan in his house in the living room one day, and I had done probably the most homework. I think I wrote seven songs and quite a bit of my tunes ended up on the first record and Bob wrote a lot and Nathan was always traveling so he wrote a little less and Harvey wrote quite a bit. We ended up with this great combination of songs, and the first album is history and it was platinum and I believe the second album was gold almost platinum, and the third album did very well as well. I wasn’t able to stay because it got very complicated with the labels, unfortunately, and the politics of the music business kind of interfered later. But the beginnings of that band probably still resonate for Fourplay today.

MR: Lee, you have a The Pink Floyd connection with the album The Wall, specifically, the song “Run Like Hell.” And you’re also an uncredited rhythm guitarist on “One Of My Turns.” Will you go into that story ?

LR: Yeah, that was in my studio days. Because of the variety of my playing we were speaking about earlier, I’d get called for Motown R&B sessions, I’d get called for film days because I was a good reader, I’d get a call for the occasional rock ‘n’ roll dates as well as the jazz dates, so all of a sudden, I got a call from this very famous producer, Bob Ezrin, and I’d worked with him a little bit before and he said, “Lee, we’re doing a Pink Floyd album and we need a little help,” so I said, “Cool.” I went down there and I brought my big trunk of guitars and pedal boards thinking I was going to impress these guys, and David Gilmour at the studio had about fifty vintage guitars all lined up in stands all around the studio and every amplifier you can imagine, so I was the one that was impressed. But they were very sweet. They used a few studio people on that record, some background singers, I believe, and a second guitar, and on the original vinyl that came out for The Wall, I don’t think any of us were credited and I understood that at the time because they wanted to keep it like a band thing. I think later on as CDs evolved, they redid the credits and all the complete credits came out. I remember them playing back David’s solo on “Another Brick In The Wall” and they said, “What do you think of that ending?” and they asked my opinion about the ending and even had me try a couple licks to see what my thoughts would be about an alternative ending, knowing that they weren’t going to use my part but to kind of get my thoughts. Later, when that solo came out on the vinyl version, I felt like there was hint of maybe a couple of my licks in there.

MR: I love that story. I also love the track “Run Like Hell” and I’m always frustrated that every time they put out one of these compilations of Pink Floyd, they leave it off, despite it being a roc radio classic. That got so much airplay in the old days, and you still hear it on Classic Rock stations.

LR: That’s right. That is a great band and man, they did not mind paying a lot of attention to detail. They would spend two or three years making an album. It was amazing.

MR: Let’s talk about another track from Rhythm Sessions.

LR: “River Man” with Kurt Elling on vocals, it’s the second track on the record.

MR: I love the spot in the song where he’s singing a note that is not in the key and because he’s so subtle yet powerful with his delivery, he emphasizes it with such class and it works so well.

LR: Yeah, he’s an amazing talent. This song has an interesting history as well. It’s written by the English writer Nick Drake. Most people in the US still don’t know Nick Drake that much. He was around just for a very short period in the late sixties and early seventies. He was a singer-songwriter, he had three albums out, he died when he was twenty-six, some people say of suicide or an accidental overdose, nobody’s quite sure. There’s only one photo of this guy. He’s a very mysterious guy. He would disappear for weeks or months on end, but his records were just so amazing, and they sound so fresh even today. Some very sharp music supervisors started putting his music into movies a few years ago and a couple of other jazz artists have picked up on his tunes. I ended up getting exposed to his music a few years ago as well. I thought “River Man” could take another vocal treatment, but Nick Drake was so strong on his vocals and they still sound so current. I thought, “Who could sing this song and really get a fresh approach?” I immediately thought of Kurt Elling. I showed the tune to Kurt and he loved it and was up for it. Speaking of rhythm sessions, we did this track with Dave Grusin on Fender Rhodes, Nathan East on bass and Will Kennedy from The Yellowjackets on drums, and myself on acoustic and electric guitar. The thing is that Kurt couldn’t be there when we did this recording, so listen to this great melody and vocal performance and check out the way Dave Grusin, on Fender Rhodes, surrounds Kurt Elling’s vocals. He’s doing that with not having Kurt there when he played it. It’s a really nice track and Kurt did a fantastic job on it.

MR: Just to remind everyone, you are a Grammy winner for the album Harlequin, and you’ve been nominated a jillion times. Nineteen times more, so you’re a regular at the Grammys?

LR: Yeah, pretty much!

MR: Lee, what advice do you have for new artists?

LR: Well, it’s very challenging for new artists today. There’s a lot more talent out there, there’s a lot more people trying to do it, there’s a lot more people coming out of the schools, vocalists and instrumentalists, all different aspects of music. There’s less work because the internet has kind of swallowed the business to a degree, like so many other things. On the flipside of that, people, I think, are listening to music more than ever, so it goes with us constantly. It’s in every establishment that we go in; music is such a huge fabric of our lives. If we didn’t have music in our lives, really, this planet would be in sad shape. It’s like the air we breathe, it’s so important. I think the musicians that are serious about making music out there today have an incredible talent. With all that being said, I think you have to be very proactive of making your own voice heard, so to speak. The business has been deconstructed and reconstructed and it’s not the same business as when I was growing up. You have the opportunity, if you have a vision of who you are and if you’re honest and evaluate yourself and listen to other people that are close to you evaluating you of who you are and what your strengths are, then you can almost design your career to go down that path. The music business is so wide open now that if you’re really sharp about promoting yourself and being sharp about the business and, of course, most important, being able to deliver the music and try to create an original style. All of those things can combine and you can make it in today’s world. It’s not easy, it’s not for the weak of heart. You have to have leather skin. You’re going to get a thousand rejections before you get one good one. It’s not easy. I always say, “The music calls us, we don’t call the music.” If you’re meant to be in the music world or be a musician or an artist or a singer or performer, usually, there’s a reason for that. It’s bringing you to this journey. So persistence and the other thing that I emphasize is that there is no insurance policy for musicians. The only insurance policy–I stole this bit of advice–is music education. The more education you have musically in every aspect, whatever your thing is, in every aspect, there’s no kind of music education that doesn’t affect you. Let’s say you’re a heavy metal guitarist and you study classical guitar, that can help you. If you’re a conductor but you study jazz history, that can help you. It doesn’t matter what it is. Music education can always make you better.

MR: Lee, what’s you’re guitar these days?

LR: Well, there are several. As far as the electrics, I’m a Gibson guy, I have been for a long time. They have two of my models at Gibson–the Custom L-5, my jazz guitar, and then my 335. There’s a special edition down at Gibson that was based on my 1960 335. These days, I also play a Gibson Les Paul. So these are the three electrics, and my acoustics are usually Yamaha classical and steel string. There’s a nice cut called “L.A. By Bike” that uses a new steel string acoustic on it, made by Yamaha, called The A-Series, that has these sampled microphones–talk about old technology and new technology–and the sound is really pretty cool.

MR: There’ll be touring, right?

LR: A lot of touring, yeah. We’re going to be going to New York coming up shortly. I’ll be in Mexico, I’ll be in Japan, I’ll be in Southeast Asia, I’ll be up and down the West Coast in late November, early December, so a lot of things are coming up.

MR: Thank you so much and let’s do this again whenever you have something.

LR: Thank you very much, Mike, I appreciate it.