In A Mellow Tone
Wednesday April 17th, 2024 with Heavy Ben
David Axelrod Pt.1: Jazz, Soundtracks, Fusion, Funk and Soul

Today we celebrate the birthday of David Axelrod, a producer, arranger and composer who in the 1960s and ’70s was one of the pre-eminent figures bridging and expanding the worlds of jazz and rhythm & blues — and whose career was given new life beginning in the ’90s thanks to hip-hop producers who sampled his ornate compositions. Axelrod was born today, April 17, 1933 in Los Angeles, California, and died in 2017, aged 85. Mr. Axelrod’s signature sound mixed the flexibility of jazz and the lusciousness of soul with the influence of composers like Wagner and Stravinsky and a penchant for psychedelic flights of fancy. His compositions were expansive and majestic, but also a little testy and tense, as if messy eruption were imminent but being held at bay by beauty. Axelrod began frequenting the jazz and R&B clubs on Central Avenue, Los Angeles’s vibrant musical hub, at a young age. “I was raised by blacks,” he told Big Daddy magazine in 2001, discussing his upbringing in a city with fast-changing racial dynamics. “For a while I thought I was black.” He told interviewers stories of teenage street brawls and heroin use. Into his later years he was typically seen in dark sunglasses, the better to mask an eye injury he received when he was a teenage boxer. Axe became enmeshed in LA’s nightlife and music industry, spending time with jazz pianist Gerald Wiggins, who taught him to read music, and before long he took on record promotion jobs and, eventually, production work. His first prominent calling card was the saxophonist Harold Land’s 1960 album “The Fox,” an outstanding example of hard bop from a city not known for it. Not long after that, Axelrod joined the staff of Capitol Records as an executive focused on developing talent, helping to create what he said was the first black music division at a major label. He shepherded Lou Rawls out of a mainstream pop-jazz sound and into forward-leaning soul, and worked with the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who was familiar with Axelrod from “The Fox.” He produced Adderley’s biggest hit, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” in 1966, and continued to work with him for a decade. “I could do anything I wanted to do,” he recalled in 2001. “I was rich — making the equivalent of $700,000 a year!” He also produced instrumental albums conducted by David McCallum, the Scottish actor (“The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”) who in the late 1960s took a pop music detour. Following his success producing for others, Axelrod put out albums of his own. The first two, his most essential — “Song of Innocence” (1968) and “Songs of Experience” (1969), both inspired by William Blake — helped set the table for the jazz fusion of the 1970s. Narrative and concept were crucial to Axelrod’s productions. His third album, “Earth Rot,” tackled environmental concerns, and a hit he recorded with Mr. McCallum, “The Edge,” was, Mr. Axelrod said, written in response to the extreme poverty he witnessed on a trip to Puerto Rico. For the psych-rock band the Electric Prunes, he produced an album influenced by Gregorian chant. In the mid-1970s, pop tastes began to shift toward disco, a sound Mr. Axelrod had little use for, and he fell out of favor, leading to a lean stretch that included financial struggles and near-homelessness. His wife was involved in a serious car accident in his 1980s, and he devoted himself to managing her care for some time. In the 1990s, crate-digging hip-hop producers began unearthing Mr. Axelrod’s productions and sampling them widely, enamored with their thickness and complexity. Axelrod sounds appear on albums by Lauryn Hill, DJ Shadow, Dr. Dre, De La Soul, Lil Wayne, Mos Def, Madlib, A Tribe Called Quest, and Canada's own Maestro Fresh Wes. We'll get to those sounds in future episodes of Chance Meeting. We'll also cover more of the rock, funk, and soul leanings on a future episode of Heavy Friends. Tonight, on In A Mellow Tone, let's explore Axelrod's 1950's and 60s credits as a producer of straight up jazz albums, get into 1970s jazz fusion and funk, touch on soul, pop, and key cuts from Axelrod's mesmerizing solo albums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Axelrod_(musician) https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/02/11/514590294/david-axelrod-musical-visionary-and-historical-propellant-remembered Intro text borrowed from this New York Times piece https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/arts/music/david-axelrod-dead-music-producer-composer.html (to embiggen the show icon, right-click and choose "Open image in new tab")