Mizell Brothers

Jeff Chang

Well this morning we’re very, very happy to have with us, not one, not two but three of the Mizell Brothers with us. So in celebration of that fact, we decided to double-up our team as well. So Benji and I are also gonna be here to help things along. But the Mizell Brothers, of course, have been very influential in the last 30, 40 years of music as we know it. From “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5, all the way through the fusion era with Donald Byrd and Bobbi Humphrey and on up to the disco era with A Taste of Honey. The Mizells have prepared for us an incredible PowerPoint slideshow, film, music thing, for our edification and our enjoyment. So without further ado, the Mizell brothers. [applause] We should introduce each of you individually first.

Larry Mizell

OK, I’m Larry. This is my brother Fonce, this is my other brother Rod. This is my lovely wife Yvonne.

Jeff Chang

With the camera. [applause]

Larry Mizell

As Jeff just said, when we were first approached by Red Bull to do this in Australia, we’ve done some interviews before, and in the heat of doing an interview, there are some things you always miss. We wanted to present a complete picture – or as complete as we could make it – of our beginnings and what we’ve done along the way. So we went out and bought a copy of PowerPoint and tried to learn it in two or three days. PowerPoint is not as reliable as you might think, being a Microsoft program with a PC, so it has a tendency to crash. So if that does happen, we’ll have a little break while I kick it in the butt. So the presentation is basically a series of slides to trace our chronology. So we’re ready to go anytime.

(slide show starts / music: L.T.D. – “Love To the World”)

That’s mom and dad there, Al and Ruby who we named our publishing company after, Al Ruby Music, and the next slide is a video taken many years ago on an old Sony three-quarter inch tape machine. Mom had just written some lyrics and she was showing it to pop, and she sang it to dad, she sang it down. Just a little moment of creativity. [video: Ruby Mizell / Mizell speaking]

Ruby Mizell [in video]

This is just something I did tonight [sings] “Give me a word / Give me a sign / Do some charade to let me know you’re mine / I’ve waited so long / Can’t get along without you.” [applause]

Larry Mizell

This is a little history of some of the family members over the years; Jane Bolin [Mizell], who was the first black woman judge; Ralph Mizell, who was appointed department head by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is a great-uncle of ours, he goes way back to the ’40s, by the name of Andy Razaf and he was Fats Waller’s writing partner. Fats Waller, as you may know, wrote many hits, one you may know is “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” Our great-uncle wrote a lot of the lyrics for Fats and for other people, like Glenn Miller, some of the swing bands out of the ’40s. So this next slide is Fats Waller performing in 1941 the song that he and my great-uncle wrote, “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

(video / music: Fats Waller — “Ain’t Misbehavin’” / applause)

Next we have some shots of some our other cousins who’ve been in the industry.

That’s Ron, Fonce and I on the end and second from the left is Don Mizell, who won a Grammy last year as a co-producer on the Ray Charles [movie] Genius Loves Company. We’re just out in the woods hiking in California.

(music: unknown child rapper produced by Jam Master Jay)

[next slide] Here’s where we grew up, Harlem in New York City. Fonce and I grew up between there and what was also known as the top of Sugar Hill in New York, Edgecombe Avenue. Then we moved to the suburbs of New York, Englewood in New Jersey. That was a picture of our high school, Dwight Morrow High School. It was really a nice experience for us. That’s where we learned to play trumpet in the high school band, a little bit of keyboard. My grandmother had a piano and we’d tickle it a little bit. [next slide] That’s where we went to college in Washington DC, Howard University. We went with a partner of ours by the name of Freddie Perren, who was from Englewood, New Jersey as well. Freddie, as you may know, after the Motown era, which I’ll get into in a second, he went on to produce a lot of records that have become anthems. He passed away last year. He wrote “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor, “Shake Your Groove Thing” by Peaches & Herb, “Reunited,” a number of records.

Jeff Chang

Actually, we should get into the significance of Howard University because most of the folks here are not from the US.

Larry Mizell

It’s a historically black university, one of the largest in the United States, and it has a huge campus and it offers degrees all the way up to PhD level in several disciplines, with a med school and dance school.

Jeff Chang

And it always had the reputation for being the cultural and intellectual centre for black communities all across the country.

Larry Mizell

It’s one of the oldest historically black colleges and it’s kind of a Mecca; a lot of black students were able to go there and interact and grow up in an interactive culture that they wouldn’t have had if they’d stayed at home in their own city.

Jeff Chang

You were there in a period during a lot of activism beginning to happen on the campus. Who were some of the folks that were coming through on the campus at that time?

Larry Mizell

Stokely Carmichael, who headed up SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee that was doing voter registration in the South at that time. His partner H. Rap Brown was there. The mayor, who later kind of self-destructed, Marion Barry, was a student there at the time. There was a lot of activism, there were students who’d leave in the middle of the semester and pursue voter registration in the South. All in all it was a good experience. This next slide shows the beginnings of our singing seriously.

We’d perform in many Howard University talent shows. We were lucky enough to win some of them. It shows us on stage and you can actually hear us singing. It was kind of a jazzy Four Freshman type of thing, a lot of people thought it was corny but we won the first prize. And Donny Hathaway was our piano player from time to time.

(music: The Vanlords — Unknown)

(music: The Moments — “Baby I Want You”)

Interesting story. We put together what we called the record company, paid for it, rented a studio, found some students at another college called Morgan State, named them the Moments and took them into a studio, hired some strings from the air force, 25 bucks for the lot. We put together this record and we didn’t know what to do with it after that. We had an apartment full of records and we couldn’t give them away, we passed them onto the DJs and kind of forgot about it. The record surfaced a few years ago on eBay and sold for almost five thousand [dollars]. There’s not too many copies around now, so needless to say, we went through the basement looking for them to find them, but it was a fruitless search.

(next slide / plays music, quickly stops)

My degree was in engineering, as undergrad, then I went on to get a graduate degree in engineering. I worked on the space program and gave some technical talks in Munich, but all the time playing in bands on the weekends, a singing group locally. I was into ham radio, things like that. Next. [next slide] I’d moved to New York, Fonce moved to Los Angeles and through different trials and tribulations signed to Motown Records. This chart you see here is called “I Wanna Be Free” and if you notice right under it it says Gladys Knight. Well, up on the upper right it says Gladys Knight, but underneath you’ll see a subtitle saying “I Want You Back.” This song was supposed to be cut on Gladys Knight, but the night before Fonce and Freddie were due to cut the song, Berry [Gordy] called up and said, “Forget that. I’ve got this bunch of kids I want you to cut on and change the lyrics.” They were bummed out because they had Gladys Knight and who are these kids? The kids turned out to be the Jackson 5 and they changed the title to “I Want You Back,” so that [points to slide] is the original music that shows it. I don’t think Gladys Knight knows that story to this day. [laughs]

Jeff Chang

So there isn’t a version with Gladys Knight singing somewhere?

Larry Mizell

No, she never put a vocal down on the track, she really didn’t know.

Fonce Mizell

[via video] Two good things happened to the Mizell family in the same era. My brother Larry worked on the Apollo program, which landed the first man on the moon, and I got the chance to write, produce and arrange the Jackson 5’s first three records, “I Want You Back,” “ABC” and “The Love You Save.” All three went on to become No. 1 platinum records.

(music: The Jackson 5 — “I Want You Back”)

Larry Mizell

The next slide shows Fonce, Freddie and the rest of the Corporation, Deke Richards and Berry Gordy receiving an ASCAP award. There’s also a picture of – we used to play basketball with the J5 – that shows a young Michael and Marlon, and Randy’s just kind of watching.

[next slide]

This is a video of after we moved to LA. Fonce and I had a house up in the Hollywood Hills with a studio and we would create our tracks, the two of us would just jam, switch off with bass, guitar and piano. We would just switch off and create stuff we liked. This is a video we shot of us jamming. It’s not good quality, but I think it’s the only video of just us working out by ourselves.

(video / music: Larry and Fonce Mizell jamming in the studio / applause)

Jeff Chang:

That actually reminded me a lot of the electric Miles Davis era, just the sound of it. I was just wondering what kind of stuff you guys were listening to back then? You guys were writing all these hits but what kind of stuff was inspiring you, making you say, “I’ve got to top that”?

Larry Mizell

We loved what Motown was doing at the time. The difference they brought to R&B music, they took away the blues feeling and they were playing – especially Holland-Dozier-Holland – minor sixth chords and writing really unpredictable chord changes. We loved the originality and they had different innovative studio techniques with two drummers. The Funk Brothers were actually jazz players in the local clubs, so they had chops and they could stretch out.

So our inspiration was definitely Motown, big time. We had a lot of influences from our parents’ records, which at the time were 78s. I don’t know if you even know what that is, they were smaller than LPs. We listened to some of the swing bands and we liked Dionne Warwick’s records, what Bacharach and David were doing, and a trumpet player by the name of Clifford Brown. We loved Tony Williams, a drummer, his polyrhythmic approach, as with Elvin Jones and a host of other different 45s that would come out that would catch our ears. There were a lot of them.

This is a cut on Marvin Gaye. We produced a Marvin Gaye record that never came out.

(music: Marvin Gaye — “Woman of the World” / applause)

Jeff Chang

I don’t want to spoil the moment because that was a big moment, actually. But you said you guys recorded with Marvin Gaye and this was going to be the big follow up to What’s Going On. A whole album’s worth of material that you guys recorded?

Larry Mizell

No, we made three cuts. [turns to Fonce] It was three, right? Marvin only overdubbed only two of them with vocals. What happened was, Marvin was in a sophomore slump after What’s Going On. Berry Gordy thought the record was too political, but when he put it out it influenced everybody, it just knocked everybody out. So Marvin had to come up with something else and he was tripping, he was in a creative slump. So Motown had meetings to bring in other producers to write tunes for Marvin, and Marvin’s perfectly capable of coming up with smash hits up the yin yang. But this time the procedure got started, Marvin agreeably went in and did the overdubs. And then we came to our senses; there were other politics happening, too, but the records got shelved. It ended up, this particular song and the other one, the one that got released on Marvin, “Where Are We Going,” since we knew they weren’t coming out we cut those songs on Donald Byrd.

If you notice on the Donald Byrd album the publishing is listed as Jobete, which is Motown’s publishing company. We were anticipating they would never come out but after Motown was sold to Universal, “Where Are We Going” came out. Yeah, it was supposed to be the follow-up. After working at Motown we moved forward to start our own production company, Skyhigh Productions. [next slide] This is the first song on Skyhigh, we’ve got a sample of a jet plane taking off.

(music: Donald Byrd — “Flight Time”)

The next project we did for Blue Note after the Black Byrd success was Bobbi Humphrey, a female flute player, who could play and she kinda looked like a little girl, which gave her a certain uniqueness. Our second album was on her. Let’s see what the next slide is about.

(music: Bobbi Humphrey — “Harlem River Drive”)

I want to point out, on the right there was Chuck Davis, who was one of our staff engineers and producers and writers. He was also an electronics nut. He built a device we used on our records called a DEBI Sound Enhancer. Basically, what it did was, in a straight stereo it caused different space relationships at different frequencies in the audio spectrum, 20 or 20K, and it allowed the sound to appear to come out of the speakers. You never knew when an instrument was going to do that. Today the devices that do that are the BBE Sonic Maximizer, the Aural Exciter, they use a similar technique. We had a lot of trouble in the studio – well, not trouble, but the engineers were reluctant because we brought it in on a bread box circuit board and we wanted to plug it into the board. But we prevailed. So that’s Chuck right there.

(music: The Blackbyrds – “Reggins”)

(music: Donald Byrd – “Lansana’s Priestess”)

Just wanted to say that Street Lady might not be too evident if you look at the songs on the album, but it was a concept album dealing with women. All the titles reflected that, different lifestyles. “Woman Of The World,” which Marvin had cut, is on there. “Lansana’s Priestess,” who was a priestess of a tribe that Lansana was a member of, “Street Lady” of course, “Witch Hunt,” “Miss Kane.” That was a little known fact about that.

(music: Bobbi Humphrey – “Uno Esta”)

Benji B

That’s really interesting, what you’re just saying, because that ARP synth sound is something I really associate with all your productions. But you say one of the main appeals for it was because they replaced all those strings session players who were costing you money, right?

Larry Mizell

[laughs] Exactly. Particularly, as a lot of session studio string work was the playing of sustained notes, and the string players would basically be yawning through their session, making all this money. They all had chops, but the kind of string arrangements that were called for in pop records weren’t supposed to take away from the artists, the main vocal. So when this came out, at the time I think Stevie Wonder got the first one. They demonstrated it in Hollywood at the West LA Musical Guitar Center.

Stevie Wonder got the first one, we got on the list, I think we got number five. Everybody went crazy with it, but you had to bear certain things in mind. You couldn’t play it like a keyboard, a lot of people played it like they played piano. You had to watch your octaves and keep it simple and look for overtones and harmonics. But in retrospect it sounds nothing like strings, it was its own sound. That was the ARP Solina that you heard. But yeah, it also did save money on the strings.

(music: Donald Byrd – “(Falling Like) Dominoes” / applause)

One of our next projects was a new artist, an organ player by the name of Johnny Hammond that we had heard earlier that year on an album he had out on the CTI label, Creed Taylor’s label, Higher Ground was one of his albums. He was amazing, one of the fastest keyboard players we’d seen on organ. One thing that contributed to that was that he was a piano player who switched to Hammond organ. His real name was Johnny Smith, but he changed it to Johnny Hammond because of the Hammond organ and he was looking for a uniqueness there.

You see his name sometimes as Johnny “Hammond” Smith, but Johnny Hammond mainly. We did a couple of albums there, one on Creed Taylor’s label called Gambler’s Life, which really didn’t do that much. We enjoyed doing the album, one of our favorites, and then we did an album on Fantasy called Gears and we enjoyed that as well, very much. The cut I’m going to play from that album is “Los Conquistadores Chocolates,” which means “the black conquerors.” It’s a story about the Moors being in Spain. One of our partners, who grew up with us in New Jersey, had gone to Spain and gotten a Master’s degree in Spanish. We had him create an opening to the song in Spanish. We’d given him an encapsulated history of that event. It starts off with what sounds like a wind sound. That’s actually an ARP synthesizer with a white or pink noise generator being swept by a filter.

(music: Johnny Hammond – “Los Conquistadores Chocolates”)

Larry Mizell

Great, great. Thank you. This next slide, I believe, was our first excursion into gospel with the Rance Allen Group. We were looking to do something different again. A friend of ours, in fact a partner who was the fourth member of the Hog Record in college group, was managing Rance Allen at the time. We heard him and just thought – and still do – think, he was one of the best vocalists we’d ever heard. So we did an album on him for Capitol Records, and it really didn’t do anything. We didn’t want to do a gospel record. We wanted to do a spiritual record, so we made it more of a spiritual record. It had traditional R&B, pop elements in it. Turned out that Capital really didn’t know how to market the record. They admitted that later, that they really didn’t know how to market the record, and they even... After we were finished and the record had seen its life, they went back, added strings to some tracks, reissued it again with a different cover. But this predated the Winans and the widespread success of gospel music, non-traditional. That’s what you will hear here, Rance Allen on the tune. I believe it’s called “Peace of Mind.”

(video: Rod Mizell playing drums)

Oh. My bad. My brother Rod Mizell came out and joined us in the mid-70s and was very instrumental in honing our sound further. He plays bass, drums, guitar, some keyboard, and sings. So now we had a trio to jam with, and it was great. This is a picture of him and also of him playing drums in the studio today. The people that he was working with: L.T.D., Mary Wells, Roger Glenn, Rance Allen. He played on Mary Wells and Bobbi Humphrey. Next. OK, this is Rance Allen here.

(music: Rance Allen Group – “Peace of Mind”)

Larry Mizell

Rod is playing bass and drums.

Audience Member

At the same time?

Larry Mizell

That would be…

Audience Member

Quite a feat.

Larry Mizell

Quite a feat, quite a feat. He played bass and he played drums. I played piano. Then came back later to lay the bass down, later, to save him some anguish. [music continues]

We first met Gary Bartz at the Montreal Festival, where we played with The Blackbirds. We had signed a deal with Fantasy to produce several acts, and we saw Gary in the studio. He’d just come off a plane with Miles Davis. He was young, and he was really on the edge. We dug him. We dug where he was coming from. That’s how we got hooked up with Gary, went to the studio. We mixed his first album that he’d already finished and was just about to come out, called Singerella. A really interesting record, actually, story of a black Cinderella with his wife on the cover. Really an interesting record, if you ever can come across it. Spelled Singerella, S-I-N-G-E-R-E-L-L-A. The first one we did with Gary was called The Shadow Do!, and that was on Fantasy. Didn’t make too much noise. He was let go from Fantasy. We talked to Capitol about signing Gary and got him a deal there. That’s when we did this album, Music is my Sanctuary. This is a cut called “Carnival De L’Esprit,” “Carnival of the Spirit.”

(music: Gary Bartz – “Carnival De L’Esprit” / applause)

One of our projects at the same time was a deal with A&M Records with a group called L.T.D. There were two brothers who were the nucleus of the group, Jeff and Billy Osborne. Jeff played drums, actually both of them played drums, but Jeff was the drummer and Billy was the lead singer, a very talented R&B horn band. It was really different for us because we were working with nine or ten different personalities in the studio for the first time. Where normally we controlled the vibe because we hired the cats we wanted to use and laid everything out for them and overdubbed the artists later; here we had a band that had already coalesced and had its own creative unity and their own ideas.

A&M told us the group was basically six figures in the hole and they were about to get released, and if we wanted to try something with them the door was open. I don’t think they really asked L.T.D. if they were fine with it, they more or less just told them this was how it was going to be, so they were somewhat reluctant. So we got with them and it was a — I won’t say trying experience — but one of the more different efforts we’ve done. We had to use a lot of diplomacy. But they got back on the positive cash flow side, A&M was happy, and we got a decent single out of it, which was this right here.

(music: L.T.D. — “Love Ballad”)

I said Jeff was the drummer. Along with the trying situations we had while making this record, Billy was giving us a lot of flak about not wanting to do this, not wanting to do that, so he walked out of the studio one day and we had this tune, “Love Ballad,” that our partner Skip Scarborough had written. We had heard Jeff crooning in the background while he was playing drums, so we said, “Jeff, why don’t you try the lead?” Jeff came to the mic and did the overdub and blew everybody away, and that was the end of Billy’s lead singing career. [laughter] So that’s how Jeff got going and the record did OK.

(music continues / applause)

The next project we had, a friend of ours who went to Howard University with us had seen this group at a party, and it consisted of two ladies out front playing bass and guitar, and he was saying, “Man, you’ve got to see this group, they’ve got a thing, something different.” Finally, we went to see them, they were playing at a local club across from A&M Records, and we said, “Yeah, there might be something there.” We hired a video crew in to shoot a video of them and went to shop them at different labels in Hollywood. Nobody would bite, they couldn’t see the vision we had that there was commercial value here, pop-wise.

Finally, another old school mate was A&R director of R&B at Capitol. He was reluctant but we talked him into it and he gave us a development budget, and we said, “OK, that’s cool, we’ll see.” So the group, of course, was A Taste of Honey, and they were kind of one hit wonders, but it was unique to see two ladies playing rhythm instruments like that and they looked good, which helped. Here’s them performing “Boogie” live just a few years ago. [new slide] Yeah, that’s them. To the left is Janice, the bass player, to the right is Hazel, Janice Johnson and Hazel Payne, she plays guitar.

There are two gentlemen there, the drummer and keyboard player Don and Perry, and through the politics of the record business they got exed out of the PR, and people started to think of them as just two ladies. Actually, the keyboard player was seminal in putting the group together. Needless to say, they were very disappointed, but everybody was making money from that record. It was a number one platinum album, platinum single and it won a Grammy for best new recording artist. This is them playing live.

(video / music: A Taste Of Honey — “Boogie Oogie Oogie” (live version))

We did a single after that with a lady we were big fans of during her Motown days, Mary Wells. She had signed with CBS Records and they had done an album on her, but they didn’t feel they had a single, so they contacted us and we produced just one record on her, called “Gigolo,” a dance horn record, which was kind of out of Mary’s idiom. It wasn’t the “My Guy,” “You Beat Me To the Punch,” pretty Smokey [Robinson]-type thing, it was more like what was happening then. So she struggled somewhat with it.

It came across OK, she got a little bit of mileage out of it. On the rhythm track Fonce played drums, Rod played bass and I played piano. It was one of the few times we performed on our own production. A neighbor of ours played guitar. This is the cover and the record itself.

(music: Mary Wells — “Gigolo” / applause)

We did several other projects, singles and maybe two cuts on an album. These are some of them, just a listing of them. The tune you will hear playing is from a solo album, supposed to be called Mizell that we did for Warner’s but was never released. There’s been talk of releasing it, but this tune is called “Spank.” It lists the other productions with different levels of success or non-success.

(music: Mizell Brothers — “Spank”)

We recorded the majority of our songs at a studio called the Sound Factory and we used the API console, the one pictured there. It had punch, but it also had clarity and was warm, too, and, of course, we used analogue 2” tape which added that saturation and distortion that was pleasing compared to the records that come out today. The owner was Dave Hassinger, who engineered for a number of people including the Rolling Stones and all the way back to Sam Cooke, and he was really into his craft. The majority of our records were done there at his studio and that’s what you see on this slide.

[next slide] These are some of the electronic instruments we used at his studio, which most of you guys are familiar with. The Fender Rhodes, the D6 Clav, the ARP Odyssey, that’s the Echoplex and the lead. I believe that’s the Maestro Phaser, which is really a swirling type of phaser, you can buy one on eBay today. That’s the Arp Solina, of course, and the Fender Princeton amp, the old tube amp, and this, of course, is the Minimoog. Oh, and the letters there at the bottom – A, B, C, D – relate to the way we used to produce rhythm tracks. We would make big signs up with A, B, C and D on them. We’d go in with the rhythm guys and we’d rehearse a rhythm chart with different musical parts; the bridge, the interludes, the hooks, whatever. And they’d be on these different signs, sometimes they’d go all the way up to E or F.

We didn’t have set lengths for each section. That’s why on some of our projects the sections will change when you expect them not to. That’s because we’d be listening to the rhythm tracks, to the guys were playing, then we’d put up a certain sign, and they never knew what was coming. We rehearsed different sections before we started recording and we made sure they had that down. Most of them were good at taking chances, doing the fills, being able to do something hip to signify the fill. So we’d be holding up different signs as we felt them grooving and peaking, we’d say let’s go back to C, whip that out, four bars later they’d hit the downbeat.

This is to show how our players interacted with each other. Typically, we used two guitar players, a bass, Fonce and I played keyboards, a drummer, acoustic piano and a percussion player. So I have the multi-track in Pro Tools format of a tune called “Think Twice,” so what I did was I’d break it down and build it back up. So what you’re going to hear is Harvey Mason, the drummer, he’s going to start off, then you’ll hear the snare and the hi-hat, Chuck Rainey, bass, will come in, King Errisson with the congas, and then you’ll hear either David T. Walker, John Rowin or Wah Wah Watson playing guitar. It’s just a rhythm track and it builds up from there.

(music: Donald Byrd — “Think Twice” Pro Tools session / applause)

We’re getting near the end right now. This next slide talks about how technology changed the game for our records as well as for our music creation period. We found our records being sampled quite a bit and we were really honored about that. We got some of the early samplers, when Akai and E-mu got on board with sampling we found you could do all kinds of tricks with the sound that weren’t possible before. We’ve had a lot of samples of our catalog, but this one I thought would be of interest. It’s by a French group called [Sat / tune is called - ed.] “Kidz,” they sampled “Wind Parade” and they’re rapping in French.

(music: Sat — “Kidz”)

This is Fonce, Rod and I jamming in our studio just a couple of weeks ago, just a short little snippet.

(video: Fonce and Larry Mizell studio jam / applause)

Last year we put together a compilation for Blue Note of some of our favorite tunes that we did for Blue Note. We remixed some of them, put on a couple of tracks that hadn’t been released, overdubbed some of those. That’s this next slide here.

(music: Donald Byrd — “Wind Parade (2005 remix)” / applause)

This is kind of what we're up to now these days. [shows slide / everyone claps when they see “Relaxing”]

Rod Mizell

I think the fact of the love that we have for each other and being brought up by a strong family and the love, we have for playing music. Definitely we always want to try to make money at it, but the love we have for each other and love for music I think plays a big part with that.

Benji B

You mentioned about building up your publishing company earlier, it strikes me that since the beginning, even since the days of the corporation, you’ve always been extremely on top of that, whereas maybe some artists and producers and composers haven’t been in the past. Where did that business savvy in the music industry come from? Did that just come naturally, or did you learn it from someone?

Larry Mizell

We’ve got a couple of influences. Our great uncle, at the beginning, Andy Bazaar. My grandmother used to say that Uncle Andy, years later was still getting these checks after he retired. She described how it was happening, and we said… That stuck in our minds. We were also influenced by what Barry Gordy was doing, like I said, we were big fans of Motown. With Joe Bent and the fact that he created a situation where all these creative guys could go in and work, and bust their butts working and producing these name acts and everything they did, Barry got the publishing on. A lot of those acts, the way accounting was done in those days was that, some of it still happens today. But the artist gets charged for the budget, not the producer. The producer can run the costs up with the artist in agreement somewhat, but in Motown, they had an album and they needed six, seven tunes, there would be four, five, six producers all gunning at the different Motown studios trying to get that single. They would overcut maybe 20, 30 songs for one album. All of those costs went to the artists. So many of those artists, the ones who didn’t write, were perpetually always in the hole, in the red. The only money they made was on the road. Having said that, Barry was making money, but artists who wrote, like Stevie, Smokey, mainly those two, and Marvin to a certain extent, they made money. We related to that as far as... We found that out later, of course, but we related to the Joe Bent thing that Barry had started. We really wanted to hold on to our publishing. We kind of negotiated that with whatever deal we were doing.

Jeff Chang

Did you get the song publishing on “I Want You Back” and “ABC” and “The Love You Save” and all of that?

Fonce Mizell

No.

Jeff Chang

You didn’t?

Fonce Mizell

It all went to Jobete. Every writer and producer in the company signed a contract with either Motown Records and Jobete, which is owned by one person, Barry Gordy.

Jeff Chang

Wow.

Larry Mizell

Yeah, we wish that was the case, but…

Benji B

One thing that wasn’t clear, and that I didn’t get is, how did you end up incorporating the corporation? How did that come about the corporation, because it’s not every day that you find yourself in-house at Motown writing for the likes of the Jacksons and Marvin and so on. How did you find yourself in that position originally?

Fonce Mizell

I came out here after Marvin asked us to come out here, and my partner and I started the corporation with Barry Gordy and the other fellow, Dick Richards. We did that until Larry came out, and Stephanie Martin. I just stopped by there for a Motown, you know. I think the first project we had was Blackbird, and that wanted to be Blue Note’s biggest album.

Benji B

Am I right in thinking that up until that point, the idea of mixing elements of… Often, up until that point, it was either jazz or R&B, and mixing those two elements, even though it sound normal now, at that point was a bit…

Larry Mizell

It was a no-no. It was a no-no for sure. Even when we were growing up, it was kind of an unspoken thing. You either played R&B or pop, or you played jazz, and there was a certain snobbery associated with playing jazz; whether you could really play it or not. So like you said, you either played one or the other. And it extended to, of course, when we first did our first records, the jazz purists hated it.

Benji B

Is that like the early Byrd stuff?

Larry Mizell

Early Byrd stuff. Blue Note was kind of… From the time we cut, we cut two or three tracks first, and then about six months later, during that six months, Blue Note was debating, “Do we really want to go in this direction?” It was historically a class-act, straight-ahead jazz label, and finally, Byrd prevailed. “I want to go in this direction.” We did it, much to the critics’ dismay, but it got a Grammy nomination. It was the biggest-selling record in Blue Note history, and kind of kicked in a new type of instrumental music. That’s really what we were doing. We never called it “jazz.” To us it was “instrumental funk” with solos and vocals on it, but other people put labels on it and put a straitjacket on it, but we didn’t even care about that. We were just jumping categories.

Benji B

The groove and rhythm section is such an important part of that sound. I was interested to know how you construct tracks; where it would start from. Was it the rhythm that would be the building block, and then you would build up from there? What’s your entry point? Melody? Groove?

Fonce Mizell

We started from the tracks from Larry and myself. Jamming at home. We’d take that to the studio and play it for the players, and say, “We want something like this.” Then they would follow that.

Larry Mizell

Rhythm tracks. We would start there. A lot of times, we’d cut rhythm tracks with no idea of what was going to go on top. Depending on how it came up, and we would go from there.

Jeff Chang

How important was the bassline in what you guys were trying to construct? You hear “Shifting Gears” or “Fallin’ Like Dominoes,” and it seems like it’s all about the bassline in a lot of ways, which is, I guess, also what separates it from being just straight jazz, as far as the limited category of jazz.

Fonce Mizell

The bassline was very important. That and the drum groove.

Larry Mizell

We had those instruments, and we were, like I was saying earlier, fiends about drum sounds, drum grooves, and basslines and how to approach them. Our work was made a lot easier because of great musicians. Chuck Raney, who was an extension of the style of James Jameson of the Funk Brothers, but yeah, a lot of tunes were written around basslines. Then when the synthesizers came out, we would, as I said earlier, double the basslines, reinforce them, and we were always looking for that muscular kick drum, and we worked hard to get that so the bass wouldn’t overpower it.

Benji B

It’s certainly no coincidence that people are always mining your records for drums and samples and stuff, because there’s that certain sound that is like a trademark of the Mizell production thing, which is just that crispy drums, crispy hi-hats. It’s not something that I can articulate, really, but I just wondered if there’s a secret to how your recorded that stuff.

Larry Mizell

We had a good engineer, we had a good studio, and we really sat on top of the mix. The drums and bass, we would have them work on it until… One thing we did; we had the engineer, they weren’t used to doing it, was to put a separate mic on the hi-hat, because we realized early on that the funk came from the 16ths, and if you had a drummer who played the hi-hat, really played it, normally they’d put up overheads; snare mic, two snare mics, kick drum mic, and if you wanted more hi-hat, they’d have to bring up more overheads, which means you’d get the toms and everything else. We had them put a mic just on the hi-hat. Engineers don’t like to use too many mics because of phase problems, and they have to deal with that. That was one of the things. But yeah, we were drum and bass fanatics.

Fonce Mizell

One thing was our vocal backgrounds. We did all the singing ourselves, from the first few albums we had done, but…

Larry Mizell

We enjoyed that.

Fonce Mizell

Yeah. We had a distinctive sound, you know. We’d double our own parts so it would sound like a group of them.

Larry Mizell

Sometimes it would be just Fonce and I doing the vocals, and we’d have to do about eight or nine passes. Different harmonies.

Benji B

That’s one thing, that when you actually listen deeply to the records, there’s so much going on, but it never, ever sounds busy. It never sounds crowded; the texture never sounds crowded. Is that another conscious thing, keeping things light in the mix?

Larry Mizell

That was a function of the players interacting. I showed the think-twice example. These guys would sit and they would be playing off of. If Jerry Peters who played piano, would do a certain arpeggio down. Harvey, the drummer, would pick up on it, and next time it came around, he would nail that lick, the piano lick, when Jerry played it each time. The guitar players; John Rowin, who was kind of a cool, conservative guy, but could really play his butt off, would sit next to Wah Wah, who could play his butt off too, but he had more of an aggressive personality, so he would get right in John’s face. They would look at each other and it was a real interactive vibe of everybody, and everybody had chops, so everybody was bringing their best.

Jeff Chang

So this is “Tell Me What To Do.”

(music: Johnny Hammond – “Tell Me What to Do”)

Benji B

Another thing that strikes me about all of the albums I look at; the Donald Byrd, the Johnny Hammond; none of them are over 8 tracks or 9 tracks, and all the tracks are really tight as well, and never longer than they have to be. There’s no long, noodling, indulgent solos; it’s just the essence. In terms of the number of tracks that you’d cut on an album, was that a conscious decision as well? Just keeping it really tight? Or was that more about how much time you had to play with?

Larry Mizell

It was limited by the technology at the time on vinyl records. And we were drum and bass freaks, so the low frequencies create wider grooves when you cut a disc during mastering. So we were limited to – ideally, to get decent radio level – between 30 and 40 minutes. That was ideal, so we had to. We would overcut as well, for an album, so we had to be cognizant of what was available. Now, with CDs, 80 minutes is, I mean, to see an album with 17 or 18 tracks, it’s quite astounding.

Benji B

OK, so time to open it up to the floor. I’m sure there are quite a few questions to come, so don’t be shy.

Audience Member

Two questions, really. Since you’ve got an array of hits, do you have any tips on making sure you don’t get thrown into the one-hit-wonder bin? Also, from your long array of tracks how do you choose what goes onto an album and what gets thrown away?

Larry Mizell

Would you repeat the first question?

Audience Member

How do you feel about one hit wonders? Do you have any tips on how not to become a one hit wonder and is it bad or is it good?

Larry Mizell

We’re not too big fans of one hit wonders. As far as tips, longevity is the name of the game in the music business. What it comes down to in our experience has been the songs themselves. You’ll see songs lasting way after the artist has faded away and when you think of certain artists you usually think of a song. The first thing that comes to mind when you think of that artist is the tune.

Only a few artists have surpassed that level where just their touch makes the song a classic. People like Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra. It’s just their thing, they’ve risen above. Streisand. But it’s the songs for us. Make sure your writing is speaking on certain levels. Then it’s the arrangement and how it’s presented, but without a doubt it’s the songs.

Audience Member

And when it comes to picking what you put on the albums?

Larry Mizell

Creative choice. We’re feeling one, we’re not feeling another. That’s the main thing. A lot of times we wanted to put songs on an album that we just didn’t have room for, so that came into play as well.

Jeff Chang

Are there any tracks that didn’t make it to the album where you look back now and you say, “Wow, we really should’ve put that out. That would’ve been the one”? Are there any tracks you can think of on any of the records that stand out that way?

Fonce Mizell

There was one where we went back in and changed the whole groove of a song. The name of it was “Miss Kane.”

Larry Mizell

Oh right, we did several versions of that. The thing about it was we’d just recently did that Mizell album for Blue Note and they sent us a whole catalog of tunes we’d written, but we really didn’t remember the tunes we’d written that we didn’t use. We really had no idea of them and we’d have to go back through them because we cut so much. We kinda just moved on after that.

Jeff Chang

You know, most of the people in this room would kill to be able to hear those tracks that you guys just forgot. [laughter] Any other questions out there?

Audience Member

A question for Fonce with the Jackson 5. Someone told me the lyrics of “The Love You Save” were about traffic safety. Is that true?

Fonce Mizell

No, no.

Larry Mizell

That was a metaphor, though. The life you save. Stop signs.

Fonce Mizell:

That’s where we got the idea from, that old saying. There was a commercial back east for traffic safety. But “The Love You Save” was about a chick who was too loose with herself.

Larry Mizell

“Stop doing that.”

Fonce Mizell

Yeah. [laughs]

Audience Member

My second question is about the Rance Allen Group. I believe around the same time there was a man named D.J. Rogers selling gospel music. Did you ever work with him?

Larry Mizell

No, we never worked with him, we ran into him mixing songs at the same studio. He was a big fan of Rance’s and we liked what he was doing, too, but he knew all about Rance.

Audience Member

Do you think you will release one day the songs you did with Marvin Gaye you played before?

Larry Mizell

Hope so. We’ve talked with Universal about it. The tune that was released was “Where Are We Going,” and strangely they’ve released it three different times on three different Marvin compilations, but still the creative is not releasing “Woman of the World.” It could be that they feel the track wasn’t finished, needed sweetening or whatever. We liked the rawness of the track anyway, so hopefully they’ll come to their senses.

Fonce Mizell

That tune, we were thinking about putting it on our album, do “Woman of the World” with a different arrangement. It would be slower, I don’t know how slow.

Audience Member

On the Blue Note compilation that came out last year there was a tune called “N R Time,” which I listened to a lot, and I understand that some elements were re-recorded. I know the incredible drum track with Harvey Mason, I just wondered if you could speak on that tune. What does “N R” stand for?

Larry Mizell

That was a track that Blue Note sent us for this album to remix and we got the Pro Tools tracks and we basically stripped it down to just drums and re-wrote the whole groove on top of it. We overdubbed the parts, brought people in, put vocals on and reconstructed “N R Time” from just the drum groove. Because what we heard on the multi-track convinced us why we never released it in the first place, it just wasn’t really cutting it, we thought. It was all done last year, all the overdubs, except for drums.

Audience Member

One more thing, do you think before the lecture ends we can hear the Marvin Gaye tune one last time? [laughter]

Larry Mizell

Sure, sure.

Jeff Chang

There’s another question this way, I think. No? Anywhere?

Audience Member

I noticed your next collaborations coming up are with 4Hero and Madlib and I was just wondering how did you get together with those guys? And what it’s like working with guys now, and whether you jam with those guys the same way as you did back then?

Larry Mizell

We met Dego [from 4Hero], he would come to the States and he had a friend who was an acquaintance of ours. He was a fan of some of our music, so she put us together, a lady by the name of Felice La Seirra. Dego came up to the house and we really didn’t talk about too much, we just went for dinner and he left some of his CDs and I liked what he was doing because they were cutting livestrings. That’s refreshing. Live, period, the musicality of it. They would go on to take a groove and lay on it, it was great. We were in London in December with them doing some mixing for a single that’s coming out at the end of January.

Audience Member

And how did you get together with Madlib?

Larry Mizell

Same way, actually. He had been sampling some of our music and had done a lot of work with Blue Note, remixing some of our tunes. Eli Wolf, the A&R director at Blue Note Records in New York, connected us up also and we kind of just hung out for a while. We’re actually still talking with Madlib about how we’re going to do it. We want to do something really different, not a typical Madlib record and not a typical Mizell record. So we’re still talking and we’ve both been travelling like crazy this past year. But I talked with him before we left so hopefully soon we can nail down the parameters.

Audience Member

Cool, I’ll be looking forward to that.

Jeff Chang

We’re actually trying to find the 4Hero track here. Benji has it and we had it a minute ago, when we find it again we’ll drop it on.

Audience Member

Hello, first of all, thanks a lot for everything you’ve done, for all the tracks and lyrics. I also would like to know, I know that Carl Craig and his Detroit Experiment has taken a very special part out of “Think Twice” and I was wondering, did he call you to ask permission, and what’s the financial part of such remakes? If I’m an artist and I want to use one of the best parts of your song, for example, what are the financial considerations?

Larry Mizell

As far as Carl Craig, we don’t really know him, we know of him through a friend back in Detroit. The procedure is basically to get a clearance from the publisher of the song and from the record company. It’s different if you’re just going to cover the song, then you just need to contact the publisher, and if a song’s been released already, you don’t even need to do that. It’s called statutory copyright, where you just record the tune and the label pays mechanical rights to the publisher, who pays the writer.

But in the case of sampling a part of the record, you have to pay the publisher, or make a deal with the publisher, and also the record company, because they copyrighted the actual master recording and they have certain rights to that. It’s that type of procedure. It’s usually good to have somebody who knows the ins and outs of it to do that for you, because different publishers and record companies have different procedures. They try to anticipate whether it’s going to be a big record and other kinds of things to decide what the parameters of the deal would be.

Jeff Chang

Anybody want to hear the 4Hero track? [hands go up] OK.

(music: 4 Hero feat. Larry Mizell & Talita Long — “Play With the Changes” / applause)

Jeff Chang

Any more questions?

Patrick Pulsinger

Yeah, I’ve got a technical question. Obviously, coming from an era when synthesizers were really new and you were kind of the first ones to introduce them to pop music, did you still keep them around at the beginning of the ‘80s or did you go into a shop to sell them for a digital piano instead of that? Do you still have that equipment?

Larry Mizell

Some of it. We had a fire in our studio ten years ago and we lost a bunch of our vintage stuff, as well as outtakes from Byrd and J5, irreplaceable stuff. And some of our vintage stuff, D6 Clav, ARP Odyssey. Actually, we’ve put together a few of them and with the help of eBay we’ve got a Fender Rhodes and so on, but we’ve been impressed with where the new software stuff is coming from. You can tell the difference, but we do have some vintage stuff still around.

Patrick Pulsinger

So you’re not entirely looking back at this time and thinking we lost a really good sound and everything today sounds really plastic? You’re OK with the new technology?

Larry Mizell

I don’t think it’s as warm. It’s very detailed and we’re still waiting to see with Pro Tools now at the high limit, 192K, which uses a lot of memory, but people are saying that 96K sounds good, 192K is even better. As the more we approach an analog curve the better it sounds, some of it sounds pretty good. Along those lines, also it’s kind of a conflicting concept when you use this high technology to produce a super fidelity product and then it gets transferred to an MP3 and everyone has the iPods and they download from the internet and it’s not a full WAV file; it’s counter-intuitive, actually.

Audience Member

You’ve been prolific songwriters and musicians for other artists. Were you ever tempted to use material for yourselves as artists?

Larry Mizell

We did an album on ourselves, I played a cut from it, it was for Warner Bros. and it’s still never been released. We enjoyed it and in fact we did play on all of the tracks on that album, but we did play on some tracks ourselves for other artists. We enjoyed jamming, and in fact, we were thinking of coming back here tonight around eight, jamming keyboards, bass and drums. [applause]

Audience Member

Studio’s ready!

Larry Mizell

Studio’s ready, let’s get it on. We need one or two guitar players and percussionists and whoever else needs to join in up there. I can play the Marvin Gaye after the next question.

Audience Member

You mentioned your man Chuck Davis, who built the Sound Enhancer for you, and you also said you guys were fortunate in that you had great engineers. Was there ever any blurred line when you guys stepped from producer into engineer mode, you wanted to move the mics around, hit the faders? And also, if any of your engineering background came in and you find yourself tweaking the box and getting your own space-age sound?

Larry Mizell

We didn’t really blur the line other than fader levels: More snare, more kick, EQ it a bit. But the processing, the types of reverb, plates, EMTs or natural chambers, we left that to the engineers because we wanted to concentrate on the music. We kept that line, we were on a creative lean. As far as my engineering background, I also kept it out of the engineering part. It really wasn’t that interesting until today. Today, you need to have a grounding in electronics, physics, not necessarily a degree, but there’s a whole lot you need to learn just to understand these programs of today, so I find it very interesting today engineering-wise.

Audience Member

A philosophical question: Listening to most contemporary producers and albums, starting with rock and finishing with R&B, every time you listen to a new album there’s something that reminds you of the past. I have a feeling that I haven’t heard a single album that was completely new, and I got a feeling that there is nothing new nowadays being composed. So, the question is why, after 20 years, are we sitting here and talking about your heritage that you’ve given us and not talking about the new producers? Is it that the creative potential of contemporary musicians is so low that there’s nothing completely new nowadays?

Jeff Chang

We have Skream this afternoon, though. [laughs]

Larry Mizell

There’s a commercial aspect. There are only four major record companies now. All the independent labels that existed in the ’60s and ’70s, they nurtured artistic stretching out. Now it’s bottom line, if you’re not selling a certain amount you get dropped, and a certain amount by a certain time. They don’t just stay with an artist. You have those factors, so people are chasing hits and are unwilling to step up. You have more business-minded A&R people. This is on the major record labels. Where you guys are coming from is totally creative, there’s not a sense of commercialism. What we’ve seen this week is totally inspiring, the mixing and matching of musical styles. So we see the hope. And not only that, the major labels that are out here right now, that whole model is changing, because now we’re going over to internet distribution and the labels are scrambling to figure out the point of their existence. Now they’re just becoming distributors, but they are not as relevant as they were. Hopefully, you guys will change that.

Audience Member

When we heard “Think Twice” with different layers and you talking about how you would cue different sections in the recording process [with your cards], A, B, C, D, the change up from the alto solo from Gary Bartz on that tune to the change that I think is possibly my favorite eight bars in music. I was wondering if you could talk about that specific chord progression and possibly even demonstrate it on the Rhodes. [applause]

Larry Mizell

That would be somewhat difficult, I’d have to look at the charts, I’ve got a lot of chords in my mind. Which particular section are you talking about, when Gary comes in?

Audience Member

The B section actually happens at the start of the song, but the extended part at the end, which was famously sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, that’s where I discovered it. But perhaps any other signature Mizell chord progression that you could lay on us.

Larry Mizell

Uh huh. [laughter] We had a lot of minor chord progressions that we favored and we’d throw different modulations in in the minor keys. It would vary.

Jeff Chang

The Fender Rhodes awaits.

Larry Mizell

But we can get into that tonight, let’s show up tonight.

Jeff Chang

A good teaser. OK, Marvin Gaye?

Larry Mizell

Marvin Gaye.