Al Schmitt on the Record by Al Schmitt & MAUREEN DRONEY

Author:Al Schmitt & MAUREEN DRONEY [Schmitt, Al & DRONEY, MAUREEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538131121
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-02-05T22:00:00+00:00

GEORGE BENSON

I first saw George Benson play in a club in San Francisco. Tommy LiPuma and I were driving back into the city one night from the Sausalito Record Plant studios where we’d been working with Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks. We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, and were driving through North Beach on the way to our hotel, when we saw “Tonight! George Benson!” on the big marquee in front of a club called Keystone Korner. We parked, bought tickets, and went in.

George was, and still is, a terrific guitar player, and it was a really good show—all instrumental. Except, at the very end of the set, George sang one song, a version of George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” and he did that really well, too. We didn’t know him at that point, so we didn’t try to go back stage and see him, we just left. But on the way back to the hotel, we talked about what a great singer he was and wondered why he wasn’t singing on more songs.

About a year later, George got signed to Warner Bros., where, at the time Tommy was a staff producer. There were a lot of people interested in working with George; he’d just come off of making some good jazz records with Creed Taylor’s CTI label. Bob Krasnow, who at the time was vice president of talent acquisition at Warner, had signed George to a record deal, and they were looking for a producer to work with him. Tommy was one of the producers who met with George, and during the meeting, Tommy said, “Man, you know I love the way you sing. You need to sing on at least one song on this album.”

George’s eyes lit up at that, because none of the other producers thought of him as a singer. They were all planning for an instrumental album because instrumentals were all they knew he’d ever done. So, when Tommy mentioned doing a song with vocals to George, that was it. He got the job.

The next thing I knew, we were doing a session at Capitol for what became George’s Breezin’ album, with an amazing band: Harvey Mason on drums, Phil Upchurch on guitar, Stanley Banks on bass, Ralph MacDonald on percussion, and two keyboard players who played with George all the time, Jorge Dalto and Ronnie Foster. We were knocking out tracks—a lot of them on the first take—and all sorts of people were coming by to hang out, because the sessions were so much fun and everything sounded so good.

At one point, Tommy surprised me and said, “Now, we’re going to do a take of ‘This Masquerade,’ and we’ll have George put a vocal on it.” Well, that was okay, except that I had set everybody up in a semicircle around the drummer. There were some gobos in place to isolate the drums a bit, but there was nothing in place to provide any separation for a vocal. I just hadn’t planned for that.

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