There is an interesting theory about the way a recorded piece of music, especially with horns and voices, is fighting for the same spot. Does this raise the bar for whoever is arranging, including you?

CRISPIN:
Well, I don’t think we ever looked at it like competition.

I'm talking abut competition for the acoustic space. In other words, the horns have to be arranged much more carefully than a rhythm guitar, for example.

CRISPIN:
Right, and I think we have always looked at it as the most important thing in a lot of records is the vocal and the lyrics. So our job to really surround that with just the right environment, you know, to support it.
ARNO:
We do a lot of arranging where we sort of make them up on the spot as either head charts or even if we work it out before. One of the key considerations is that our parts not step on the vocal in any way or in any way mess with the lyric. We consider it our job to stay out of the way of whatever the vocal is doing and, yet, to compliment it.
BOB:
It is very liberating to play on instrumentals where there is no vocal.

How often do you walk into a session and the arranger’s got all the parts together and all the voicings done perfectly?

BOB:
It’s happened a fair amount--twenty--thirty percent.
CRISPIN:
Certainly, especially on things like jingles, commercials, or movie scores.
ARNO:
Soundtracks.
CRISPIN:
That’s the case.
LARRY:
That’s usually a lot more formalized because time is of the essence.
CRISPIN:
But, on those kind of dates if they hire The Uptown Horns, a certain kind of arranger with a good amount of experience knows exactly what our sound is and knows we are going to get it fast.
ARNO:
I came home one day reflecting: sometimes the music we play is actually only sixty seconds worth of music. It’s not all that complicated, but, what they want, because it’s got to be synced exactly to what’s on screen, they’ll say, "When you go 'Bop,' can you make the 'Bop' just a little shorter? Can you make it like a bop as opposed to BOP?" The point is we understand what they are talking about, and that’s one of the reasons we are there.

Do you guys hanker off to the other extreme and continue the record making process which you’ve enjoyed from time-to-time?

CRISPIN:
Well, we did this album called The Uptown Horns Revue which was songs we wrote mostly and produced and arranged together for this group which is still intact. The personel for the Uptown Horns Revue consists of an eleven or twelve-piece rhythm and blues revue with three singers, The Uptown Horns, and a rhythm section. We also write for our own projects and, occasionally, those projects will involve all of us. I recently produced a soundtrack for a movie called Burnzy’s Last Call that featured The Uptown Horns. So, we’ll do different things in different ways that involve us on our own.
ARNO:
We hire each other too.
CRISPIN:
Yeah.

You don’t feel the need to take the initiative, obviously. Do you enjoy it when other people take the initiative or do you just like a balance of the two?

ARNO:
Balance of the two is nice.
LARRY:
It’s nice to feel that you can have some input in any kind of creative process and you kind of have to feel out the situation sometimes. You know, depending on who you are dealing with and how concrete their ideas are and if they really want your ideas. You might be flooded with ideas, and yet they don’t want to hear it. The best situation is when people are open and are willing to take your input.
CRISPIN:
It’s also great in that respect when the best ones for us is when we are working for other people
and those people really want us.
LARRY:
And, often times, they do want our input. They are hiring us for that reason.
CRISPIN:
Yeah, if they really like what we do, and then hire us, it is then the best situation because they want our input, as Larry said.

How long do you think it took before you had this identity where you could second guess each other's moves? At what point did that sensibility arrive?

LARRY:
We don’t always have the same idea at the same time. We go through plenty of arguments over what to do at certain times.
CRISPIN:
I believe one thing we have developed over the years is that we can allow each other to express our ideas or even try them out. Then we come to a consensus pretty easily where, it’s like, that works--whatever that is. It’s a great thing because being able to shuffle through a bunch of ideas on the spot in a recording session is like a cool ‘checks and balances’ system.
ARNO:
It took us probably a good year or so to really first get to that point and then the next few to develop it.
CRISPIN:
I’d say more. But, ultimately, we did get pretty good at covering a lot of ground and being able to draw on it. It’s almost like a well of information that we can draw on which is the best thing about us, really.
BOB:
The most intensive period was that eighteen months when we played almost every week down at the old Tramps on Fifteenth Street. We put together these shows that would go on for hours and we would put them together in a day.
CRISPIN:
In the afternoon.
BOB:
We would be in that club from two or three in the afternoon until three, four or five in the morning. Most of the time playing and putting together the music.
CRISPIN:
We took this job when we first started for almost no money.
BOB:
We would go home with cab fare and that was about it.
CRISPIN:
The deal was that this club, Tramps, would put our name in the paper every week because we’d just started playing as a group.
ARNO:
It pays to advertise.
BOB:
They put us out there and it forced us to get our collective thing together.
CRISPIN:
As a result, we learned how to throw arrangements together really fast.
ARNO:
We used to call them "insta-charts."
CRISPIN:
Elvis Costello, Dr. John, Iggi-Pop, The Neville Brothers, all came by the club. That’s how the group met David Johanson. Really, we knew him individually.
ARNO:
In fact, Buster Poindexter sort of evolved out of that because he was on the road doing his David Johanson solo stuff, which was sort of hard rock, and he’d be off the road by at 2:30 in the morning and be plastered. Then decides to get up on the stage and say give me a pig foot and a bottle of beer and Mack the Knife!
BOB:
We had to spontaneously evolve in front of an audience, especially those situations where people would come and sit in and somebody would call a tune. We really learned to listen to each other and pay attention to what was going on there. Back to your earlier question. I kind of want you to define what you meant by taking the initiative whether you meant as an artistic project or taking the initiative in a relationship with another artist that we are working a sideman for.

Would you be the person who starts an idea which ends in a piece of music or into a record. Or would you be following something else?

BOB:
It works both ways.
CRISPIN:
A lot of people have said to us, "Okay, here’s where I want you to play; what have you got?"
BOB:
Which goes back to my thing about coming up with original lines for other peoples’ projects that would actually be considered part of the composition, as it were.
ARNO:
And, we’ve got their phone numbers.
BOB:
Yes. Someday in the karmic ledger there will be payoffs or paybacks. Yeah, taking initiative where it’s appropriate. I mean, if Keith Richards is telling you to play this part; then you play that part. But, if he says, "What have you got?" "What do you hear here?" Then you throw something out.
ARNO:
Or, ideally, you have the kind of relationship with somebody where even if they are sort of saying this is what I want you to do, and you say, "How about if we lost this little piece at the end here and added this harmony here," one would hope usually that they are willing.
LARRY:
Be receptive.
ARNO:
Yeah, be receptive enough to listen.
CRISPIN:
Ultimately, the bottom line is we can never have too much invested in an idea because in those situations it’s for somebody else. If it’s for our own record, we can argue for years about it.
BOB:
Anything!
CRISPIN:
When it is for somebody else, we can’t argue too much –it has happened--certainly there have been times in the course of nineteen years when somebody might really have felt strongly that’s a really great idea. But really, somebody else is the artist, or the producer and the writer. And the truth is, it’s their music.
BOB:
Sometimes there’s this sublime moment after you’ve finished the recording session and you actually get to go in and listen to the play back and they’ll turn the horns up enough so you can actually hear them, and it sounds really great. Then you hear the finished product out in the market later on, and you go, "We played on this record. We really did!" But, you can’t hear it.
LARRY:
That’s like 80 percent of the time.
BOB:
I don’t know the percentage.
ARNO:
I don’t know if it’s that much.
LARRY:
So many times you hear it in the studio and it sounds great and you say, "That’s why I picked up the horn!" You know, it’s also the way they mix our parts. It takes a really good person to make a horn section sound good in a production.
CRISPIN:
It also depends on the style of music.
LARRY:
Yes. And of course, we are a little weighted towards the horn because we want to hear it.
CRISPIN:
We did a record not that long ago for a blues singer, a young woman named Shemikia Copeland, who’s the daughter of the late, great Johnny Copeland, for Alligator Records, which is the big, Blues label. Obviously they don’t receive airplay on Z-100, but the horns are kicking! You know, they sound great and that’s rewarding.
LARRY:
It has to fit the genre.
CRISPIN:
Yeah, it depends on the genre.

If the horn is fighting with the voice, is the voice going to lose out? Sounds to me like the arrangement has to be pretty immaculate before the horns can be up front.

CRISPIN:
That’s true. But, also, I would say, getting back to what you said a little while ago about music today, there’s a huge swat of Pop music on the charts where no producer would want to get within a hundred miles of a horn section, in general. Or, would want to get within a hundred miles of anything outside of pro-tools, you know. And, that’s just reality.

Oftentimes producers prefer to relate to a machine rather than the irregularities of people who are liable to do all sorts of odd things. Do you think there is an element in that?

BOB:
There’s an element of truth there, sure.
LARRY:
Would we relate better to machines, at this point?
CRISPIN:
We’ve witnessed that, but I think, also, it’s the reality of what’s popular and what sounds are popular, and what oral palate is happening at the moment.
BOB:
There’s also an economic factor driving that attitude. The major labels really want to push what the kids are exposed to a lot. If there’s a certain level of quality there, the kids are going to respond to it. That means fewer players or no players and the producer sits there with ten thousand great sounding loops of the best musicians in the world, royalty free, license free. He can put together whatever he wants and then just brings in one beautiful singer to sell to the public as a commodity.
CRISPIN:
That’s true, but what’s also true is that Hip Hop turned out to be really popular with a lot of people.
BOB:
Sure!
CRISPIN:
But, Hip Hop has its own rules.
BOB:
It does.
CRISPIN:
Whether it’s like straight-ahead Rap or whether it is Hip Hop with pretty vocals on top, it’s got its own sound and its own rules. In regards to a live performance of the music, it doesn’t apparently fit in that scheme except for the vocal.
LARRY:
Unless it’s processed to sound like a loop.
ARNO:
Look at the record companies, for example. Their instinct is to always total control. If there is anything that takes that control away from them it puts them uptight. I mean, obviously, they enjoy the profit, but they’d rather not have another Beatles. They’d rather have something that sells far less units, while still having control of how to reproduce it and how to make it happen, than have this unpredictable element of four guys where they can just recreate the sound automatically.

When we toured with The Rolling Stones, Keith Richards chuckled about the early days of the British Invasion. He mentioned that one of the great things for them was the freedom to basically do whatever they wanted. Why? The music Biz people didn’t now how to make a certain sound happen. So, they had to let the musicians do it.
LARRY:
I don’t know.
BOB:
I would agree.
CRISPIN:
That’s politicizing it a little bit. For instance, Rap music when it started was not at all embraced by major labels.
ARNO:
No!
CRISPIN:
They didn’t pick up on it.
ARNO:
No! I’m not implying that to Rap.
CRISPIN:
Well, that’s what Hip Hop came out of.
ARNO:
Right.
CRISPIN:
What I’m saying is Hip Hop’s presence today started from an audience who responded to it in the very beginning, out of the underground. In other words, out of the streets before hitting the mainstream. I don’t think record companies have the brains to predict what would happen. Instead, they responded to the trend and eventually picked up on it.
LARRY:
It’s always twenty/twenty hindsight with the music Biz people. From my own perspective, record labels aren’t doing enough in terms of creativity and experimentation. Instead, they go along with the status quo; with what has been successful.
BOB:
That’s their job.
LARRY:
Next, the labels come out with a ‘No More Horns!’ policy. But if one group scores a hit with horns, then they’ll all follow!

Arno, what’s that story about your friend, Carl, right now?

ARNO:
I have a friend in LA who writes music for one of the cop shows on TV. Shows like NYPD Blue, but not necessarily that one. Every week he writes the music for the following week’s show and assembles a group of five or six musicians to read down his charts. One day, he gets a memo from the show’s financial person saying there isn’t enough money in the music budget to hire musicians. That example sort of says it all as far as the economic side of things.
CRISPIN:
I definitely think that’s true in terms of TV and film. TV especially. That’s where production companies are at. If you are talking about Pop music that’s on the charts, these companies spend a lot of money on a Backstreet Boys album. I think the traditional sounds which might include horns are not popular with kids today. Honestly, it might come back in new ways. That’s possible.

Suddenly, there’s such a huge sound in these tracks and it draws questions of the integrity of the arrangement.

ARNO:
Most of the time when somebody calls us in and says they want horns on a particular song, they’ve already adjusted in their minds what exact part they want played.
LARRY:
Certainly, if the horns detract from the overall gestalt of the song, obviously, the horns are not being used correctly. Using unnecessary background vocals also detracts from the main lyric or vocalist.
CRISPIN:
It really depends on the producer.
LARRY:
You have to produce and arrange a song correctly so that, hopefully, the whole thing gives a good impact.
CRISPIN:
We’ve also done stuff for Wyclef Jean, from the Fugees. Basically, he had an idea in mind where we’d just play a couple of riffs. We didn’t have to read down any charts at all. I’m pretty sure he’ll manipulate our parts in Pro Tools or whatever. But, Wyclef certainly knew what he was looking for.
BOB:
It comes down to an editing question, too.
CRISPIN:
Right.
BOB:
Not just with Wyclef. This goes for any producer. We’ll throw out a lot of ideas or play down a lot of tracks and we have to expect to get edited.
LARRY:
The art of arranging is editing, too.
BOB:
True.
LARRY:
Whether you do it in Pro Tools or you do it out of your head with a pen and staff paper.
ARNO:
To some degree it comes down to the artist and the producer, as well. I mean, if you’ve got what amounts to a Blues Shuffle and you bring in a guitar player and you say, "now give me John McLaughlin doing Inner Mountain Flame."
LARRY:
Yeah. It detracts.
ARNO:
It might detract from the vocal, and you know in situations like that we sort of say, "Well, gee, something a little sparser might work better there." But, obviously, if the artist and the producers insist, "No, no, this is what I want," you just can’t butt heads and say, "We’re not going to give it to you."
LARRY:
A horn section, just like any other instrument, can add dynamics you never knew would be possible. On the other hand, it can be detractive if used incorrectly.
BOB:
Then you compress the shit out of it, and it turns out all right.
LARRY:
It could be good or horrible.

Earlier, you mentioned a situation where a producer would say they hear John McLaughlin playing this sort of way. Do you like being told something as vague as that?

ARNO:
Sure.
CRISPIN:
That’s where our memory bank thing helps out, because the more ideas we can come up with, then they’ll go, "That’s it!" Then we can zero in.
ARNO:
It’s fun to be creative, too.
CRISPIN:
As long as we’re not too married to any one direction, we can adjust.
LARRY:
We can accept the challenge.
CRISPIN:
Right!

Crispin, it’s almost as if you are a superstructure of a group, which tends to rests on the more traditional form of a group.

CRISPIN:
Well, you know, we’re a four-headed creature.
ARNO:
Sometimes.
CRISPIN:
We’re like one person with four heads. That’s what we’re called on to be. We sort of have to function the same way a single person would, but be four people in that kind of sense where it isn’t charts in front of us reading the notes.
LARRY:
Right.
CRISPIN:
I suppose there are groups where it’s like one person has the ideas and tells the other guys what to play. That’s not us.
ARNO:
We’re an anarchist, collectively, we always say.
BOB:
Yeah.
CRISPIN:
I am sure a lot of people have perceived our process as…
LARRY:
Comical?
CRISPIN:
Well, probably on a scale from comical to like psycho.
LARRY:
Horrible. Brutal.
CRISPIN:
But the truth is, unless we were set up in a different way, where it was one person dictating, that’s what they are going to get.

Somehow, you've all achieved a balance of terror.

LARRY:
Yes.
ARNO:
Yeah. A lot of times when there’s some creative process involved, what comes out is genuinely the collective effort of the four of us. I mean it’s usually not one person’s, as Crispin said, it’s not one person saying do this and do that, there’s a lot of banter or arguing, if you want to call it that.
LARRY:
Yeah. We don’t always agree.
CRISPIN:
Where one person might be inspired that day or it might be in a style that somebody had been immersing themselves in and might come with some ideas, we are capable of going in different directions with the moment.
BOB:
The ideal would be like the old Quincy Jones saying, "Check your ego at the door and come in."
LARRY:
Which is not easy all the time.
BOB:
It is very idealistic and not very often the case.
CRISPIN:
A studio musician, whether it’s four-headed or one-headed, is a strange sort of creative breed. Probably people outside of that world never really witness. The whole idea is they don’t know what they want you to play and you don’t know what you are going to play. But you got to come up with stuff, until they go, "Yup, that’s it." Then you’ve got to zero in and make it perfect. The difference with us is we do it as a four-piece together rather than one person.
LARRY:
We might individually give our own ideas and hope that the producer picks up on one of them.
CRISPIN:
Like I said before, some producers don’t even give us a chart to read down. We really sit there and come with ideas and see what happens.
ARNO:
It’s like an improvisational comedy theater group, where they just sit on stage and take props like a coat hanger or a belt and somebody suggests a theme. They then proceed to improvise and develop this whole bit or series of bits off the single prop or idea. I feel we do the musical equivalent.
CRISPIN:
If there is a budgetary or time consideration, we may come in with prepared arrangements if they give us a tape beforehand. We usually divide the songs up between the group and sketch out arrangements and some ideas.
LARRY:
That’s right. Crispin might take one and Bob might take one.
CRISPIN:
We’ll do that. Those notes on paper become the jumping off place.
LARRY:
Right.
CRISPIN:
And, if they like exactly what we’ve written down…
LARRY:
Great!
CRISPIN:
We’ll say fine, that’s it. But, they might say that one riff I like, but I don’t like the rest of it. So then we’ll start going back. We try and set up situations that will key a free flow of ideas so that the person we are working with is going to have some material scrolling in front of him when he can go, yes; no and that kind of thing. Sometimes we get the occasional remarks…
LARRY:
Eh!
CRISPIN:
You call yourselves professionals? How long have you been playing those things?
ARNO:
I can get some kids from Juilliard here tomorrow!
CRISPIN:
I can get a Brooklyn horn section in here!

Home Albums Artists Contact Downloads Help Links New Shopping Words

We encourage shopping:
Why our CD prices are so low
What you get in packaging
Why CDs sound better
Why you get almost instant satisfaction: wait just three days for REAL quality
We give away HUGE chunks of music so you can REALLY check it out

site maintenance by empathydesign, York, England