Jan 1, 1999 12:00 PM, Eric Rudolph

Four-time Grammy-winning producer John Snyder gets to have a lot of fun. When he's not busy producing living legends like Dave Brubeck, George Shearing and Joe Williams, he's making records with younger comers such as saxophonist David Sanchez, pianist Danilo Perez and trumpeter Tom Harrell. For a change of pace he fishes and bicycles and makes records at a Bayou-side studio-cum-leisure complex in Louisiana with people such as James Cotton and Clarence Gatemouth Brown.

Between producing gigs, Snyder supervises compilations and reissues, everything from the Jefferson Airplane (After Bathing at Baxter's and Bless Its Pointed Little Head, among others) to Miles Davis (Miles in the Sky, Miles Smiles) and Glenn Miller (Moonlight Serenade, Carnegie Hall Concert).

Snyder apparently does it for the love of the music, as evidenced by his claim that he'd give it all up in a second if he could play lead trumpet in the hard-working, globe-trotting legacy edition of his all-time favorite band, the Count Basie Orchestra. That position, however, is filled, so Snyder continues on recording the music he loves.

Snyder's recently completed projects include two 1998 Christmas records-one each with George Shearing and Etta James-and a Jim Hall/Pat Metheny collaboration. He's also just completed I Remember Bill, star arranger Don Sebesky's piano-less tribute to piano great Bill Evans, which features Tom Harrell, nascent sax legend Joe Lovano and guitarist John Pizzarelli. Snyder also completed Quintet, the second record by 19-year-old slide guitar phenom Derek Trucks. Upcoming projects include a tribute to Bob Dylan by various blues artists and a possible follow-up to Snyder's popular Paint It Blue: Songs of the Rolling Stones, which will feature Stones songs covered by the likes of Luther Allison, Johnny Copeland, the Holmes Brothers and Gatemouth Brown, among others.

How did you become a record producer?

I was born in Charlotte, N.C., in 1948. In Charlotte in those days, there was one record store; really a hi-fi store with a few records. So I joined the Capitol Record Club-the first record I got was Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool, which scared me to death! I'd never heard a Beatles record until way after the fact, but I knew every Miles record. And so I took up the trumpet.

I was pretty serious about music in high school, playing trumpet everywhere I could, and got a music scholarship to the University of North Carolina, where I got a degree in music ed. Then I went to law school at UNC-Chapel Hill. I went to law school because I'd done well in a criminology class and was urged to study law by that professor, and because the dean of the UNC law school was a big music fan and really wanted me there!

Also, it was the late '60s and law schools were looking for diversification-women, blacks, weirdos-and I fit the weirdo category. I didn't love it, but I went through the whole three years of law school. I thought law school would be more serious than it was, but it was just a memory thing; you jump through the hoops and you pass. So I jumped and did pretty well.

After law school I was interviewing for jobs at banks and insurance companies and I knew this was not for me. So I wrote to all the entertainment law firms in New York City and to one record producer, Creed Taylor, founder of CTI Records, who wrote me back and said, "If you're in New York come and see me." I drove up and met with a few law firms and with Creed, and he hired me on the spot.

This was 1973; my job was to run CTI's publishing companies, listen to the tapes that came in, look over the contracts. It didn't hurt that I knew every record Creed had ever made! One day Creed said, "Hank Crawford's coming in tomorrow and we need some songs." I picked out some songs for Hank, and they took every one. After that, Creed asked me to continue to look for songs. So I started spending evenings in the office listening to a lot of records. Then CTI started to go downhill because of the branch distribution setup they had but could not support. I took over the jobs of many people who were fired, and eventually touched on almost every job at CTI-manufacturing, A&R, distribution, creative services, everything. It was an education in the record business I doubt you could get these days. Then, finally, CTI just went out of business.

So I went to A&M in 1975 and started a new label called Horizon, and we recorded artists like Ornette Coleman [Dancing in Your Head] and Dave Brubeck [Dave Brubeck Quartet 25th Anniversary Reunion and Dave Brubeck & Paul Desmond Duets] and that lasted a couple of years. I tried to sign George Benson to A&M just after he left CTI and before he went to Warner Bros. and sold 10 million records, but A&M wouldn't give me the money, so I didn't get George. You can't win 'em all.

After A&M, in 1977, I started my own record company called Artists House with Ornette [Body Meta, The Quartet], Paul Desmond [Paul Desmond], Art Pepper [So in Love, Lover Man], Chet Baker [Once Upon a Summertime, The Quintet], Gil Evans [Solo] and others. That lasted five years; I kind of got run out of town by MCA with a bad distribution deal. So then I was sort of on my ass for a couple of years.

While I was out of work, I was Mr. Mom back in North Carolina. Fortunately, John Hammond was a mentor to me and was always trying to get me work at CBS. Finally, I called John one day and said, "I've really got to get back." He said, "Well, you know I'm the old fart at CBS now and they don't pay me any attention." I asked him to introduce me to Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records, which he did, insisting that Ahmet's office put him through even though Ahmet was in his dentist's chair at the time! John talked me up as Ahmet was getting dental work done.

Ahmet hired me and I ran a jazz division that I created. And there were some blues records they asked me to take care of, so I ended up with a staff of five or six people. Ahmet wasn't comfortable with that, even though his chief of staff had made it happen. He tried to fire me one day, but I talked him out of it.

By now it was 1987, so I wrote Ahmet a report on how to make money putting his jazz records on CD, which he didn't think was possible. I gave it to him on a Monday, and he fired me later that day! He was also generous with the severance pay, but I was really glad to get out of there; it was like a totalitarian state.

So from then on, I've been independent. I do a lot of reissue work for RCA and GRP, and I worked at Sony for a number of years also doing reissues. But that's just sort of rent money, because basically what I've done since then is make jazz records-everything from Tom Harrell, Danilo Perez, Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan to Ornette, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. I've been lucky. I also started making blues records about five years ago and have had pretty good success with that. I had a contract with PolyGram for five years and with Telarc for six years, to produce jazz and blues records. I have a wide range; I do Bobby Short's records and James Cotton's. I do some gospel, some classic R&B.

What are you excited about right now?

I've just done my second record with Derek Trucks, a young slide player who I think has an incredible future; he's certainly had an incredible past. He's 19 and has been on the road with his own band since he was 11. His uncle is Butch Trucks, the drummer in the Allman Brothers. Since Derek's been on the road almost half his life, he's received his education through the mail and by phone.

He's extremely smart; he's like a sponge. He said to me recently, "Hip me to Plato." I said, "Hip you to Plato? Go practice your instrument!" But I gave him Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and he just soaked it up. He's into all kinds of music; world music, Indian music.

Derek likes to play Coltrane and Miles and he loves Sun Ra. He went through his blues phase from 12 to 13, then he had to move on; it wasn't interesting enough for him! I think of him as a Weather Report or Mahavishnu type of artist, as an alternative to the neo-traditionalism that is so in fashion now in jazz, through the Wynton Marsalis influence. That's what interests me about him.

Let's talk about how you work. Do you do a lot of rehearsals before you start a record?

That depends on the situation. When I recorded Sun Ra, I was determined to make really good-sounding Sun Ra records. Sonny's records had always been made under the oddest of circumstances. And after I made my first Sun Ra record [Blue Delight] and it sounded pretty good, I was determined to make an organized Sun Ra record, which is probably an oxymoron. So we had two or three days of rehearsal for this new record [Purple Night]. We get to the date, at RCA, with Don Cherry and 20 musicians, and Sonny and his musicians started playing this music we hadn't rehearsed; it was just sort of going along. And Sonny wouldn't talk, he would just play. Suddenly there was this sound, it was like a big spaceship just took off, exactly that image-I could see it, it was just great. But it wasn't anything that we'd rehearsed!

After the date I asked Sonny, "Why didn't you do any of the songs that we'd rehearsed?" He said, "Think of it this way: I'm a football coach. We practice all week long but we don't play the same game on Sunday that we did all week."

So despite that experience, I'm always surprised that rehearsals don't play a bigger part in pre-production, but when you are hiring musicians from various parts of the country, it is hard to get them together a week or a month ahead of time.

So how do you approach a recording?

It depends on the musical genre. I find that blues artists are more malleable and workable; they're not uptight about it. Jazz artists are much more proprietary about what they do, and the influence you have is much more subtle; I don't direct jazz dates as much as I do with a blues record.

I listen carefully. I've been in bands, I know what they do, what they're going through, and I always try to pick out something great, something really positive about what somebody's playing. And then they know I'm listening, and it makes it easier for me to tell them when they're not doing something well.

You work in a lot of different studios...

There's a studio in Maurice, Louisiana, where I've made more than 20 records, called Dockside. At Dockside, the studio environment becomes an active participant in recording. It's on a 12-acre estate; there's a lake stocked with fish- you can't fail to catch a fish there-and there are tennis and basketball courts and miles of flat country roads for bicycling. And they've got two vintage Neve boards and two Studer analog machines. You bring musicians there and they sleep, eat, work and play there. It creates a real mutuality, a kind of community of interest, and everyone's very relaxed. There are no problems, the food's good, and I always get great records out of there.

Let's go over the nuts and bolts of how you record.

We record the bass direct; we have an amp but don't use it much. The guitars are isolated but not direct, so you need great amps. It's like a meal: The better the ingredients, the better the result. I've also had access to some great instruments through Dockside, like a 1956 Gibson Les Paul and other wonderful stuff. You put an instrument like that in a guitar player's hand and he plays better. He knows he's got a world-class instrument there.

We use Neumann mics a lot: 67s, 47s; the mic selection at Dockside is pretty good. They also have Telefunken U47s, Neumann M49s, AKG C24s and, of course, workhorse mics like Sennheiser 421s, Shure 57s and AKG 414s.

Telarc, where I've made many records, has its own equipment for recording direct-to-2-track, and it is also good. Their thing is 2-track and picking the right room. It's fine to make a classical recording direct-to-2 in a great hall, but it's not great for the blues records and is not always the best way to cut jazz. But the sound is always superb. They usually run a DAT for the direct-to-2-track and back it up with 48-track recording, for remixing to surround sound. Telarc favors Neumann M50s and M49s, among other mics.

But Telarc doesn't just do direct-to-2-track. The late Junior Wells' last record was for Telarc, Live at Buddy Guy's Legends. We cut on 24 tracks of ADAT at Buddy Guy's Chicago club and then mixed to 5.1. I believe this record was the first live 5.1 blues recording. I think 5.1 is the future. If you listen to the Junior Wells record in 5.1, you think you are in Buddy's club. There is nothing two-dimensional about that recording.

Tell me what it is like making these blues records.

We try to keep it fun. We have a lot of laughs down there at Dockside. We often cut the tracks in three days, sometimes less, not often more, because the budgets aren't that big. Then we spend a couple of days overdubbing and three or four days mixing. They're seven- to ten-day records; I've certainly made them in less time. If they give you $25,000 to make a record, you've got two or three days at the most to track and then two or three days to mix. I don't really like to make those kinds of records because the budgets create such constraints, but you do what you have to do.

I usually have a tape of some preliminary version of what I want for each song. I try to rehearse the first day and run through the songs. But when you're using studio cats, they'll usually just say, "Look, we'll rehearse the song and then record the song and then go to the next one," which is fine.

I just love the chaos. For me, the fun is going into the studio, where no one has the faintest idea of what we're going to do, and then you bring order to the chaos. It's like cleaning up a dirty house. The house is a wreck, and you just put it back together. I know the music is in there someplace; you just have to go and find it.

What's your goal in recording these legendary blues artists like Gatemouth Brown, James Cotton and the late Junior Wells?

My thrust with blues guys is to make a great record and hopefully win a Grammy and sell a lot of records so that their live performance money goes up.

That happened with Gate, with Junior and with Cotton: Their live fees increased dramatically, and I'm really happy about that. The main way these guys make money is from working live, and I want to see that they get the best money possible for all these shows. With Gatemouth Brown, we got Eric Clapton to play on the record. Actually, Gate didn't know who Eric Clapton was! We got Eric to play on Gate's record along with Ry Cooder and other people, and all of a sudden Gate sells 100,000 records and his performance money triples, and to me that's the whole point.

You've also made several records in the last few years with the great singer Joe Williams, who is still going amazingly strong as he nears his 80th birthday.

There's a true gentleman there. He's also a guy who always has a lot of fun. I grew up listening to Joe Williams singing with Count Basie. Count Basie was my band! I wasn't one of those Duke Ellington guys- it took me a few years to appreciate Ellington-but Basie I got right away. As a kid who played trumpet, my goal was always to be lead trumpet player in the Count Basie band, and it still is. If I could play lead trumpet in the Basie band today, I'd do it!

The Count Basie Orchestra, the legacy band, is still a truly great band.

I'm telling you! We did the Live in Detroit record a few years ago, reuniting Joe Williams with the Count Basie Orchestra for the first time on record in a very long time. That was a thrill. Since that recording, for which the Basie band got together a real book to use with Joe, the band and Joe have been doing a lot of live dates.

Talking about Joe Williams reminds me of how close we are to the beginnings of jazz. A hundred years from now it will be like classical music-everyone will be dead and gone. We know people who knew people who were there at the beginning. But not for long. Joe has a famous quote about how one day soon there won't be anyone left who ever heard Billie Holiday sing live.

So I think we're living in a golden time, at least for the music. Maybe it was more of a golden time 20 years ago or so. But still, today is a golden time. Guys like Joe Williams, Max Roach, Dave Brubeck, George Shearing-the older guys who've seen it and been there-they were all friends with Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. And so the chain of jazz is just a short chain. We've seen the links being formed in those people's lives. It's an amazing thing.

Sometimes if I'm in a record date and I'm having problems with the musicians focusing or getting in the right frame of mind, I'll tell them what I think, which is that music is a powerful medium that can change people's lives, that can make people feel good and bring something positive into the world that wasn't there before. That's an amazing thing, and the world needs more of that.

And if we have the opportunity of doing that-creating something that's going to last who knows how long, and will affect people's lives in a positive way over and over again-we've done a good thing. I don't know what could be better than that; I really don't. That's why I consider myself a lucky person to be able to work with people who can do that; it's a wonderful thing.

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