| 31 August 2010
Jack Johnson brings his mellow vibe to the Cruzan. (Photo by Thom Smith)
It’s 6 p.m. The South Florida sun is still hot enough to cook eggs on the pavement. Most performers would be chilling in their tour buses or having dinner at the Four Seasons. Not Jack Johnson.
Armed only with guitars, he and his old buddy G Love set up on his “village green” at Cruzan Amphitheatre and sang a few songs for the early arrivals. It’s a good move: He warms up a little and helps draw attention to the organizations whose booths rim the “green.”
Johnson literally uses green to live green. When he can, he rides a bike; when he can’t, his buses run on biodiesel fuel. From the show’s proceeds, he matches whatever the organizations on each concert’s village green raise, up to $2,500. Cruzan’s beneficiaries included Kids Ecology Corps, Surfrider Foundation, Trash to Treasure Creative Reuse Center, the local arm of Slow Food USA and Indian Riverkeeper.
“He’s wearing one of our shirts during the show,” Surfrider’s local vice chair Todd Remmel bubbled. “We sold out of shirts.”
Johnson’s presence also generated signatures for petitions to ban offshore drilling on Florida’s Gulf Coast and to stop construction of environmentally unfriendly breakwaters off Singer Island.
Johnson was just as happy to play for the few dozen on the village green are he was for 19,000 when he walked onto the the Cruzan stage at 9 p.m. Thursday. Simply, both are places to play, neighborhoods, large and small, in his community.
But with a venue as enormous as Cruzan, performing on the green is the omelet to the big stage’s scrambled eggs. Cruzan’s mass renders everything less significant. Even Jack. His music is not small, but it’s intimate. It’s why lovers prefer to make love in the back seat of a car than in a stadium.
Five years ago, Johnson’s bus stopped at the Mizner Park Amphitheatre in Boca, a band of five still wet behind the ears in touring terms. For a crowd of 2,500, Johnson’s laid-back style worked fine. It didn’t hurt that Jimmy Buffett dropped by for a couple of numbers.
Cruzan, however, is a different bowl of poi. It’s great for the bottom line and great for the eco-groups that reaped the proceeds and exposure . . . but not great for the fan who wants to hear, and listen to his lyrics.
Both Buffett and Johnson project beach party personas, fueled by boards, buds and beers. Buffett’s parties are wild, bayou-flavored, spring-break concoctions that inspire bead collecting. Johnson’s remain more reserved – akin to gathering around a fire at the beach house, grilling some ahi, singing a few tunes, taking quiet walks along the shore.
Buffett was small once. The original Coral Reefers were a band of one, but as his fame grew, so did the band. Three decades ago he played small halls like Miami’s Gusman Theatre with four backups. Now Buffett’s Tabernacle Choir numbers a dozen or more and can easily fill the stage at Cruzan. Instant Mardi Gras.
G Love and Jack Johnson. (Photo by Kirsten Smith)
Unfortunately for Johnson, Cruzan isn’t suited to singing songs around a campfire. Its sound system could make a piker out of Pavarotti. Johnson’s fans who know his lyrics can snuggle and sway and sing along, but newcomers to Johnson’s style were left to shrug and wonder what all the fuss was about.
Johnson’s songs don’t tell stories like Buffett or raise hackles like Dylan. He doesn’t screech like Steven Tyler or strut like Mick Jagger. He doesn’t reach the high registers like Roger Daltrey or belt bluesy like Otis Redding. Don’t look for the passion of a Bruce Springsteen, the eroticism of a Jim Morrison or the soul of a Ray Charles in his shows.
Folky but not quite funky. Perhaps an occasional Latin rhythm or reggae riff. No screams, no pain. He’s a surfer, but he doesn’t sing surfing songs. He’s Hawaiian, but he doesn’t include any Hawaiian music, although he did pick up a ukulele for Breakdown.
Finally, Johnson begins to fill the stage. With the arrival of guest Duane Betts (son of West Palm’s own Dickey Betts), the tempo and the mood were revved up with some hot licks on Mud Football. Betts left, replaced by Hawaiian Paula Fuga plus Dan Liebowitz from opening act ALO who brought along his slide guitar for three songs, and then G Love. They added some needed counterpoint. Too bad Fuga’s graceful gestures on Turn Your Love and Country Road weren’t expanded to a full hula.
Covers of The Cars’ Just What I Needed, inserted into Poor Taylor, Steve Miller’s Joker and Buffett’s A Pirate Looks at 40 during the encore added variety and change of pace. To use a Hawaiian surfing metaphor, the added energy was like the difference between Waikiki and the North Shore.
If you like someone who stands at the mike, strums a decent guitar and delivers, without flash, sincere, heartfelt poems – mostly free verse, not much rhyme – set to simple melodies, then Jack’s your man. Fundamentally, his show flows in streams – no – waves of consciousness. For many fans, his songs are “their songs,” reminding them of a first date or a special birthday.
He has been described as the “anti-bling.” Perhaps a better moniker would be earth father, as he helps a generation addicted to Facebook and various housewives who dance with Star Trekkies connect to a less obvious but more genuine and productive humanity.
After two hours and more than two dozen songs, many people left wanting more. Blame Cruzan – for its impersonal sound; credit Jack -- for using its size for economic good.
Somewhere down the road, he’ll come back, and he’ll give them more. Perhaps in a slightly more intimate venue.
Anyone know a beach house where we could light a bonfire?
Jack Johnson brings the band and crew onstage to celebrate the end of this leg of his To The Sea tour. (Photo by Thom Smith)
| 03 August 2010
Carlos Santana at the Cruzan. (Photo by Tom Craig/Live Nation)
Both were boy wonders. Both were performing in public before they reached puberty. Both have kept the fires burning, enthralling, inspiring and enlightening audiences for more than five decades.
But perhaps Sunday’s show at Cruzan Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach explains why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has inducted Carlos Santana as an individual artist, but Steve Winwood only as a member of Traffic.
For Winwood, it was a night of “perhapses.”
Perhaps the sound mix was uneven. No. The sound was uniform throughout the shed.
Perhaps it was an unfamiliar song here or there. No. “They’ve been playing the same set all tour,” a sound tech said.
Perhaps he was road-weary. Possible. His 2010 touring schedule began Feb. 9 in Durham, N.C., with four stateside dates, broke for three months, then jumped to Europe for 16 May through mid-June well-received shows with Eric Clapton. After one solo show in Chicago on June 26, he hit the heartland as opener for Santana.
Twenty-three shows in 33 days.
Was he tired? He didn’t appear to be. At age 62, he seems fit, the ideal image of a boy wonder half a century later.
Perhaps it was his band. Five players including Winwood. Competent, but hardly inspiring. Perhaps Steve was deferring to the lead act. Didn’t want to show up his elder.
After all, so many times in his career he was not the dominant force. His first gig, at age 15, was in the Spencer Davis Group. Traffic was a joint effort, and with the likes of Dave Mason and Jim Capaldi, egos were bound to clash. Longevity wasn’t in the cards. Then came Blind Faith, a one-album wonder with Clapton and Ginger Baker, back to Traffic with Capaldi for its dominant years.
Nothing Sunday night was dominant. With its flute interludes, the opener, Secrets, conjured up some of early Traffic’s jazzy twists, and Dirty City, with Winwood on guitar, suggested more edge which built as the band ripped into Can’t Find My Way Home. But then the Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys needed a highlight. Too reserved.
Steve Winwood at the Cruzan. (Photo by Tom Craig/Live Nation)
Going trio, Winwood swapped his beloved Hammond B-3 for a Stratocaster and showed some fire in his solo on Dear Mr. Fantasy, but the song still seemed to drag. Then came a rousing , pumping, this-is-what-we expect-from-Steve-Winwood Gimme Some Lovin’. Alas, the set was over.
As fan “sponge bob” wrote on Winwood’s website Monday morning: “Steve, Steve, Steve, you have fallen asleep at the wheel. I was so dissapointed (sic) in your show; it was like a jam session! Just terrible.”
It didn’t help that, unlike Tampa the night before, when Winwood and band joined Santana and band for Marvin Gaye's Right On, the fans were treated to no what-if fireworks Sunday.
No sweet taste. No foul taste either. Just: Huh? The music offered no depth, no power, no subtlety – a monaural memory in a high-def world. If this was earth music, then Winwood and Co., are in the middle of a drought.
Back in the VIP area during intermission, UpShot, a local band that struggles for every gig it can get in a lean market, sounded better on its covers of the likes of Brown-Eyed Girl.
We have to wonder about Carlos Santana, too. Not about his talent or his music, but about what might have happened to him had the nation been embroiled so deeply in the immigration debate half a century ago when his family moved from Tijuana to San Francisco. Fortunately, he didn’t have to scale barbed wire or swim a river, and in 1965, the same year he graduated high school, he became a U.S. citizen.
Actually, Santana is more a citizen of the world, as he expressed after opening with a powerful, energetic Yaleo: “We are very grateful, appreciative. This is what Martin Luther King was talking about: unity, harmony, respect for one another.”
Then BOOM! They were off, with the political Maria Maria, vocalists Andy Vargas and Tony Lindsay going back and forth:
See mi y Maria on the corner
Thinking of ways to make it better
In my mailbox there's an eviction letter
Somebody just said see you later
Then came the horns (Bill Ortiz and Jeff Cressman) on Foo Foo, the salsa of Corazon Espinada, and Dennis Chambers’ exhausting drum solo, all enhanced by a dramatic light show and three video screens that served to amplify Santana’s world view. No where was it more evident than with the African tribal dancers on Santana’s first hit, Jingo, with musical emphasis to the percussion of Karl Perazzo and Raul Rekow and Freddie Ravel’s organ. Add Miami-raised Tommy Anthony on guitar and backing vocals and Benny Rietveld on bass and you have the complete package.
They go bluesy on Singing Winds, Crying Beasts, then have the crowd dancing in the aisles with Evil Ways and A Love Supreme. Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love offered a taste from the new album, Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time (due Sept. 21) while Smooth/Dame tu amor recalled Ultimate Santana, the first such guest-star venture in 2007.
Carlos Santana and the band. (Photo by Tom Craig/Live Nation)
The band is blessed with energy; every member wants to cook; every member, however, knows he’s in a band and thus part of the team.
With only one album, Santana first played South Florida at the Miami Rock Festival at Miami-Hollywood Speedway Park in what is now Pembroke Pines in late December 1969. Not much survives, no reviews, no set lists. By contrast, Woodstock is seared into the rock fan’s memory and was rekindled at Cruzan with a triptych video that began with the “Woodstock chant” and continued in perfect synch on stage with Soul Sacrifice. Hits from album No. 2, Abraxas, followed: Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen, Oye Como Va.
Into the Night, another Ultimate cut was followed by the Chambers Brothers’ Love Peace and Happiness that segued into Freedom.
Thus a tale of two concerts: Winwood, full of promise but failing to fulfill, and Santana, leaving the audience screaming for more but satisfied. Such is rock ‘n’ roll.
| 31 July 2010
Ingolf Dahl (1912-1970).
In the years just before and after World War II, Southern California became an oasis of sun, refuge and economic opportunity for several of the era’s most important European composers, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schonberg chief among them.
Ingolf Dahl was another one of those composers, and in the fourth and final program of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, his lively and clever Concerto a Tre was the intellectual and musical high point. Written in 1946, this piece for clarinet, violin and cello has a lot of the flavor of Stravinsky, with whom Dahl closely worked, but it comes across as less calculated, more naturally musical.
Friday night at Palm Beach Atlantic’s Persson Hall, violinist Dina Kostic, clarinetist Michael Forte and cellist Susan Bergeron gave a deft and engaging performance of this work, which has neoclassicism in its veins but also takes in some of the popular musical language of its time. Although each of the players has very difficult, challenging music to play, it’s the sound of the clarinet that drives the piece more than any other, and Forte gave the enterprise fluid fingers and a large, pleasing tone.
He ran into trouble in the highest reaches of the florid cadenza that ends the second movement, a piece with a slow-stepping kind of archaic grace (it’s marked esitando) in which the violin carefully sets out steadily rising single notes as it climbs, too, into the instrumental stratosphere. But most of the piece has a slangy, vivid swing in which odd rhythms and bright colors dominate, and in the conclusion, where the rhythmic complexity reaches its apex, the three musicians dispatched it handily.
Another trio on Friday’s program had its world premiere: Odyssey, for flute, clarinet and bassoon by composer Clark McAlister, who has been the festival’s producer for each of its six recordings. McAlister, whose Lou’s Mountain Bread remains my personal favorite of the works he’s written for this company of musicians, has crafted here a modest, sober 6-minute work for the three musicians – Forte, flutist Karen Dixon and bassoonist Michael Ellert – who founded the festival in 1992.
Beginning with a moody solo motif down around the chalumeau register of the clarinet, Odyssey opens up into a tapestry of long-lined, slowly moving themes, with a recurring waltz-like motif and an overall aspect of almost Bachian gravity. McAlister knows his way around the tonal possibilities of the three instruments, which gave this interesting, worthwhile piece added breadth despite the inherent limits of flute, clarinet and bassoon.
Modesty also was the watchword for two other works on the program, beginning with a curious Duo for bassoon and double bass by the French composer Albert Roussel. This 1925 duet already is on one of the festival’s discs, and was one of the works chosen for revisitation in the event’s 19th season. This is not the Roussel of the Third Symphony or the ballet score Bacchus et Ariane; rather, this work is more of a sport, an exploration of how to write for two low-voiced instruments.
Roussel leaves the bassoon to do most of the work, and much of that is a march-like chattering for the wind instrument over spooky harmonics in the bass. Ellert and bassist Jason Lindsay played it well, and with the right whimsical touch.
The concert opened with a rarity by Donizetti, a Trio for flute, bassoon and piano featuring Dixon, Ellert and pianist Michael Yannette. Best-known for his operas, Donizetti also wrote a great deal of other music, including 19 string quartets, and this work probably dates from the early part of his career around 1820, when he was concentrating on instrumental music.
Again, the three players here did a good job with this light-as-a-feather piece, which was distinguished by attractive melodies and a thoroughly conventional harmonic format. Dixon and Ellert had plenty of straightforward tune to play, and they made a good case for this composer’s fondness for both of these instruments.
The final work on the program was the little-known String Quintet in G, Op. 77, of Dvořák, which despite the late opus number is a relatively early composition, written about the time of his Fifth Symphony. Composed for string quartet and double bass, it has a ravishing slow movement, a folk-flavored scherzo and finale, and a somewhat fussy, academic opening movement.
Kostic and Lindsay were joined by violinist Mei-Mei Luo, violist Rene Reder and cellist Christopher Glansdorp for the quintet. There were moments of fine playing here, especially in the slow third movement, in which all five musicians maintained a beautiful intensity that served the music well, and in the trio of the Scherzo, which was somewhat more successful than the main section.
But there were frequent intonation problems throughout the piece, and in general, the musicians didn’t sound quite in control of the material, to the point that little of the lilt and joy of Dvořák’s writing came through. As sometimes happens in this festival, this could be an example of opening-night unease, and I would wager that matters will improve by the final performance Monday night.
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival repeats this program at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets are $22. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.
| 24 July 2010
Jacques Ibert (1890-1962).
At its most important, the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival is about discovery, in hearing something worthwhile that its musicians have brought out of the libraries or fresh off the stocks for its loyal audience of nearly two decades.
In the first installment Friday of its third week of concerts, the musicians returned in a largely French program to the work of Jacques Ibert, whose Deux Mouvements of 1922 the group performed and recorded 10 years ago. That work, for two flutes, clarinet and bassoon, got an encore performance Friday night at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall, but it was another composition by Ibert that really raised the temperature in the room.
The Trio for violin, cello and harp, written by Ibert in the dark year of 1944 for his harpist daughter, is an exemplary piece in whose second movement the ghost of Gabriel Fauré looms large, but which overall is a quintessentially French, marvelously colorful exploration of the timbres and capabilities of its three instruments. Harpist Kay Kemper was joined by violinist Mei-Mei Luo and cellist Christopher Glansdorp for this three-movement piece, which differs from the earlier Ibert work and much other of its ilk in its red-bloodedness, fire and drive.
The opening movement, marked Allegro tranquillo, was anything but laid-back in this performance; the first chordal snap in the harp was followed by a fierce athleticism from Luo and Glansdorp for the sinuous opening theme, giving the movement a headlong feel that the three players were happy to feed with plenty of fuel. Kemper provided strong rhythmic backing for her string partners, and offered impressive power in the fountains of glissandi that burst out in the middle of the movement.
Glansdorp demonstrated beautiful tone quality in the lovely second movement, a Fauré-style chanson from its harp ostinato to its melancholy harmonies and long-limbed melody, and Luo answered him in the same open-hearted fashion. The brusque energy of the opening was evident again in the closing Scherzando con moto, in which a chattering five-note motif was prominent and was effectively contrasted with a gentler secondary theme in the harp. The three musicians worked admirably well together, and their high-octane reading of this fine Trio made it stand out.
The Ibert Deux Mouvements that followed featured the same musicians that assembled for it a decade ago: flutists Karen Dixon and Beth Larsen, clarinetist Michael Forte and bassoonist Michael Ellert. This is a slighter piece than the Trio, and gains its attractiveness in its sly humor, exemplified by the two smirking-bassoon codas. This was an expert performance, distinguished by the fat, rich flute tone of Dixon and Larsen and its ensemble control, such as the skillful group diminuendo in the first of the movements.
Larsen and Dixon opened the second half with an old-fashioned Romantic-era display piece, a fantasy on themes from Verdi’s opera Rigoletto by the flutist-composer team of brothers Karl and Franz Doppler. It was designed to show off flute virtuosos, and in Larsen and Dixon it had two excellent players who gave us a good idea of why this kind of piece was so popular in its day.
Although this piece featured, briefly, La donna è mobile and Bella figlia dell’amore, much of it was built on the Act I aria for Gilda, Caro nome. The Dopplers surrounded these tunes with plenty of rapid chromatic scales in duet, or let one flute play difficult accompaniment figures while the other sang sweetly above it. There was no hint of any squeaks, honks or flubs in any of this, just two veteran players spinning out yards of silky smooth scales and dazzling filigree. Pianist Michael Yannette accompanied skillfully, and stayed well in the background.
Yannette, Forte and Ellert opened the concert with the other German work on the program, Mendelssohn’s early Concertpiece No. 2 for clarinet, bassoon and piano, written in 1832 but with the misleadingly high posthumous opus number of 114. The bassoon part of this work was originally composed for the now obsolete basset horn, and Forte hinted in remarks before the piece that real basset horns might show up on the festival’s concerts in its upcoming 20th anniversary season.
This is a modest but very attractive work, a chamber concerto for the two wind instruments that’s light on its feet. Both Ellert and Forte played with charm and suavity, with Ellert tackling a slightly more difficult part in that the second of the three movements required him to play the wide-ranging arpeggios supporting the clarinet tune, an Italian opera aria in everything but name. Both musicians were nicely in synch for the bubbling third movement, and they had good support from Yannette.
Like the second concert in the festival, the third ended with a major work from the string quartet repertoire, this time the String Quartet in F of Maurice Ravel. This sublime masterpiece contains not just wonderful music but also an object lesson in Ravel’s genius at orchestration; few composers before or since have been able to draw so much color and sound from only four instruments.
Violinists Dina Kostic and Rebecca Didderich (more familiar as a violist), violist Rene Reder and cellist Susan Bergeron joined forces for the Ravel, and did a more than respectable job. They were at their best in the most straightforward parts of the quartet, such as the tricky five-beat fourth movement, which sounded carefully and thoroughly rehearsed, and in the second movement, with its frequent time shifts and pizzicato punctuation.
And while this was a good presentation of the quartet in that it allowed listeners to appreciate the warmth of Ravel’s melodic writing and the richness of his sonic fabric, something subtle about the music seemed to elude this foursome. The closing bars of the third movement, for example, were deliberate where they might have been mysterious and dramatic, and the delicate, frequent harmonic changes in the first movement could have been played with a greater sense of surprise and mood.
What’s needed here is a little more of what makes Ravel, well, Ravel: An illusion of spontaneity and naked emotion carried out by means of an almost fearful precision.
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival repeats this program at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets are $22. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.
| 22 July 2010
Michael Zager.
When Michael Zager founded the commercial music program at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton in 2002, it's unlikely that some students knew about the level of commercial success he'd achieved in the music industry.
Perhaps they know now. The 67-year-old professor and eminent scholar has had a 50-year career as a keyboardist, composer, producer, arranger and educator that includes 13 gold or platinum records and three instructional books.
The Passaic, N.J., native has also worked with jazz artists Herb Alpert, Joe Williams and Arturo Sandoval as well as R&B acts The Spinners, Luther Vandross and Peabo Bryson, written chart-topping hits, and discovered future six-time Grammy Award-winning singer Whitney Houston when she was only 14 years old.
“I was producing a record for her mother, Cissy Houston,” says Zager, who lives in Delray Beach with his wife (and has sons as old as some of his hit songs at ages 40, 37 and 33). “One of her background singers couldn't make the recording session. When I asked Cissy who she wanted to sub, she said her 14-year-old daughter, and I thought she was crazy. But Whitney came into the studio and seemed like she'd already been in the business for 40 years. I'd never heard anything like her, and had her sing on some of my own albums afterward.”
Some of Zager's original scores and recordings (with Houston, The Spinners, and his own self-titled band) are on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. The professor's life experiences, as well as his multi-faceted musical education, helped to form the curriculum of his commercial music program.
“The goal is to produce graduates who are prepared for virtually every facet of the music industry as professionals,” Zager says. “We not only train them in the classroom, but we also have a professional record label, Hoot/Wisdom Recordings, so whatever they learn in class must be applied to a digital, globally distributed label. We have a creative track for students who want to be composers, arrangers and producers; a technology track for those who want to be engineers, and a business track for those who want to be executives. We also have two masters programs, one with a concentration on commercial music and the other focusing on music business administration."
“I got my master’s in commercial music at FAU in 2006,” says 46-year-old Israel Charles, a Fort Lauderdale-based composer, producer, drummer and educator. “Now I teach music technology and production at the performing arts wing of Dillard High School. It was great learning music production from Prof, and being able to make it my career. He talked to me at an educational conference in 2003, attracted me to his program, and was a great professor. I'd bring in mixes of songs that I thought were hot and ready to go, and he'd tell me what was missing and send me right back to the drawing board. He'd always find one or two elements that were needed, and he was always correct! Now I get the chance to show kids that knowledge in return, which is an awesome job.”
Zager was surprised to be hired full-time by FAU in the first place. A 1964 University of Miami graduate, he'd gone on to study at New York City institutions like Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music and Mannes College of Music, a division of New School University. When he applied for a part-time position at FAU, administrators clearly knew about his history.
“I wasn't even a music major at Miami,” Zager says. “I loved warm weather; my grandparents were here then, and I studied to work in television, something that my oldest son ended up doing. He's a producer at Paramount. But I never wanted to go back to the cold weather.”
“I'd started teaching two courses in 1997 as an adjunct professor at the Mannes College of Music,” he continues, “back when I was a full-time composer and producer. But I wanted to move back down here and teach, and it was an accident that I got this full-time position. I really just came down here for an interview to teach a course as an adjunct professor.
“The vice president asked if I wanted to apply for my current position and it worked out, even though I'd never been a full-time academic. It was like ‘The Godfather’ in that they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. And it was the best decision I ever made to this point in my career.”
He'd certainly made some other good ones. Zager may not have planned to be in the music industry, but his career started rolling in 1968 as a member of the band Ten Wheel Drive -- horn-heavy contemporaries of Blood, Sweat & Tears and precursors to Chicago and Tower of Power. The keyboardist co-founded the group with guitarist Aram Schefrin, who now resides in Wellington. After a 1969 appearance at the Atlanta Pop Festival, the band was signed to Polydor Records, and released four albums by 1974 on either the Polydor or Capitol label.
“I was a jazz nut, and we were one of the early jazz-rock horn bands,” Zager says. “We got a record deal and became quite successful. But our management turned down Woodstock, or we might have been more successful. Although who knew then that Woodstock would be Woodstock? Once we saw what it turned into, that was our lowest point.”
Zager started composing for TV, radio, and films afterward, and built an impressive résumé that includes everything from IBM, Budweiser and Buick to Ally McBeal and the films The Eyes of Laura Mars and Summer of Sam. But the mid-1970s also produced a new musical trend called disco, something that Zager embraced wholeheartedly.
“I didn't know anything about disco,” he says. “My musical partner, Jerry Love, was the head of A&R at A&M Records in New York City at the time. When he left, we formed our production and publishing company in 1975, Love-Zager Productions, where he handles the business end and I handle the creative side. He started hanging out at Studio 54, and he said, ‘This disco thing is going to blow up, so let's make some dance records.’ I started listening to it and really liked it, right as it exploded. We ended up having hit after hit.”
The biggest was Let's All Chant by the Michael Zager Band, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard disco chart in 1978.
“I get more checks now for that song,” he says. “I sold more than five million copies of that record, and it's bigger than ever, especially outside of the United States. That's the case with most of my records. But I had a hit here with The Spinners called ‘Working My Way Back to You,’ and one with Peabo Bryson called ‘Do It With Feeling,’ which went to the top of the R&B charts.”
Disco may be a four-letter word to some music fans, but Zager is unabashedly unapologetic about the genre.
“Disco is bigger than ever now, but they just call it dance music or electronica,” he says. “What do you think Lady Gaga is? There's no difference, other than they're using synthesizers instead of orchestras. They use more tricks in the studios now. Look at the talent from that era. There were some of the greatest singers and musicians in the world recording disco.”
Most figures as successful as Zager don’t go back to school after topping the charts, but he checked his ego at the door of Mannes College between 1984 and 1988.
“I wanted to start film scoring and do big orchestrations, but I got scared that I didn't know enough,” he says. “So I went back to school and majored in composition. And this was after I'd been at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, plus studied with Stephen Sondheim for several years.”
Zager’s students praise the professor for showing them the intricacies of the music biz.
“When you walk into Prof's office, you see gold and platinum records on the wall,” says Charles, “so the hardware speaks for itself. As a songwriter and producer, that's the same impact that you want to make on the music industry. He has so much practical experience to go with his knowledge that you just keep quiet, listen, and try to soak it all in. He let me produce my own 10-song CD as my thesis, since I wanted to do something hands-on rather than written.
“I got an area singer I was working with, Rachel Brown, to contribute vocals. After I graduated, I formed my own label. And one of those songs, ‘Let's Fall in Love Again,’ ended up going to No. 1 on the ‘Billboard’ hot R&B single sales chart.”
Zager is at work on a fourth educational book, plus producing a singer named Karina Skye. He even released his own independent smooth jazz CD called South Beach Wind a few years back. While some in the industry avoid South Florida because of its tourist-driven music scene, Zager shakes his head at his good fortune.
“I wasn't even familiar with FAU before Jerry Love told me about it,” he says. “It was one of those things that happens once in a lifetime. I love being here. My job as an eminent scholar is to stay very active professionally, so it's very fulfilling, especially when I see my students get out into the world and do well. It's a dream job.”
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