Play Declaration of Love From Celine Dion’s “Falling Into You”. A track I produced, in effect, for Celine Dion. Celine’s people had a deal to demo up a bunch of tracks; I was working in that orbit at the time and got this one to work up. I added a bunch of harmony to propel it, wrote a horn arrangement, played everything on the track in the sequencer, she heard it and said “I’m gonna sing on this one just like it is!”, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t, and sang the crap out of it too! We replaced my machine drums and added guitar, but other than that this is basically my demo, synth horns and all…
 

Play Lost and Found From an excellent Gino Vannelli CD, I executed this entire arrangement in Logic (including a nice “poor man’s Stevie” harmonica solo on a Kurzweil K2000), programming the drums/percussion as well. Gino is a BMF with the writing and production!
 

Play A Moment Is All I Ask A recent production with Gino Vannelli for an incredibly talented young singer/songwriter, Jamie Alimorad. When Gino and I do this sort of work I’ll play a pass in on each instrument (dig the Floyd Cramer licks!), and we go over it almost note-by-note, but I think the results speak for themselves…
 

Play Words Can Kill Another Gino track, again programmed entirely in Logic, this one features a kind of cool blues nylon-string guitar break…
 

Play I'm Easy A re-thinking of Lionel Ritchie’s great track, my arrangement is in a minor key, something that I thought was kind of a nice ironic twist on the lyrics. Singing this demo myself; when we did it on Drew Zingg’s CD, we got Michael McDonald to sing it 😀

 

Play You Make It Right When It Rains For a minute, when I was working on tracks for Celine Dion, I thought I might have a way to get a big gospel ballad to her. This idea for a lyric had been floating around my head for a while, so I decided to write a track and demo it up. Never did manage to get it to her, but it’s a pretty damn big track by the end with a lot of nice harmony in it. I am singing this demo myself as well, wish I still had high chops like this!

 

Play Let It Go I sure had fun working on these records with Randy Brecker. This one is entirely programmed with the exception of live horns (and what a horn section: David Sanborn, Fred Wesley, Mike Brecker, Randy and Ronnie Cuber). A good example of my very detailed drum programming and “bloody fingers” bass concept, mixed it myself, too. This disc won a Grammy in 2004 for Best Instrumental Jazz CD or some such.

 

Play Firefly And now for something…completely different. An A Capella, sort of doo-wop tune I wrote and sang several years back, kind of as a grooving little vocal experiment for me…

 

Play New York, New York (It's A Helluva Town) “Keys To The City” was a cool project: get a bunch of really good NYC pianists to each do a tune about…NYC. By the time I picked my tune, most of the obvious ones were taken, so I decided to do this piece, and take it pretty left, like NY used to take me kinda left! So I did it as a latin/orchestral thing (again, entirely programmed) in 7/4 and played some kind of kinetic piano on it…