A very small sampling of the tracks I’ve produced, composed or arranged for artists such as Celine Dion, Chaka Khan, Gino Vannelli, Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana & Dave Matthews, Michael Bolton, Patti LaBelle, and dozens of other artists:

 

Play America The demo of an arrangement I did for Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang, who were working on a duo CD; this is “America” from West Side Story. Dig the “classical piano” I came up with for Lang Lang; this project got shelved, but the arrangments burn pretty hard!

Play Dreamer A chunk of film score I wrote and orchestrated, recorded live at Fox Newman Studios with a 45-piece orchestra. This was a scene from “Dreamer”, the great girl-loves-horse story, and this played under the climactic horse race at the very end. Written for ASCAP’s Film and TV Scoring Workshop with Richard Bellis, where I was awarded the Harold Arlen Award for best score.

Play Don't Give Up My warm strings/horns orchestral backing is featured in this cut from Herbie Hancock’s “Imagine Project”, featuring John Legend and Pink on vocals, and the most gorgeous touch ever to grace a piano on the piano…

Play Somewhere Here’s another arrangement from the Herbie/Lang Lang project. My original concept was more spacious with the pianos; I envisioned it as a kind of “touch piece” rather than quite such a florid thing on the Lang Lang part, at least. But Clive Davis, who was digging the project, wanted me to “challenge our piano players more” (as if!), so I wrote more piano in there.

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 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…