Interviewed by Shannon West
July 28, 2007

If not for glitches in circumstance you could have been banging your head to a rock band fronted by Blake Aaron toward the end of the 80s, or buying his new GRP release in the mid 90s. There were paths he could have taken that would have turned him into a cult hero doing eclectic world music or instrumental rock like Satriani or Vai. Fortunately for us the signs he followed led him into smooth jazz with his rock and R&B influences intact, which makes him a true original in a field of guitarists who mostly play chilled-out grooves or Benson/Brown flavored urban smooth.

His originality and diversity are showcased in the 15 songs on his new CD, Desire. His story is one of perseverance, persistence, and preparation. It's the down to earth side of being a working musician that is more the real life of a most of the musicians we love than the limos, entourages and stages in exotic locales. Star quality doesn't guarantee stardom. He has a lot of the first but the latter has eluded him so far. His story is the one that most musicians live, which makes it fascinating to share. Since I spent a big chunk of the 80s hosting a radio show called “Metal Madness” on weeknights then doing the Sunday Jazz Brunch on the same station it was fun to talk to someone else who had a foot in both those worlds too.

SV: Desire is your third album and you got some airplay for the first two but there really isn't a lot of information out there about you so starting with the basics, when did you start playing guitar?
BA: I started playing when I was about seven years old. I didn’t really take it seriously until I was in high school, though.

SV: What kind of music were you playing?
BA: I did a lot of rock bands, I played those shows on sunset strip. Then I did a whole thing where I played with a bunch of R&B acts for a while, then a bunch of rock acts. It was in little sections in my life back then. When I first got out of college I was doing a lot of those R&B revival acts like Bobby Womack and Little Anthony and the Imperials, Mary Wells, Drifters, Coasters and all that stuff.

SV: That seemed like a pretty impressive list for someone straight out of college. How did you start doing those shows.
BA: I had friends that were playing in those bands, they recommended me and I was fresh out of college so it was a chance for me to go out on the road and learn from these R&B guys.

SV: What did you learn from being on the road with those guys?
BA: Musically it made me a lot funkier. I was kind of a white boy before I got into those bands (laughs). There’s a certain way that those guys play that’s real funky and it makes you learn how to groove. When you’re in college you’re learning all the intellectual stuff but you have to pick that up on your own. I was often the only white guy in these bands and they’d get after you real quick if you weren’t playing  what’s called “in the pocket.” It’s a certain lock that the guitar player has playing rhythm and a feel that’s not so much lead stuff but the rhythm stuff. If you don’t really experience that type of music it’s something a lot of white guys don’t get that experience because they come up playing rock or jazz . I kinda learned the hard way, the street way. It's really helped me to this day because even when I’m playing jazz or fusion stuff  those parts come up and I can give them that feel like a funk player.

SV: Where did jazz come into the picture?
BA:  I was still doing jazz gigs while I was doing the rock and R&B. I just wasn’t doing my own music. I didn’t start doing that till later, but I played with lots of different bands. They weren't super big names but I was playing anything from big band stuff to four or five piece straightahead groups to fusion. I remember doing a lot of fusion and playing stuff like Yellowjackets and Larry Carlton.

SV: When did you decide to go in that direction. When did it first captivate you?
BA: It pretty much captivated me right away but  Pat Metheny was the big crossover point for me. He had the biggest effect on my musical life and that happened pretty much when I was coming out of high school. I was just starting to listen to the guys who were rock-jazz players as opposed to jazz-rock players. People like Jeff Beck were rock players who got into jazz, Carlton’s stuff was pretty rock edged too, Lee Ritenour was playing stuff like distortion guitar back then. Those guys were an easy crossover for a guy like me who was a rocker, where if you had just sprung something like Coltrane on me back then it would have been a little difficult to digest that. It was more of a slow process going from being a kid that was into Zeppelin and Queen then going into checking out Jeff Beck. I could grab that, then from there I got into the guys who were playing the cleaner stuff like Metheny. He’s probably my all time favorite. I remember Metheny having such a powerful effect on my life. I was working a daytime job at a guitar center selling instruments and feeling like it just wasn’t the right thing for me to be doing but I was going to hang in there. Someone was demonstrating a PA and they were playing Metheny and it just hit me that I shouldn’t be there. I should be working on my music. I went in and quit that day. Metheny has had a pretty powerful effect on the direction of my life. Other guys have had a lot of influence but Metheny has had an almost magical effect. I remember listening to that Travels album over and over, actually on album. I had it on vinyl.

SV: At that point you decided to do this?
BA: I was still doing rock shows because I loved it. There were a lot of good bands coming out in the late 80s that I really liked and I was into progressive rock too. I was listening to Genesis and Rush, and I really liked Queensryche. If you saw my collection it was probably about half jazz stuff. I was starting to get into traditional jazz too, which was kind of the next step after I got into Metheny. And I was listening to the  rock guys that were before my time like the early Hendrix and Clapton albums. With both jazz and rock I started with the guys that I know then I started working backward. From Metheny it was Wes Montgomery, then Benson then people like Grant Green.

SV: A lot of us first got to know you when you started touring with Steve Reid’s Bamboo Forest which was when you were starting to get a national profile. What led up to that?
BA: I was doing a lot of rock stuff. I started playing with some cover bands doing rock and made a bunch of friends. One of them was Will (Donato) who was doing a rock/R&B cover band. I started doing some writing with a rock singer who was good friends with the guys in Stryper when they were real big. Tim Gaines (Stryper bassist) was doing a solo project and my friend told him about me. I ended up in a rock band that was a solo project for Tim then he got busy with Stryper. We decided to go ahead without him and it got to the point that things were going to take off. I was doing a lot of writing. It was kind of like Extreme and they were shaping me up to be the next Nuno Bettencourt. The record company was looking for the next Nuno, Joe Satriani, or something like that so I had a deal to do my own instrumental rock album and the band was being looked at by Polygram and doing the shows on Sunset Blvd. My hair was down to my waist, almost.
I had these big earrings and the pirate rock shirts and stuff so my career started going in that direction. I never lost my love for jazz. I was still playing jazz and listening to R&B. Then unfortunately the band that I was with came so close to being successful but the typical stuff that goes on in bands where guys can’t get along and things caused the band to break up. Then a friend hooked me up with a TV and film composer who needed a guitar player. We did a couple of shows that didn’t do anything then he ended up doing a show with Ben Stiller and from there he started working with Mad TV and I started working on that show. That led to more studio stuff so for a while I was really focused on being a studio musician.

SV: Did you shift your focus to the studio work and cut back on live gigs?
BA: Actually my solo jazz career started right after Mad TV took off.  I had a contact at GRP records and he was interested in me so I spent several months locked up in my studio writing jazz stuff so I would have a demo for him. I came up with this really eclectic 6 song EP. It actually had “Rumblefish” which ended up on my first album and “Run Away With You” which ended up on Desire.  I sent it over in about 1995, they wanted to fly me out for a meeting but unfortunately that was when GRP was starting to go under.

SV: Another adventure in bad timing…
BA: Yeah, first the rock thing then here’s this big opportunity to do jazz and the label is about to crumble. I was talking to an A&R guy and he said to call him in a week. I called him in a week and got his voice mail message that said “Hi. I’m no longer employed at GRP records.”  After that I had the six songs and figured I might as well do something with them. I had a guitar student named Peter Vidmar who wanted some CDs for his clients so I gave him some of those.. He came back telling me how much he and his clients liked it. That’s when I found out he had won gold medals in the 1984 Olympics and was a motivational speaker. He was interested in financing some more copies of the album to give to his clients and from there it went from the idea of copying the demo CD to making a new CD.  Then we decided that as long as we were going to do that we might as well start a company so we started Innervision records. I had done a gig with Eric Marienthal and I asked him to play. I had David Benoit in mind for one song. I didn’t know him but Eric sent him some songs and he liked them so I got him on a song. It started to snowball and ended up as “With Every Touch.”  It took a while to get the company started and do the recording, so while that was going I heard from Will Donato. He was about to join Bamboo Forest because Jeff Kashiwa was leaving the band and they were looking for a guitarist too. I met Steve Reid and he invited me to audition. I just said “I’m going to get this gig” and I spent a lot of time with his CDs. I learned every guitar part, I charted them all. I made sure that every little nuance he could ask for was there. I went down and the guys couldn’t get together at the time so I ended up actually camping out in Steve’s RV in his driveway and working on tunes. I played for all those guys and Steve was blown away that I knew every little part and I ended up with Bamboo. While this was going on I was still trying to get “With Every Touch” finished. While I was on the road with Bamboo I met David Munoz, a smooth jazz radio guy in Texas, who got me in touch with a promoter that had a developing artist program. I was able to work with them and get some airplay. Between Bamboo and the album I was back into jazz again.

SV: The visibility you got with Bamboo Forest helped get your solo career of the ground and give you a way to get some exposure for your CD.
BA: IT did. It was my first national jazz thing. I was doing local stuff before that so it got me in front of a bigger audience.

SV: Then you did a follow up CD.
BA: I did Bringin’ it Back mostly on my own.

SV: It was funkier and more high energy, I thought. You got some pretty decent airplay on “She’s So Fine” too.
BA: We were trying to do something that would get some airplay but not be background music because doing background music will get you on the radio but it won’t sell any CDs. It’s a really thin line to work.

SV: You did a beautiful job of it though. And you’ve really built on that with the new CD. You used multiple producers and you’ve got 15 songs that cover about every piece of turf that is in the smooth jazz genre.
BA: I wanted to try some new things and Michael Whittaker, who produced my first two CDs, moved to Nashville so the logistics were a factor in not using him for more songs. I had known Hussein (Jiffry) for a long time and he had told me he was doing some production. He did some work with Michael Weingart...

SV: (butting in) ...who is just amazing. I got to see him a few weeks ago with Warren Hill and it was one of those things where you just stop in your tracks when he does a solo.
BA: He’s great, he used to play with Dave Weckl. So did Hussein.

SV: Now it’s coming clear why I latched onto this CD. When you have guys with that kind of background working with you the result is going to be awesome.
BA: Actually before any of this started I decided to use Paul Brown. I wanted to get his sound on some songs and obviously it would help to have him producing some tracks when it came to trying to get airplay. He used a song I wrote called “More or Les Paul”  on his CD and I played on it, Euge Groove was on it too.

SV: How was working with Paul different from working with Whittaker or Hussein?
BA: They are all really different from each other. Mike works fast and he likes to get a track down and then not tweak with it much. He doesn’t want to go in and rework a lot of stuff, which gives it a real spontaneous feel. Paul is kind of like that too but he’s more laid back.

SV: His thing seems to be the sounds and effects he can get on the tracks, the real production part of it. On one hand he has a signature sound but he came up with some stuff for you that sounds really original. Tell me about Hussein.
BA: He mostly does fusion guys, I’m really one of his first smooth jazz projects. He worked with Weckl, Robben Ford, guys like that.  He’s the most patient guy. He will stay there and get really into the details. Paul pretty much used the tracks I sent him and worked from there. With Hussein we built the songs from the ground up. He’d have Oscar Seaton come in, then Steve Weingart. The whole thing was live except for a few snippets of loops we added for some texture. He spent so many hours mixing that stuff.

SV: You’ve got 15 songs on this CD. Most people stop at 10 or 11 and then table the rest. What caused you to go ahead and include all 15.
BA: Because I was doing writing for Paul. That’s how it all came about. When I first did this record it was supposed to be a different record. It was going to be called “Shine” and it was coming out on another label over a year ago. That was when I did “Spin Zone.” That song was completely different from all those. I wanted to do a track on a 24 track analog machine. I wanted to try one with that sound. I spent way too much money, we recorded everything the old fashioned way on the 24 track with horns and everything and that was “Spin Zone,” which actually came out as a single. The we had record company issues that put things off for almost a year. I decided I needed to get going with the rest of it myself because I had a single going out to radio with no album to follow it. I got some money together and went to Paul Brown. We did three songs. So then I had four songs. I had a vocal tune Alan Hewitt had produced so that gave me five songs. Then Paul called me up and asked me to write some songs for Norman Brown’s new album. I went on this writing frenzy and submitted a bunch of songs for Norman. Norman wasn't going to use the songs but Paul wanted one for his album. Then I had all those songs, plus I had another song I had written that I was going to send to Norman or Paul but I didn’t and that’s “Bumpin’ on the Wes Side.”  I just knew that song was strong enough that one of them would have picked it up and I could have used the money. I was ready to send it out when Adam from my record company said I should keep it myself so I kind of followed my instinct and did that.

SV: It is but it would have been a deep track probably. You open the CD with it and it’s getting sent to radio where hopefully it will do well. These songs sound so perfectly you that it's hard to imagine that some of them were written with another artist in mind. It gives people a lot of bang for their buck too. It's almost like getting a double CD.
BA: I wrote Bumpin on the Wes Side and Desire and pretty soon I had 15 songs. I felt like I had all these tunes, it took forever to put this album out and it could take a long time for me to put another one out. By that time these songs could be stale or I could be into something different. Who knows. So I just put them all on here. I'll write more tunes. I've got enough songs here that I can go to radio with. For the first time I think I've got some songs that will work in Europe, where they want it to go beyond being smooth. There were supposed to be 14 songs on the record.

SV: What was song # 15?
BA: It was the Billy Preston song, “Will It Go Round In Circles,” Mike and I heard it over a sound system and thought it would be a really good song to cover because it was funky and it hadn't been overdone. We ended up doing it three weeks before we mastered the disc.

SV: The other cover is “Fragile” which you pretty much morphed into something that doesn't even sound like a cover. You took it into this whole Latin jam thing, especially toward the end. How did that come about?
BA: I've been doing it live for years with a Latin Flavor. It wasn't as salsa as this version but I got a lot of compliments on the way we were doing it live so I came in to do that arrangement. Once Hussein got into it he had some ideas. He made it a little more traditionally Latin with the percussion and things.

SV: You didn't really hold back on your guitar work on this CD. Some of the intros are softer but then toward the middle and especially at the end you cut loose with a lot of really fast, complex solos that are really jazzy, really rock or both. Did  you feel like you needed to show some restraint but you wanted to cut loose so you kind of frontloaded the restraint then opened it up or is that the way it just came down?
BA: A little bit of both actually. I've been listening to radio for so long I felt like you can do anything you want to after the fade. All I have to do for radio is just fade it before it gets burnin' but it will still be on the album so people will get their money's worth and I can give them some real stuff but I can just fade it early to go to radio. Most of the real burning stuff I saved for the end of the tune or did on songs that we would never even try to go for airplay on, or toward the end of the CD.

SV: I think you just wrote the textbook on how to create a CD that will get past the radio filters but still be interesting enough for listeners and fans to want to own it. Put some toned down stuff on there but don't let that become the focus of the project and do some killer soloing at the end of the toned down stuff and on the tracks deeper into the CD. Are you going to do any touring to support the CD.
BA: I want to but if  you don't time this exactly right it's hard to get interest from agents and promoters. It's tough to get a tour going with the logistics and cost. You get interest from the promoters when you have something thats on the charts but then doing live gigs fuels that too so it's kind of a vicious circle. I am trying to get something going.

SV: So what we have to do is spread the word about the CD so it can start getting the kind of profile it needs to get for you to hit the road and play for us because when people hear you live they are going to want all your CDs. It's a matter of getting the ball rolling so thank you for the conversation. It should intrigue our readers enough that they will want to check out the music. It's pretty irresistible. When you hear it you want to hear it again, especially with 15 songs to choose from.