Mindi Abair has a new album that's gonna take you there. Little blurbs started showing up in her newsletter about how excited she was over her new material and the people she was working with. It was going to be a different kind of album, less production and a soulful jazzy sound that was inspired by music from back in the day. The title, In Hi-Fi Stereo. comes straight from the top of those old album covers. The music comes straight from the heart of all the players involved. Talking to Mindi is as much fun as watching her play and she took a big chunk of time from her busy schedule to give me a fly on the wall perspective on the new music that's been spinning (?) on my not so retro iPod.

SmoothViews (SV): The first thing I have to say is wow. You played down and dirty on this one. There's a lot more of the sound we get from you when you are playing live but it's even beyond that. Like deep fried funky and lowdown bluesy.
Mindi Abair (MA): It's a different thing as far as the CD but I've been playing this music all along. I had Keb'Mo sit in with me on my Catalina unplugged set a couple of months ago and someone came in after the show and said "Wow, I've never heard you play the blues!"  I thought that was funny because I've always played a lot of blues - I guess in different settings than my own music. It has echoed through my music but it hasn't really been this pure, so for them to see us up there grinding it out was fun. I think I'll have people who hear this new music saying they've never heard me playing this raw and soulful, just broken down like this.

SV: Your have been most visible with music that reflected current trends. You played with the Backstreet Boys and Mandy Moore when the O-town sound was hot. You were with Duran Duran who were one of the bands that defined pop new wave in the 80's and the production on your contemporary jazz albums has been very state of the art, and you do a chill show. So this is a flip for you to dig back into earlier influences and strip down the production, at least as far as your recorded work.
MA: I've always been into this sound, though and played a lot of it, especially when I was starting out playing in clubs. I grew up listening to artists like Ramsey Lewis and Jr. Walker and Cannonball Adderley, I got to them through other players, they weren't the first people I listened to, but once I heard David Sanborn and Marc Russo from the Yellowjackets I had to figure out who they listened to. They said they were listening to Hank Crawford and "Fathead" Newman and Wayne Shorter so I had to start looking back at that stuff. I love the vibe of jazz from the 60's and 70's. It was just people getting together and jamming in a room. They didn't have a bunch of synthesizers and sonic wonderment. It was all about the magic between musicians and what they created together. That's what I wanted to do here. I wanted someone to feel like they were in the room with us like we were playing in a small club and having fun.

SV: Why did you decide to do a different type of CD than what you had been doing?
MA: As I was growing up as a player I was playing six nights a week in different bands. Some of them were traditional jazz where we would do standards, some of them were R&B cover bands and we'd do Earth Wind and Fire and Stevie Wonder, I was in some fusion bands too. Those years of playing really solidified who I was and gave me my voice as a musician because I was playing so much different music and putting myself into different styles of music. That's how I grew up as a player and how I became attached to my instrument. When I came out to LA and started making records I had the chance to be in the studio and take advantage of all the technology and production which I really had a blast with. I had come off the road with the Backstreet Boys and Mandy Moore where there was a lot of production. It was fun to work with different loops and sounds. Every artist needs to change and morph into different directions. The musicians I look up to have always done that. Miles Davis fearlessly did something different with each record because that's what he was feeling. Herbie Hancock is like that, so is David Sanborn. There was a point where I realized I was listening to all these old records and getting inspired by them. I've always put one or two kind of jam songs on my albums and I wanted to do more of that. I wanted to make a whole album where I could be a player and pay homage to these guys I love who were great inspirations for me. I would take out a few records and listen to them, that would lead to more. The more I listened the more I thought about what a cool vibe it was and wanted to recreate that vibe in a way that sounded like me. I had a blast not "producing" a record but bringing in all the right players and writing the songs, then watching the magic happen around me.
                              
SV: Let's turn the readers on to some music. What were some of the records you were pulling out?
MA: One of the first ones was The In Crowd by Ramsey Lewis. I love his older stuff. He took flack for being a jazz pianist who brought the songs of his day into a more jazzy soulful environment. I loved those records because it sounded like he was just having a good time. You never felt like he was trying to be heady or obsessing with his solos, you could just sit back and enjoy it all.  A friend and I pulled out "Tighten Up" by Archie Bell and the Drells and we must have listened to it thirty times. Jr. Walker and the All Stars, obviously. King Curtis "Soul Serenade"  was a big influence. With him it was about the feeling, not about playing a lot of notes. His music really speaks to me.

SV: I heard little snippets of parts of songs from that period. It might have just been three or four notes, or a part that had this familiar vibe without actually replicating a riff, like "All Star" had this flavor from "Knock on  Wood" and "Heard it Through The Grapevine,"  I hear some AWB in "Down For The Count," and a little "Shining Star" inspired bass line in "Girls Night Out."
MA:. I think invariably some "telltale" melodies are going to sneak in because that's what happens when you are really influenced by the vibe of music you are listening to. I didn't want to copy anyone or make an old school type of record. I wanted to make one that sounded like 2010 but I did want to have it be the spirit of that music.

SV: "Sing Your Song" has this kind of fun singalong sound that a lot of pop songs that came out in the summer had back then.
MA: I had that song in my head from the huge marketing campaign Coca-Cola did back then. "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing."  (which we then started singing-Mindi beautifully and me scary)  I love the idea of finding yourself in a place where you feel good about who you are and you want the whole world to sing along. It's very hippie of me (laughs).

SV: You have that going on with "Be Beautiful" too.
MA: That is such a great anthem. It is full or words people need to hear: believe, belong, be strong, be beautiful. It was originally recorded for the PRVCY United We Cure album. PRVCY is a jeans company I've been involved with. I have so much respect for that company, they are women-owned, black-owned, really multicultural, and they give a portion of their proceeds to fight breast cancer. They get behind things they believe in and they did a CD with a lot of  artists like LaLah Hathaway, Wayman Tisdale, and Brian Culbertson. I recorded it for them and I was so glad to be a part of the album, and they let me put it on my CD too.

SV: Tell me about the writing process. It sounds like you all had so much fun writing and playing this stuff.
MA: We did. For me writing is a social thing. I'll call up a friend and go "Hey, wanna get breakfast and write a song?" (laughs) and usually they are up for it. We get together and usually write the song that's in the room - which is to say that we'll write the song that is in our heads, we write the song that we're feeling. We'd listen to old records for inspiration and kind of jam. or just start playing. The creative process is a cool one, we'll have a blast and see what comes out. I probably wrote about 45 songs for this CD, then I had to start paring it down.

SV: That has to be daunting, especially since you and your friends created them. How long did it take  you to do that?
MA: It's hard. It took a few weeks. I would put them up against each other and feel out which ones I loved and which ones I just liked. I thought about which ones go together and which ones don't really fit in. I played them for friends to see what they thought. I'd play them in the car or on the plane and just see which songs I went back to. It's like any album. Some you go back to and some you start skipping. The ones you go back to are the keepers.

SV: You worked with some new people on this one, didn't you?
MA: Yes and no, I wrote with a lot of different people and there are a lot of my friends represented here. Most of them had played on my albums but there were a few that I had played with live but not in the studio. And my band is on it. We are on the road for so much of our lives, we've become so much of a family over the years and we decided to go into a rehearsal studio and just get crazy and play. We went into this studio called The Alley and just played what came to us, that's where we came up with the song that closes the CD.

SV: I love that song. It sounds like a really soulful pop song because it has that kind of structure but the sax is singing instead of a vocalist.
MA: Someone told me it reminded them of a Billy Vera song. I thought that was cool.

SV: It does sound like something he could put a lyric to and sing. The one before it,"Take Me Home", reminds me of a combination of that King Curtis sound and a lot of what Sanborn started out with and has come back to during the past few years. You play with more range, more dynamics, and more power on this whole project. I've seen that a lot of reviewers noticed that too.
MA: With pop and rock rhythms, beats, and harmonies there are only so many ways for you to go as a soloist. When you add jazz and soul it seems like the world opens up for a sax player. This allowed me to reach out and go further than I have  as a player. It made it a lot of fun to create because I could just get out there and scream and play around.

SV: That was against the rules for about the last 15 years. Artists were supposed to be really restrained in the studio so you could fit into that "smooth and relaxing" thing. Now you an cut loose again but when you were doing this one did you ever feel like you needed to second guess or hold back, like that old voice was whispering in your ear?
MA: Absolutely not. We went into this knowing we were doing something different. We were all of one mindset that we were going to do something intensely cool that had such a vibe that we would not even let anyone into our own little world. We'd just go in and record and see what happens. We were in there with our heads bobbing, having a great time. We didn't have any strings attached to us telling us to be anything other than who we wanted to be.

SV: It was all live wasn't it.
MA: Yeah, We were all in the studio together. If we wanted to change something later it was hard to do because we were all bleeding into each others' mics because we were in there playing and standing close to each other. it was fun to be egged on by such incredible players. We were all feeling that. Even the process of getting everyone in there was really organic. I've gigged with Randy Jacobs but he's never been on a record. This was the one for him and I got him in here.

SV: It surprised me that Rex Rideout was producing because he's been one of the smooth jazz uber-producers, one of the guys who usually deliver a very smoothed out and polished type of sound.
MA: When I came to him I knew what I wanted. He totally got it. He had been working on a session with a  singer/songwriter that was more acoustic and really getting into the whole process of not using so much technology.
He can do anything. He played a lot of the keyboard parts, that's him doing the ragtime piano thing on "L'espirit Nouveau." Turns out his grandfather played ragtime piano. He was a great partner in crime.

SV: That's a good word for it. It sounds like  you were all partners in crime on this thing.
MA: We were. There was a lot of working off each other, lots of pushing each other and jamming with each other.

SV: You have a female vocalist, the incredible LaLah Hathaway, singing a version of James Brown's "It's A Man's World."  How did that come about?
MA: LaLah and I have been friends since college. She was really special then and she is just an angel of a person and as a musician. I really wanted her to be on the record because it was going to be really cool, really soulful music and I wanted her to add her spirit to it. I didn't even know what I wanted her to do. I asked her if there was anything she had always wanted to sing that we could do and both started thinking about it. Then I got this idea and I called her up and asked her what she would think of singing "It's A Man's World" not like James Brown but add a woman's edge to it since it would be me and her. She was up for it but she said we needed to do something more than just have her sing it and me take the sax solo. We needed to make it our own. We did it as a duet with her doing the first verse, me doing the second, then us weaving sax and voice around each other for the rest of the song which really brought us both out. When we were finished she listened to the track and goes "my mom is going to love this. She likes this bluesy stuff and she going to want me to do more of this."

SV: So maybe the two of you should do just that. Could you see yourself going even further in this direction and doing a whole album that is, I don't want to say straightahead, but jazzy bluesy improvisational kind of like "Take Me Home?"
MA: Absolutely, without hesitation. I loved doing this record and going in this direction. As a player it's fun to do different things and show different sides of your personality. This is a side of me that I really haven't gotten to show a lot of.

SV: Do you think discovered a lot of this side of  you even more during the process of doing this album?
MA: Sure. It's one thing to make a record and write more pop and rock songs and play them. There's a lot of power and intent behind those but these songs really made me stretch. It made me try harder and push myself.
The music was really interesting to play over. There were so many possibilities and I wanted to really push myself as a player. It brought out a lot in me and really pushed me. I'd like to do more of it.

SV: You have so many projects going on right now. You're going to be in an Adam Sandler movie, you're in the Dianne Warren Tribute, you got to be a model for PRVCY and be part of their charity project, you've got this album and you're doing some playing on Keb'Mo's new CD and you got elected to the Board of Governors for NARAS, which among many things does the Grammys and is very involved in music education.
MA: The past few years I've been involved in working with the Grammy Foundation and Grammy In The Schools. I'm a product of the school band program. I started back when I was eight years old and I only had a handful of lessons from then until the time I was in college. What I learned I got from being in the school band. To see these programs getting taken away and schools cutting the arts is just awful and I would do anything to help. I've gotten involved a few ways. I'm an artist ambassador for the Grammy foundation and Campbell s Labels for Education. Remember when you could bring soup labels in and they would donate money? Now they are doing it for the arts programs in schools. They are really doing some cool things like bringing in all kinds of artists to speak in schools and play with the kids. I did an evening for Grammy In The Schools where they brought in kids from all over the country. It was so inspiring to be in the same room with them. They all learned my music and I got to spend a couple of hours with them and rehearse them like they were my band. Then we did a concert at the end of the night that was me and Brian Culbertson and Boney James with all these kids. I've done programs where we invite the kids in for the sound check so they can see what goes into getting ready for a concert.

SV: And see, some of these kids will go home and one day their band director is going to get budget cut. A lot of them can't afford private lessons and playing in groups is so important too.
MA: It really is. You learn things in band class that you don't learn in private lessons or even in a math or science class. You learn that you have to practice to get to the next level. You learn teamwork. When you are out on the field marching with other people you are only as strong as your weakest link. In Jazz Band or Orchestra if your section doesn't play together they don't sound good regardless of how good any individual is. It's so important and that's one of the reasons I went up for being on the L.A. Board of Governors for NARAS. The are so involved in education, they are involved in advocacy for musicians. I want to be a part of that and be able to shape what our future is as artists and musicians. This was a way to have a voice and some influence and I'm honored to have been elected. Now I'm going to try to make the most of it and do as much good as I can.

SV: You're already doing so much with working for good causes and giving us wonderful music, which in itself can make all the difference in the world because it touches people and it touches each of us differently. Thank you for all you do and for the fabulous conversation.