July 20, 2006
Interviewed by Shannon West

The stories he could tell! Greg Adams spent 25 years as a member of the legendary Tower of Power horn section. Those classic arrangements that other horn-based bands have emulated ever since were his. During that time he played onstage or in the studio with Elton John, Santana, Rod Stewart, The Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt, Luther Vandross and others; such an impressive list that it is hard not to spend the conversation asking about back in the day. But Greg is living fully in the present musically. His fourth CD, Cool To The Touch, is full of original music that will remind you of what this genre we have started calling smooth jazz can sound like when the artist delivers what the audience actually wants to hear instead of what the industry says they want to hear. He came to Jacksonville to do a beachside concert and was gracious enough to have a fairly long conversation. We talked about navigating the changes the music business is going through, his decision to start a label and get creative about marketing his new release and his three previous spectacular and underrated CDs.  His excitement about this new release was tangible.  After you hear it you will know why.

SmoothViews (SV): Hi Greg!  You picked up trumpet at a very early age.
Greg Adams (GA): I picked it up when I was about five years old, but I didn't do much ‘til I was about 10. Then I started to really take an interest in it. I went to band camp every summer and got music theory and worked on the instrument. When I got to high school they had a jazz band so I got involved with that. I started to write for the jazz band during my sophomore year and that really got my interest going. I was going to go to college and be a music major and I got a call from Tower of Power. They had an opening for a trumpet player so they asked me if I'd like to come over and audition. I did and I got the gig. From then on I was working, playing and writing and arranging. We did records, we toured, and we were really starting to pick up the pace. I was the arranger for the band's horn section; I was the arranger for the band. The horn section started getting recording dates with big name artists like Elton John, Santana, Rod Stewart and Dionne Warwick. That really put the horns and the band on the map along with the records Tower was doing. Then we toured with Huey Lewis for about eight years in the 80s and 90s which was great because it really got the band out there worldwide. We'd hire our own publicist for the horn section and when the articles came out we'd get a little box interview or picture. We were really coat-tailing and it worked. A lot of times what we'd do is have the rhythm section come out with our singer for a week or so and we would do the Huey show at the local arena which was always sold out. At the end of the concert, Huey would do a Tower of Power song.  Then he would say that Tower of Power is going to do a midnight show, tell them where, then say they would be there. He'd make a big to-do about our gig. So, of course, it would sell out. It got Tower of Power back in people's minds. I think people thought they were gone or not doing much anymore by then, but the band was always around, they always recorded.

SV: When you got out of high school you were going to go to Berklee then Tower of Power made the offer. What influenced your decision to take the touring band route rather than the academic route?
GA: It was the opportunity of doing what I would hope to get the opportunity to do after going to school for four years. That opportunity was being presented to me right there, to get into a recording and touring situation and become a professional musician immediately and be in a band. It was an opportunity I felt I couldn't pass up. As it turned out it worked out okay. The only regret I might have had is the academic thing of getting a degree to teach if things didn't work out. But things did work out.

SV: You were already writing charts by the time you were in high school, weren't you?
GA: Yeah, I was ready to go. I was cooked enough to be thrown out into the real world and that's what I decided to do.

SV: Tower was real big on campuses during the 70s when the horn sections were a big thing with progressive bands and R&B bands. Going out with Huey was kind of a comeback or resurgence then.
GA: It was. Our reputation started to pick up again, and it was worldwide. To this day the band still tours. I left in 1996. I was at a point in my life where I needed to do something different. I was stagnating.

SV: Twenty-five years is a long time to be in one band.  Not many people could do that without getting restless.
GA: I know. I probably should have left before that but I didn't. We were on tour in Germany, and I just said when this tour is over in two weeks I'm leaving. I figured I could do studio work in LA. I'd been doing that, and I knew I could do it full-time if I wanted to. Then the next day I got a phone call from the record company. They said they had heard I was leaving and they were sorry to hear that, but they asked me if I was interested in doing a solo album since the new contemporary jazz thing was catching on.

SV: Is that how you got on Epic when most of the majors, except for WEA and GRP, weren't doing much with this music?
GA: Tower of Power was on Epic. I said sure, I could do that. So I did Hidden Agenda and it did really well. It still does to this day. "Smooth Operator" gets played all the time. We were really doing good.  Then one afternoon, it was a Friday, Epic just dropped the jazz department. Without that support, the CD and the single just started to fade away.

SV: This happened during the time that "Smooth Operator" was still on the charts?
GA: It did. And we had started working on a new album in '97 in anticipation of still being on Epic. We had a finished record in the can and they yanked our deal.

SV: So you got practice at that process before everyone else.
GA: Yeah. (Laughs) Then I was going to go with GRP, and that fell through because of management problems, so I didn't have a deal. So, here I go back to the studios. I'll be a session musician, and I have this album in the can. What we do with it, I don't know, but I've gotta make a living, so I started doing recording dates, television and movie sessions and stuff like that and did that for years. Then all of a sudden we had this record that we'd done that was five years old. I have a friend in Seattle who said he wanted to start a record company and do it with me. I had the record already done, so we put it out.

SV: GRP did some roster cuts and some of their biggest names left around that time so you may have dodged another bullet there, too. But it was something like seven years between Hidden Agenda and Midnight Morning wasn't it? It didn't sound like a five-year-old album.
GA: It was timeless. We put it on this label we started called Ripa Records. This was a long time ago and the internet thing was just really starting. We got the "Roadhouse" single going strong at radio. Everything was going great. Then we hit a wall; we just didn't have the infrastructure to really pull this off. Blue Note came to me and offered to buy the contract out and put it out on Blue Note. I had to make a decision, leave my partner in Seattle and go on, which was something I really had to weigh. I decided to go with Blue Note because they had the structure to do something with it. When "Roadhouse" peaked out, we put out "Sup With That" and that did pretty well. Then we went to the table to do the next record and they said they were not going to renew the contract.

SV: I was going to ask you about that. Four CDs on four labels.
GA: There ya have it.

SV: The title track got some action too, didn't it?
GA: My A&R guy at Blue Note felt really terrible about what happened. I asked him if he could do me a favor and put out "Midnight Morning" as a single. That would get a third track out there and might help me get another deal. It didn't do too much though. So once again I was back in the studio doing sessions. Then I got on 215 [Records] and put out Firefly.

SV: That CD had some amazing songs on it. It seemed like I heard "Firefly" and "The Crossing" on the local station fairly often but they didn't get as much airplay as they should have, and you couldn't find the CD in the stores which is never a good thing. It was probably the most underrated CD that year.
GA: We got out of 215, and on New Years Day this year we decided to start our own label. I've been on major labels since I was 18 years old, and I've finally figured out that it's not the way to go, especially now with all the labels dropping their smooth jazz artists. We decided we had to try Ripa again. We've got to do it with a crew of people who are passionate about my music. When I started planning the album, I called in a lot of favors and stacked the deck with a lot of artists in the format. It's really a cool thing. We're just diving into the water here.

SV: And diving in with a really good lifejacket, Cool To The Touch is an excellent CD.
GA: The first single just went out to radio. It's called "Felix The Cat." I had some special friends playing on it: Richard Elliot, Eric Marienthal, Boney James, Mindi Abair, and my sax player Johnnie Bamont. These sax players are on two tracks, "Felix The Cat" and the title cut. We also have Vinnie Colaiuta, Leland Sklar on bass, and Paul Jackson Jr. on guitar; Tom Scott makes an appearance on sax. Everybody was gracious enough to rearrange their schedules so we could put this together and it came together real nicely.

SV: On "Felix the Cat," were the sax players live? Were all those stars in one room?
GA: They were. We've got pictures too. There are some on the website. It was a lot of fun. Making this record was.  And since it is on my own label, we can kind of control its destiny.

SV: When is it coming out?
GA: The street date is August 15th. We've got a lot of really great songs on it. I co-produced half of it with James Wirrick, my songwriting partner and guitarist in my band. I produced the other half by myself and co-wrote the rest of the songs with other people, which was really fun. I wrote with Nick Milo, who is a former keyboard player with Tower of Power and plays with Joe Cocker now.

SV: Which ones did you write with him.
GA: We wrote "Life in the Key of Blue," "When the Party's Over," and "One Night In Rio." We have a cool writing relationship. We always come up with stuff that's a little different but really musical and accessible.

SV: You have always been an amazing songwriter. Over all four CDs you just come up with these melodies that are catchy and totally original; the kind of songs that make you want to hit repeat over and over again. A lot of them you wrote with James Wirrick. You have a way with hooks.
GA. What I came up with when we were writing the bio is that I write lyrics without words. It's that melody thing and I've got a knack for it. James and I will come up with a chord progression or he'll come up with something he put together on ProTools and he'll say, “Write a melody for this.”

SV: Is that the way you've been writing over the years.
GA: In this instance, it seems to be working more often than not. I've worked in so many different formats that I become a chameleon. I can sit down and write a big band chart. I've been doing that for years. I can write a song with a lyricist whose done melody and words and I do the chords. I can adapt to any situation.

SV: There has been a lot of musical diversity over the four CDs, but it's really cohesive. They are collections of really strong songs that don't all sound alike.
GA: Take "When the Party's Over," the last cut on the record. On Firefly I did something like that when Nick and I wrote "Just Like Breathing" and it was so successful being done live. I said let's write another one of those and expand on it, make it more of a jazz changes kind of thing. The string arrangement is just beautiful. It's a nice way to end the record.

SV: The press release talks about a 60s jazz culture vibe, but the album doesn't sound retro at all.
GA: It's in the other elements. The titles on the record are kind of evocative of the 60s and when you see the cover it's almost like an old Blue Note style. It's real minimalist, just the title, the artist, and a picture. Like those old jazz records. They didn't want to spend any money.

SV: I always thought the cover art on those old Blue Note and Impulse albums was so minimalist because they were trying to be more cerebral and above pop culture. So it was the budget! But it's a really eye-catching look now.
GA: If you look at the titles on the CD, they kind of take you back to that era although the music doesn't take you back. There are like "Bongo Baby," "Hi-Fi," and "It's Only Love, Love" which is so Michael Caine, so "Alfie." So that's the idea. You see the titles and the cover, but you open the book and it's really current.

SV: The music is very 2006, which is really refreshing. I do think "Life in the Key of Blue" has a little bit of early 70s fusion in it but not in a dated way. That's something that's great to hear these days.
 GA: It was kind of like Miles Davis meets Sly Stone.

SV: That works! Was the Herb Alpert sound on "Bongo Baby" intentional?
GA: Absolutely. I doubled the trumpet on the melodies. That's what Herb did on all those records. He doubled the trumpet and played it in the style of Tijuana Brass. With a title like "Bongo Baby," what are you going to do? It's gotta go there. Like "Whipped Cream" and "Spanish Flea." It's a fun piece. We've been playing it and it's really been going over.

SV: It really went over here. You had people packed in front of the stage dancing. You did something really cool with the CD sales so they could take it home with them, too.
GA: The CD isn’t out yet so what we did was tell them they could buy the CD without the artwork that night and get it autographed. Then when the album comes out we will send them the CD with the artwork free, so they will have two copies, one for the car and one for the house. We sold a lot of CDs that night.

SV: And instead of marking them up like they do at a lot of live gigs you were selling them at below retail. That’s the kind of bold move that may cost a little initially but it will pay off in the long run because it establishes a relationship with the fans. They could afford to buy it, they get this extra goodie thrown in, and they will tell other people and will play it for other people and get them interested too. As an indie, you can be innovative but it's all you which can be scary.
GA: You have to really get creative. That's the whole thing these days. As far as retail, we're on CDBaby.com, we're on iTunes, we're going to go on Amazon, and obviously ultimately try to secure a distribution deal to get in the big retail stores. We're doing everything we can to create a stir, some interest, through radio wherever they will play it and do shows. Its a great live band. The record industry isn't what it used to be, and it never will be again, I think, because the record companies didn't embrace the technology that was out there, and by the time they were able to grasp it, it had passed them by. Now they're playing catch-up. Basically the little indies are the way to go. Now I have an independent label, and maybe sometime in the future I'll take on some other acts. But I still have to have distribution. We're taking it one step at a time at this point. You take baby steps, then you take bigger steps; you get all your ducks in a row and cross your fingers and keep working hard.

SV: One thing that is really tough for indie labels and adult-oriented musicians is that brick and mortar music retail is not adult friendly. Plus it costs so much to get any type of high profile placement like endcaps, listening stations or recommendations. It's beyond the budget of a smaller label or even a major label for the artists that aren't on the superstar track.
GA: It's a necessary part of marketing but they've priced themselves out of the market. It's impossible. There are so many disturbing things about the recording industry but there have always been disturbing things. The problems just shift. Now it's this, but what are you going to do. You just have to roll with the punches.

For more info on Greg Adams visit www.gregadamsmusic.com