David Axelrod: Drums, Strings, and a Lotta Soul

David Axelrod’s first work as a producer was on tenor saxophonist Harold Land’s The Fox, an album that demonstrated what a marvelous musician Land was as well as putting the world on notice that West coast jazz musicians could play hard-edged bop with the best of the East. On his last studio recording, a CD for the Mo’ Wax label entitled David Axelrod, there is a tribute to the tenor man entitled “For Land’s Sake”. It’s just a small example of the way all of the music of David Axelrod has been profoundly influenced by the jazz and soul sounds he grew up hearing in his native Los Angeles.

A few years later, Axelrod was at Capitol Records, a label at the apex of its creative powers, as a producer and A&R man. There he worked with Lou Rawls, writing and producing the singer’s big hit “Dead End Street”. He helped create a distinctive sound for Rawls, and it turned out to be one that he would stick with and expand upon throughout his career. That sound was one of smooth urban soul that was deeply tied to Los Angeles’ connection to jazz and big band music. It was smooth, but it still retained a street edge.

Axelrod’s arrangements provide the perfect setting for Rawls’ weary yet passionate vocals on tracks like “I Can’t Make It Alone” and my personal favorite, “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” where Axelrod’s arrangement provides the fervor of gospel along with the tight ensemble passages of, say, Carson’s late night big band. Some of Rawls’ Capitol catalog is unavailable on streaming services, but are still available on CD and, of course, vinyl if you can find it (worth the search). The Stateside collection I Can’t Make It Alone: The Axelrod Years is a wonderful collection of this material.

Julian “Cannonball” Adderley was the other act that Axelrod worked with extensively during his time at Capitol. Adderley was the most successful jazz artist of the ‘60s, after the Ramsey Lewis Trio, to cross over into the pop charts, though he was not able to do so with the kind of regularity of Lewis. Adderley’s agenda was rather different as well: he played straightforward bop as well as soul and R&B-tinged jazz. Adderley’s best-selling album, 1967’s Mercy Mercy Mercy: Live At the Club, starts with a boppish Nat Adderley composition, “Fun”, but quickly gets into the same backbeat-and-blues territory as the Ramsey Lewis Trio with another Nat Adderley composition entitled “Games”. Adderley demonstrates his unique ability to play Bird-like runs while maintaining a down-to-earth blues sound that gets the crowd excited in the same manner as Lewis’ “’In’ Crowd”.

The real killer track, though, is Josef Zawinul’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”. The song does just what Lewis had been doing, incorporating a bluesy melody, albeit at a slower tempo, with the slinky sound of the Fender Rhodes electric piano and a gospel-style groove. In fact, the song starts with Cannonball himself testifying to the power of music: “You know” he intones, “sometimes we’re not prepared for adversity. When it happens sometimes we’re caught short. We don’t know exactly how to handle it…when it comes up. Sometimes we don’t know just what to do when adversity takes over. And I have advice for all of us. I got it from my pianist Joe Zawinul who wrote this tune. And it sounds like what you’re supposed to say when you have that kind of problem-it’s called ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’”.

By now the audience is ravenous and they eagerly spur the group and Zawinul, who plays the only real solo of the tune, on. The track was a gigantic hit, and won the group a Grammy for Best Instrumental Performance of 1967. Other strong tunes followed, including “74 Miles Away”, “Walk Tall”, and “Country Preacher”.

Live at the Club was produced by Axelrod, who Adderley had requested as a producer upon signing with Capitol Records, partially on the strength of his work with Rawls. Axelrod turned Adderley on to some of the music he’d been listening to: Amos Milburn, Lowell Fulson, and Roy Milton. When Axelrod arrived at Capitol there was no Black Music Division. He was able to use his clout to start one, building on his success with Adderley and Rawls, who demonstrated the need, artistic and commercial, for the label to address the burgeoning demand for jazz and soul records of substance.

Axelrod was also given rock band The Electric Prunes to produce, with predictably bizarre results. The band had a hit with the mildly psychedelic “Too Much to Dream Last Night” and a follow up single, “Get Me To the World on Time,” but their second album, on which they mostly wrote their own material, had gone nowhere. It was decided by the band’s manager and the record company that David Axelrod would be hired to write and arrange material for their next album. The result was Mass In F Minor, which Lillian Roxon described as an initial offering in the genre of ‘God rock.’

The project is summed up well in this excerpt from Richie Unterberger’s liner notes for the CD reissue of the album:

“They wanted a sound from us to hang the mass on,” says lead singer James Lowe. “We came in and there are these charts. We were slow and only Mark [Tulin, Electric Prunes bassist] read music.” Although it is the band you hear on the three songs that comprised side one of the album (”Kyrie Eleison,” “Gloria,” “Credo”), the group were going too slow for Axelrod’s tastes. As a consequence members of a Canadian group, the Collectors (later Chilliwack), were enlisted to help complete the album, although Lowe did all of the lead vocals, and Tulin and drummer Quint from the Prunes do play on every track. (Engineer Richie Podolor assisted on guitar as well.)

“I like and respect Dave Axelrod,” comments Tulin. “I think he’s a brilliant musician and he greatly helped expand my musical knowledge. However, he wasn’t us. We were a ‘known entity’ plugged into an outside concept; a means to someone else’s end. Trouble was, we were a band, not an inorganic artificial product that could be manipulated at will.” For all its apples-and-oranges conception, the record is a nifty psychedelic curio, with its unusual mixture of searing acid rock guitar and subdued, harmonized Gregorian singing. The quasi-choral effect, incidentally, was achieved by having Lowe double-track most of the vocals.

--Liner notes for the Electric Prunes Mass in F Minor by Richie Unterberger--

The group disbanded in 1968, so Axelrod was given carte blanche to produce another record under the band’s moniker. The result was Release of An Oath. Although the band’s manager hired a new group of musicians, including a vocalist, Axelrod recorded Release of An Oath with a group of studio musicians including Carol Kaye and Don Randi, making it a David Axelrod album in all but name.

In 1968 and 1969 Axelrod released two albums under his own name that drew their inspiration from the work of mystic poet William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. These works, plus his 1970 album Earth Rot, an environmentalist opus warning of the dangers of taking the planet for granted, were sampled extensively by hip-hop and electronica producers impressed with the booming, spacey sounds of his string, bass, and guitar arrangements.

Much of what the listener hears in Axelrod’s work will depend on the direction from which that listener approaches it. Soul and R&B aficionados will hear his soul influence, rock fans will hear psychedelic-laced concept rock. Arrangers will hear masterful use of available musical elements, musicians will hear superior musicianship that sharpens the expression of Axelrod’s musical vision. Two constant musical companions on Axelrod’s projects were bassist Carol Kaye and pianist Don Randi. Listen to the percolating bass line Kaye lays on “The Fly” and Randi’s harpsichord work. These musicians were able to execute the music that Axelrod had in his head, and their familiarity with a wide variety of styles, including funk, rock, blues, R&B, and more from their frequent studio work, fueled their ability to provide both exciting and loose-sounding rhythm work that menaced and rippled beneath Axelrod’s orchestrations.

Axelrod released The Auction in 1971, a concept album about slavery--I’d argue that some of his work, including this as well as Release of An Oath, Messiah, and Requiem: Holocaust might well be labeled as oratorios or the workshop basics of a musical stage production, but none of these was ever developed as such. As you might imagine, Axelrod’s subject matter didn’t lend itself all that well to the popular music of the day, and his solo recordings didn’t sell well despite being filled with the same kind of stylish grooves he used on records by Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Hampton Hawes, and the band Funk, Inc.

1973 saw the release of Heavy Axe, which pointed a bit in the direction he would head: jazzy fusion and soul/funk, mostly instrumental, of the type that crate diggers find irresistible. For some, Axelrod’s chord voicings and instrumentation give off the vibe of ‘70s television soundtracks, but for others there is more there. Cannonball Adderley commented that Axe’s music possessed a ‘layer of violence’ regardless of its surface beauty.

Seriously Deep, recorded in 1975, was a further swing towards full bore jazz arrangements, albeit with a fusion twist. But as Thom Jurek comments in his album writeup for Qobuz:

“Given its time period, the album stands out in many ways from the dance-based funky soul and disco that were beginning to pervade electric jazz at the time, and instead creates a sense of driven slippery jazz-cum-funky big-band grooves that incorporate soul, film soundtrack music, and knotty but short solos from his horn players.”

Indeed, Seriously Deep is a highlight of David Axelrod’s recording career. The record was produced by Cannonball Adderley and Jimmy Bowen. Axelrod wrote and arranged all the tracks, which are packed with a who’s who of jazz recording and studio talent of the day, including Ernie Watts, Joe Sample, Jerome Richardson, Jay Migliori, Snooky Young, and Ndugu Chancler.

The death of Cannonball Adderley in 1975 at the age of 46 was a serious blow to Axelrod, for whom Adderley had been his closest working partner for many years. He had produced Adderley’s final record, a recording of his folk musical Big Man: The Legend of John Henry. The combination of Adderley’s death and the complete lack of reaction to Seriously Deep put Axelrod into an uninterested mood, and he sat out the next couple of years.

In 1977 he released Strange Ladies, an album of tone poems inspired by various women in his life. Like Seriously Deep, this is a solid album of arrangements for rhythm section, strings, and horns that was to prove inspirational for future generations of musicians, producers, and DJs. One track, “Tony Poem” was used as the basis for “Every Ghetto, Every City” from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, earning Axelrod a co-writing credit along with DJ and producer Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley.

Axelrod’s work began to see a resurgence and reevaluation with the hip hop era, as his grooves were suddenly considered to be ahead of their time and were sampled by artists such as Lil Wayne, Ghostface, and DJ Shadow. Many of Axelrod’s albums were out of print and many weren’t available on CD, making his records highly sought after by crate diggers of all types. Fantasy Records released a decent anthology which still provides a good taste of Axelrod’s many musical dishes.

Then, in 2000, David released an eponymous CD on the Mo Tracks label, based on rediscovered acetates of rhythm tracks originally recorded for a proposed third Axelrod ‘Electric Prunes’ album that never materialized. Playing DJ to his own work, he repurposed these into a series of new tracks that paid tribute to the hip hop genre that had helped sustain his work as well as integrating his work from the past. On ‘Loved Boy,’ a song about his son who passed away in the ‘80s, Axelrod works with Lou Rawls for the last time, while on “The Little Children” he works with Ras Kass on a track that evokes records like Songs of Experience and Earth Rot. Besides the tribute to Harold Land there are also nods to DJ Shadow (”The Shadow Knows”) and the president of jazz label Fantasy Records (”Fantasy for Ralph”).

With the currency, both cultural and monetary, of sampling from his old records it became easier to hear his greatest work from the sixties and seventies again. At a rare 2004 live performance at the Royal Festival Hall, recorded and released as a CD the following year, Axelrod told the audience “This allows you to have ‘screw you’ money! Thank You, Dre.” The key track that Dr. Dre sampled was “The Edge,” an Axelrod composition featured on the Capitol album Music: A Bit More of Me by Scottish actor David McCallum.

How’s that for worlds colliding, baby?

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