This week I had the opportunity to play keys for a tribute to the great producer James Mtume at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, music directed by Ray Chew.
Mtume is known for classic songs including “Juicy Fruit”—later sampled for the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy”—“The Closer I Get to You,” “Never Knew Love Like This Before,” and so many more. Ray Chew is the legendary music director of Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, and Showtime at the Apollo.
The band was incredible: Dawn Tallman, Dannis Winston, and Ramona Renea on vocals, Artie Reynolds on bass, Artie White on guitar, Chuck Norris III on drums, Ray on keys and music directing, and me on keys and playback. The guest artists included Lisa Fischer and Kenny Lattimore, and Mtume’s family was there advising and supporting the concert.
At some point during rehearsal, four older musicians walked into the room. They looked familiar to me, but I didn’t know their names. Between rehearsing songs, I heard them say things like, “When we recorded this…” and talk about the sounds they had used on the original records.
So I started looking them up.
Hubert Eaves. Bashiri Johnson. Spaceman. Tawatha Agee.
These weren’t people who had studied the records.
These were the people who had actually made them.
It was an amazing feeling to be sitting there playing this music with musicians who were part of its history. But there wasn’t much time to sit around and take any of it in.
We had a show to build.
I’ve spent a lot of my professional life working on these kinds of one-night events, and I’ve recently started thinking about how unusual the process actually is—and how rarely anyone outside of it gets to see how it works.
The audience sees the finished concert. When the lights come up and the band steps out, everything is supposed to look polished and professional.
What they don’t see is how much can still be unknown until almost the last possible moment.
For this kind of event, we might get the music only days before the show. I had less than 24 hours to write charts for the rhythm section and horn section. There was one rehearsal. Set lists and arrangements changed as we rehearsed. Keys changed. Transitions changed. Ideas appeared and disappeared.
This is a very different process from what a musician might find in other high-pressure environments, such as a Broadway show or an artist on a world tour. Those worlds can be enormously complex, but there is generally a process for building that complexity: preproduction, rehearsals, previews, revisions, repetitions, set lists, a consistent technical team, a union. You have time to build the machine, and a machine to build it with.
This is something else.
Maximum complexity with minimum preparation time.
It depends heavily on the skill and flexibility of the people in the room.
You get one rehearsal in which the show is created. Then you do the show. You get one shot to impress, move, or convince the audience.
During this rehearsal, Ray asked me to create a medley that would take Biggie’s “Juicy” into Mtume’s “Juicy Fruit.” This involved creating and integrating tracks that the band would play along with. We needed to change the key of “Juicy” to D, but keep Biggie’s vocal sounding as it did in the original version. We needed to create a smooth transition around the line “and if you don’t know, now you know,” which I eventually did by throwing a quarter-note delay on the word “know” and turning that into a count-off that would bring the live band into the next song.
And I needed to do this while rehearsal was happening.
I was working my MacBook to the max.
I had Logic open to make the track. Ableton to trigger it. MainStage for the sounds I was playing on keyboard. Transcribe! to slow down parts of songs and change keys. Moises to separate Biggie’s vocals from the track. Sibelius to chart the medley.
All of this was happening at the same time.
Meanwhile, I was still playing keyboards in the rehearsal.
We tried the medley. Ray gave feedback. I made changes.
Exported the track.
Another change. Another export.
A more subtle change. Another export.
This is the process I want to document: the work behind the finished performance that almost nobody sees.
It requires a strange combination of skills that don’t necessarily belong to one traditional job description. You have to play. Listen. Arrange. Transcribe. Program. Troubleshoot. Understand notation software, production software, playback software. You have to keep track of all the changes while continuing to move through the material.
There's no academic training for this. Nobody sits you down in music school and explains that someday you might be in a rehearsal with some of the greatest musicians in the world, playing keys while simultaneously editing audio, separating vocals, changing keys, building tracks, programming sounds, and writing charts for a concert that will happen within 24 hours.
I’ve played in the Apollo Theater Amateur Night house band for fourteen years. Amateur Night is the oldest talent competition in the world, but for me it has also been a training ground for a very particular kind of professional musicianship. It's where I learned this way of working.
It is where Ray created the template for a kind of production that is simultaneously high-level and incredibly spontaneous. Fourteen years of playing Amateur Night trained me to work inside uncertainty. The job is to make the moment work.
I so enjoy using these skills and I love the idea of teaching them. But the truth is, I’m not even sure where else this exact combination of skills is valuable. I don’t know whether it will retain its value as technology and the music business continue to change, or whether I was simply shaped by a very particular time, place, and professional culture. I just know that it is an awesome thing to experience.
It's a unique kind of flow state. And perhaps the most important lessons extend beyond the music itself.
Like the ability to walk into pressure and uncertainty and stay calm, cool, and useful. To listen intently and holistically. To support seamlessly.
To solve problems without drawing attention to yourself—or to the problem.
To have the technical ability to execute an idea quickly, the humility to change it immediately, the flexibility to abandon the plan you prepared, and the composure to keep working while the clock is running out.
Those are skills worth sharing and preserving.
By the time we played the concert at NJPAC, the medley was on Version 9.
The audience heard it once. It was a joyous celebration. And then it was gone.
But the process—the accumulated knowledge, skills, instincts, and professional culture that made it possible—is something I think is worth sustaining and documenting.