Interview with Abraham Laboriel



MJ: Abraham Laboriel.

AL: My pleasure.



MJ: Thank you for joining us today.

AL: Thank you so much Mark for inviting me.



MJ: Now here we are in the home of, you have been called the "King of the

Bass." What does that mean? How does one get to be called "King of the Bass

Guitar?"

AL: Well, I've been called many things, but the reality is that I love

music with all my heart, and since 1976, that I've been in Los Angeles, up

until now, I've been invited to participate in more than 3,000 recording

sessions of all different types. I started to play bass in Berkeley, in

1971, and since that time I've just never stopped. Never stopped ever. So

people are used to seeing my name, and hearing me, and I have a style that

is left of center, so people recognize it, you know.



MJ: Who are some of the artists that we'd be familiar with, that you've

played on their records?

AL: Well, just about everybody. I've done albums with Al Jarreau, I've done

albums with  Lee Ritenour,  Larry Carlton, Henry Mancini, Michelle LeGrand,

Joe Sample, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson,

Madonna, Barbara Streisand, you know, everybody.



MJ: What exactly is a session player. How would you describe a session

player?

AL: Primarily someone who's flexible. In my case, besides being flexible, I

have a style that is recognizable, so that when people want me to, you

know, they say, "Abraham, we want you to be yourself, don't play what we

wrote, play what you feel, then you become a recognizable studio musician,

then when they really need me to be very disciplined, to do exactly what

they want,and only what they want, so that people will not know who's

playing, I try very hard to do that. And so when they see that there is a

wheel, and an attitude that is flexible, pretty soon the word gets out that

there is guy that you can use, because if you want that, he can do that,

and if you want that, he can also do that. Whereas many people, some of the

famous bass players in town, will say to the producers, "If it is a ballad,

don't call me. I do not play ballads." Or, "If it is difficult, send it to

me way in advance, so that I can practice it, and then I'll tell you when

I'm ready." So if you start putting many requirements before people are

allowed to call you then you become a specialist, and that's not the same

as a studio musician, that every day we do different things, you know.



MJ: What would be the biggest hit song, hit pop song, that you ever played

on?

AL: Wow. I haven't put together my career from that perspective. I know

that one of the very important songs that I did was Lionel Richie, All

Night Long, which was just for the Olympics. I've done Coca-Cola

commercials, and you know, Ford commercials, Honda commercials that have

been used all over the world. And I've played definitely with some of the

most successful people in the world. I think that one of the records that

really sold a lot was the first record that I did with Julio Iglesias, in

1983, which sold something like 25 million dollars, I mean 25 million

copies all over the world because he did it in English, which is, you know.

But I haven't, you know, that's a great question. I'm going to try to study

my curriculum, as see which one is the one that ha sold the most. 



MJ: You mentioned Michael Jackson and Madonna. When they call you, how does

that happen? Can you take us through the process of them calling you, and

then your playing, what happens there?

AL: OK, they all have producers, and the producer, after they get together

with the artist and arrange the song, then they say, "Who do you think we

should cast to be part of the rhythm section?" And so at the time Madonna

was working with the same guy who did Like a Virgin, Pat Leonard, and he

hired Carl Izega and I do do this particular record, and we came, and then

she came after we had done the tracks, and loved them, so just, " I have

nothing to change, no comments. You did great , thank you very much." 



MJ: So you've already played, and then you meet them.

AL: Right. In the case of Michael Jackson, Bruce Swedien was producing this

particular song together with David Page, the pianist, who was the

arranger, and they had already done a sequencer version of it, you know,

with machines, and they felt that they really needed personality, so they

asked me come and add the personality. And it was really special. So

basically they just have meetings, and they start talking about what

specific thing they would like to see happen to their song, and then

availability; sometimes they call and we are not available, and they have

to go on to somebody else, and then if they're still are not satisfied,

they call back, and they start comparing, like that. So it's beautiful,

because we all participate in the process as equals.



MJ: Now, you also have a career with a group. You play dates, live dates.

How is that different from the session work, and tell us about that.

AL: Well, there's a famous musician in Los Angeles who helped me understand

that concept, or at least I like the way he articulates it. He says, "When

you make a record, think of a funnel, and when you are making a record, you

are in the big end of the funnel, so you have to make your sound and your

concept very very small, so that it fit sin the tape, and it doesn't

interfere with all the other people that are going to participate on the

record. But when you play live, you are on the small side of the the

funnel,so you have to exaggerate everything to communicate to all the

people out there." And both provide a wonderful sense of balance. Another

great musician said that when he would do only film work, his sight reading

ability would improve tremendously, but his ability to be creative would

start getting dormant, and when he did records, his creativity would

improve, but then his sight reading would fall apart. So he said balance

and variety I think is the right address, you know. So I'm real blessed

that I get invited to do films, and I get invited to records, and jingles,

and to play live.



MJ: You play live, would you say, more in the US, Europe, or Japan? How

does it balance out?

AL: More oversees, but when I play things that aren't.... with complete

freedom and abandon, it's usually in small clubs in the United States, you

know. Then when we go oversees, it's a little bit more structured. But one

of the things that distinguishes me is that within the structure, within

the discipline, I have a tendency to choose spontaneity first.



MJ: Is that a problem?

AL: Well, people don't know quite how long before I'm going to start doing

something out of the ordinary. 



MJ: Take us back to your early years. You grew up in Mexico?

AL: Born and raised in Mexico.



MJ: Tell us about that.

AL: Well, my parents come from Honduras, Central America. I have an album

called Guidum, and that's a word that my father invented, and we belong to

a people called the Garifuna people, which in its own people it means "the

Carib."



MJ: From Africa originally?

AL: Originally from West Africa,and then they came on a ship that sank

outside the islands of St. Vincent, in front of Venezuela. So this

particular group of people were never enslaved, and they survived, swam

ashore, and they created their own language, they combined with the Arawak

Indians, and they populated all the Caribbean. And so we were the only

people from that culture living in Mexico. And I was born and raised there.

I didn't leave the country until I was 21 years old. So I am Mexican, I

understand, and I start screaming. But my brother, who's five years older

than me was the lead singer of the most important rock band in Mexico. So

they won many awards. And all the American publishing companies were

sending him material to consider translating into Spanish to record. And so

that way I started to become acquainted with American music and it stole my

heart. Completely so. Everything that was American in style and sound,

whether it was country, or rhythm and blues, or jazz, I loved it. And so

when I ten years old, I was playing along with the records, and learning

all these different styles, so I think that's part of the reason  why I

became so flexible.



MJ: When did you start playing music?

AL: Well, my father started teaching me guitar when I was six years old and

then I quit when I was eight, and then when my brother joined the rock band

at age ten, I started to play by ear with records. And then when I was 21,

I left Mexico and I came to the United States to go school in Boston, at

Berkeley.



MJ: That's a hard school to get into, isn't it?

AL: Yes, it is. Mostly because it is a school where people go to train to

become professional musicians. So they... At the time when I was going, it

was 60 percent pop music, and forty percent classical. And the reason why

they did it that way was because they knew that if we wanted to make a

living as a professional musician, popular music was more lucrative, and

would open more doors than to be strictly trained classically. 



MJ: Were there any people you went to school with who went on to achieve

success in music?

AL: Yes, mostly jazz musicians, and there's one in particular, who was my

roommate. We lived in his house in New Jersey for two years during the

summertime's, and his name's Alan Sylvester, who's become on of the most

important film composers of all time. And then Joey Lovano, a saxophone

player, John Scofield, a guitar player, and Ricardo Ceveda went after I

graduated, and Alan Broadman graduated the year I started. And Alan

Broadman has become one of the major jazz pianists and arrangers here in

Los Angeles. I        a little bit with George Morass, great bass player

from Czechoslovakia, and Joe Salanol from Weather Report fame, so those are

wonderful people, you know.



MJ: When you're on tour, what are the fans like in Japan? How are they

different than maybe European or American fans ________

AL: Well, the people in the United States are very unpredictable. The

people in United States, their attention span is very willful, you know.

They don't try to figure out "Do I like it,?" or "I don't like it," or

"What's going on?"  They just choose that they're going to love it or not.

The people in Europe are highly educated. They really have read your

biography, they have studied your discography, they understand what line

you are likely to play at a given time, and that's really impressive, no

matter how young or how old they are, the European fans have done all of

their homework, and then the Japanese fans completely blow my mind, because

it is the only audience that listens to the whole fade-out. So like, the

music starts dying, and the musicians  are bowing down, they wait until

there's complete silence, and then they applaud, you know. So they... you

know, their attention span is different. They listen deeply. One time I

went with Johnny Mathis to Brazil, and every time we sang Misty, the

audience would give him a standing ovation during the bridge, and when the

song would end, and when the song would end, they would not applaud, they

would not respond. So that was a very unusual experience. And then when I

asked, they said, "Well, we like the bridge." So audiences have

personalities.



MJ: I read that while at Berkeley you sort of developed a new technique of

bass playing?

AL: Yeah, it's a combination of... Because my first instrument was rhythm

guitar, and my father had a very unusual style of playing, with a full

sound, and he taught me, and I saw him perform many times, so that is part

of my heritage. Then in Berkeley, as I started to get involved with all the

intellectual aspects of what music is and how it works, when I discovered

that I could transfer from the bass, I mean from the guitar to the bass, a

whole world just exploded right in front of me. And I was able to

differentiate between when I'm playing by myself, I create a fuller sound,

like my father would do, or whether I'm just part of the overall orchestra

sound, and then I play very clean, and stick to the function of the bass

player. So in one of my teaching videos, I always to people that if they

feel that they want to be bass players, that it is really important that

they know the difference between the roll of being the bass player, which

is an accompanist, and a supporter, and then being the feature instrument

in funk, because when you become the feature instrument in funk, then that

bass function has a tendency to suffer a little bit, because nobody is

taking care of the foundation.



MJ: So the bass is a supporting instrument. It should be.

AL: Yeah, it's the foundation. One of my teachers in Berkeley said, "You

know, you are the house. And if you're not paying attention, you're leaving

all of your friends without shelter. So, it's a beautiful way of thinking.

But if you don't play the roll of being the bass player, then the other

people have nothing from which to build, you know.



MJ: So these days, how do you divide your time up? What is an average day

like for you?

AL: It varies. How can I explain it? Whenever I have time off, I try to

spend it working with musical ideas in my little home studio to create

songs either to be recorded by me or by other people, and then when I don't

have the time off, sometimes I leave the house at 6:30 in the morning and

come back at midnight, so a typical busy day would be a film call that

begins at 8 in the morning and then you finish, it's 8 to 11, probably off

till 3, and then at 4:00 you go and do a recording session, and that's 4 to

7, and then 8 to 11, and then you go home.



MJ: Is there ever a record that you play on, that, you know, you're just

not really crazy about it, but you have to do your job, and play the bass

line?

AL: Only when the people that put it together did not do their homework,

and they expect us as the side man to not only do their homework, but

basically come up with the whole idea. That's particularly painful, because

you know that they are taking unfair advantage of our roll as musicians to

take their ideas and make them blossom, as opposed to actually having to

come up with the ideas. And those kinds of people, because of the financial

constraints of the modern day are diminishing fast. Because usually when

that happens, to come up with one song sometimes may take three days,

instead of doing three songs in one day, you know. And even at that, if the

people that they have cast are people that have a particular affinity for

working together, it can be a lot of fun to create the ideas, but it's

always sad when you know that they are taking advantage of our ideas, and

taking credit as if they had invented it themselves.



MJ: When all the computers and drum machines came in, and technology, were

you ever afraid that, "Maybe someday they won't need me, they'll just have

computers, machines that do this?"

AL: There was a period of six months where work became almost impossible to

find, because everybody was trying to figure out how to use these machines,

and then the great joy came when we all realized that the machines were

part of the music world but not the music world, so that now we are better

off, because now we have one more color to use, or to choose from, one more

way of expressing music, but the fears that it can completely replace a

person or a person's validity has pretty well been eliminated. Mostly

because the listening audience has become more sophisticated, so that they

can tell when something is done carefully, and with a lot imagination and

with a lot of love, and when something is done automatically and

mechanically.



MJ: You're known as a real sort of a creative bass player. Where do you

find the creativity within yourself? How do you...what's the inspiration?

AL: The word that I use primarily is "spontaneous." Spontaneity for me has

always been clearly related to freedom. I became free when I gave my heart

to the Lord, because basically what happens is that when you're a musician,

and you're available to everybody for whatever they need, there's a certain

amount of pressure that says, "Man, how am I going to come up with

everything that all these people need?" They have expectations on what they

want from me, but when you have given your heart to the Lord you realize

that the Lord is the one that has creative, and that we are just

instruments that He uses to communicate His love and His creativity. So the

pressure of having to be creative disappeared and then I became free. And

then also because of the honesty in your relationship with people, if your

try something that really makes you happy, and they don't like it, because

there's an honest relationship, you can learn to respect the fact that

"Man, isn't this great?" and they say, "No, I don't like it," "OK, I'll go

back to this other thing," and there's an honest rapport.



MJ: Now your son is playing now.

AL: Yeah.

MJ: Talk about that. He's playing the drums?

AL: Yes, he's a professional drummer. He graduated from Berkeley in '91.

MJ: The same school that you graduated from.

AL: Yeah, actually, '90, yeah, '91, '92. Now five years, '91, '91. And he's

been incredibly successful. The year, his last year of school he was able

to do a tour of Europe with me, he  was able to play two songs, no, three

songs on my first solo album. And then he went on the road with Joe Sample.

He played live with Al Jarreau, and he played with Diane Reeves. And then

after that he graduated, and he's become a very successful studio musician.



MJ: What is it like playing with your own flesh and blood on stage?

AL: It is hard to describe, but one time, when he was like 11 years old, we

were having a sound check with Koinonia, and Bill Maxwell, and Alex, to

tease me, they started to play the rehearsal, and then they called my son

up, and they asked him to sit on the drums. And I had my eyes closed, and

we finished the song, and I turned around to say to Bill and to Alex that

it sounded really good, and it was my son on drums, and they laughed. So it

was an incredible experience, you know. I literally feel like I'm walking

on clouds, because when he practices at home, he usually puts n his

favorite rock records, and plays rock and roll with the records on the

headphones. And then when we perform on stage, and he shows that he really

understands all the different languages of music, is something that is hard

to explain, you know. It's incredible.



MJ: Are you glad he's involved in music?

AL: Yes.



AL: Well, around the house my son practices around with headphones and he

puts on his favorite rock and roll music, so whenever I heard him at home

practicing, it would be primarily rock and roll, but then when i started to

work with him, or see him work with different people, in different styles,

I was very impressed so much of how he understood how to do all these

different things with all his heart, you know. So it's a wonderful thing to

watch somebody that comes out of your own life contribute. And he's

becoming highly in demand as a live musician, and as a studio musician.



MJ: Now, you created a genre, known as "jazz fusion." What is that about,

and how did that come to be?

AL: Well, I was part of the new generation of musicians that made that

style famous, and basically what happened is that when Herbie Hancock and

Chick Corea were being hired to open for rock and roll acts, and nobody

could hear them, they figured that they had to make a transition into being

able to have enough equipment and enough sound systems so that the people

in the audience could just feel the impact of their jazz as powerfully as

they felt the rock and roll bands that were the headliners at the time. And

so this became an idea of playing still jazz music, and improvising in

nature with melodies that are challenging, but through equipment that can

be heard in large places. And then what used to be a very free style of

playing drums in the traditional jazz swing style became more of a funk, or

rock and roll, or Latin approach. So that then you started to hear drummers

and bass players and guitars playing patterns while the melodic instruments

would play free and double those patterns, and because both styles have

distinct roots, they call it fusion.



MJ: What do you like about music?

AL: The way I define music is incredibly narrow and highly opinionated. To

me, music is when a person forgets what they are listening to, what

instrument it is, or what song it is, and it just becomes an all

encompassing experience of beauty and joy. And very few people can do that

all the time, but almost everybody does it from time to time, and I have

been saying to people, "My music visited you in this moment. And then it

visited you again here, and then it visited you." And it's great when music

visits and stays.



MJ: Any advice for young, aspiring musicians.?

AL: Just, the most important advice I can give to anybody is to not be

afraid of being honest. Because they're honest, their friends in the music

business will help them to discover what they can do best. If they pretend

to be somebody else, thinking that's what everybody wants them to be, and

then that keeps shifting depending on what they think is hot, "Oh, now this

is the hot thing, oh now this is the hot thing," then they become

disoriented, and the people that want to help them become nervous, because

they don't know at what point they are going to turn, you know, like a

chameleon. And really just be honest and do it with their whole heart. If

they feel very comfortable supporting other people and helping other people

do some good, most likely they have the vocation to be a bass player, and

enjoy being a supportive and encouraging roll. If they want to be always in

front and always be dominating, and be the instrument that plays all the

melodies and plays all the solos, then they need a bass player.



MJ: Thanks for joining us today.

AL: My pleasure. This is great. I wish you all the best.