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.