Michael Franks’ music career predates the rise of both hip-hop and smooth jazz. But he has long been embraced by both worlds, much to the surprise of the veteran singer and writer of such enduring gems as “Popsicle Toes,” “Eggplant,” “Monkey See, Monkey Do” and “Your Secret’s Safe With Me.”
“When I started to get sampled by hip-hop artists, I thought: ‘Well, this will just happen a couple of times.’ But it’s been pretty steady,” said the La Jolla native and longtime New York resident.
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Franks’ songs have been recorded by everyone from Diana Krall and Peggy Lee to Ringo Starr and Lyle Lovett. They have been sampled by such hip-hop artists as Logic, Ginuwine, Raekwon and a good number more.
“It’s amazing the things they choose to sample and how they choose to sample particular parts of my tunes,” said the University High School alum. His funk-tinged 1977 song, “Chain Reaction,” forms the foundation for the 2018 song “Bob Saget Gets New Real Estate” by New Jersey producer and DJ Flamingosis.
Franks himself approves or turns down requests from artists seeking to sample his music for their own recordings. He chuckled when asked if sampling is providing him with a lucrative source of extra income.
“It is,” he said, “surprisingly so.”
Franks lives in upstate New York, near Woodstock, with his wife, Claudia. He will perform a homecoming gig here this weekend at the two-day San Diego Smooth Jazz Festival. His five-piece band features former Pat Metheny Group mainstays Mark Egan on bass and Danny Gottlieb on drums.
The location of the festival alongside San Diego Bay — at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park — is one Franks knows fondly.
“My dad was in the Air Force and he later got a job flying a plane with pontoons for the San Diego tuna fleet. He would locate the schools of tuna from the air and direct the boats to them,” the mustachioed troubadour recalled.
“When I was little my mother and I used to go down to the harbor a lot. My dad was flying for a boat called Chicken of the Sea!”
A smooth San Diego return
Franks’ most recent performance here was at the 2017 edition of the San Diego Smooth Jazz Festival. It was held at Embarcadero Marina Park North, just across from The Shell, which occupies part of Embarcadero Marina Park South.
“I’m anxious to see the new venue,” he said, speaking from his rural home in Saugerties, N.Y.
Franks’ debut album came out in 1972 and he scored his first hit — the whimsical “Popsicle Toes” — in 1976. He released seven more albums before the largely jazz-free music known as smooth jazz started to become a national phenomenon in the early 1980s.
The warm welcome his music received from smooth jazz radio stations and concert audiences came about by accident, not design. His music had little in common with that of such smooth jazz staples as Kenny G, Bob James and Hiroshima.
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Franks’ sly, svelte songs drew from jazz, bossa nova, funk, urbane pop, soul and more. His albums featured some of the same top jazz musicians who were recording with Steely Dan during the same time period.
Like Steely Dan — whose co-leaders Donald Fagen and the now-deceased Walter Becker were also jazz devotees — some of Franks’ songs became smooth jazz staples.
Never mind that he has a master’s degree in English from UCLA and that his wry lyrics were inspired by the sophisticated wordplay of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael and Mose Allison.
Never mind that Franks’ quirky, intricately crafted songs were influenced by, among others, Thelonious Monk and such Brazilian music greats as João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
And never mind that his elegant 1995 tribute album to bossa nova king Jobim, “Abandoned Garden,” was shunned by Broadcast Architecture, the top consulting firm then used by smooth-jazz radio stations across the nation.
“When that album came out, Broadcast Architecture said: ‘You’re the kind of person we don’t want to play,” Franks recalled with a touch of incredulity. “I couldn’t understand that. Then again, in the 1980s, I’d suddenly become one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the (smooth jazz) format.”
Was such a designation good or bad?
“I don’t know,” Franks replied. “A lot of the compositions in smooth jazz tend to be predictable and have ‘cute’ parts. But, hey, I wonder if some of this music is designed to be in the background?
“And that’s OK; I don’t want to bite the hand that still feeds me. But I felt I was not necessarily in that groove. And I’m 79, so what the hell!”
There is some irony to the fact that the lyrics in Franks’ svelte 1977 song, “The Lady Wants to Know,” reference Miles Davis and John Coltrane — two jazz giants whose music was ignored by the same smooth-jazz radio stations that had Franks in heavy rotation.
The smooth-jazz radio format — which was championed by San Diego’s KIFM in the early 1980s — has all but vanished from the airwaves.
Not so on concert stages, including the San Diego Smooth Jazz Festival, whose lineup this weekend also includes Eric Darius, Average White Band, Rick Braun, Jeff Lorber, Keiko Matsui and San Diego area residents Richard Elliot and Rebecca Jade.
“We don’t do some of our more sensitive ballads at festivals,” said Franks, who knows how to deliver audience-pleasing sets in a party-hearty outdoor setting.
“We’ll do ‘The Lady Wants to Know,’ ‘Rainy Night in Tokyo,’ ‘Eggplant,’ ‘When I Give My Love to You,’ “Cookie Jar,’ ‘Down in Brazil’ and ‘Monk’s New Tune,’ which features our pianist and music director, Charles Blenzig, and has become a crowd-pleaser.”
Franks has released 23 albums to date and is now at work on another. He is also writing his memoir.
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Its title, “The And of One,” was inspired when Joe Sample — the keyboardist in the band The Crusaders — made a comment while Franks was playing one of his songs for Sample at a pre-recording session.
“I’d just been signed by Warner Bros. and was getting ready to do ‘The Art of Tea,’ my first album for them,” Franks recalled. “I was playing a tune — I think it was ‘Eggplant’ — for Joe and it started not on the one (of the first beat) but on the and of one.
“Joe said: ‘Oh, you start on the ‘and.’ I would never have said it that way. I would have said: ‘I’m anticipating the second beat.’
I just loved that phrase — ‘the and of one’ — so I’m using it for my book.”
Franks returned to La Jolla to write the songs for his 1990 album, “Blue Pacific.” Will his memoir have much of a San Diego focus?
“A lot,” he replied.
“I spent my childhood and high school years in San Diego. I played in a folk-music trio there and I had a great education at University High, mostly Jesuit. When I got out of high school I had learned a lot, in terms of literary things.”
He laughed.
“Did I really need four years of Latin? That felt a little extreme!”
Fifth annual San Diego Smooth Jazz Festival
When: 3:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday
With: Eric Darius, featuring Rebecca Jade, Michael Franks,
Rick Braun and Richard Elliot, Michael Lington, Ray Fuller and Friends (on Saturday); Average White Band, Damien Escobar, Jazz, Funk, Soul (featuring Jeff Lorber, Everette Harp, Paul Jackson Jr.), Keiko Matsui, Phil Denny (Sunday)
Where: The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, downtown
Tickets: $80-$210 per day
Online: theshell.org
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHO
