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to set the tempo. “How about some bebop in B-flat right about here?” I asked. “Just give me thirty seconds of insanity.”
    Woods went right into the solo, and blew up a storm. After a minute of hot and heavy playing he stopped and took a deep breath. “Is that what you wanted?” he asked. “Yeah!” I said. “Perfect.”
    In addition to having a bit of musical ability and being able to converse fluently with musicians, having eclectic musical tastes—and a knowledge of different musical styles and genres—is a prerequisite for working with songwriters and recording artists.
    Jazz, more than any other genre, has been a consistent theme in my life and work.
    For a classical student, it was the forbidden fruit, but I was a rebel. Jazz became my musical nirvana: the ultimate confluence of melody, rhythm, and unrestrained musical expression. Although my classically trained professors discouraged it, I wanted to let my violin wander into the jazz world the way Stephan Grappelli and Django Reinhardt did. I began playing in small clubs on Fifty-second Street, which drew the ire of my Juilliard professors, who had no compunctions voicing their displeasure.
    Contrary to their opinion, I found copious musicality in those jazz performances. I learned to speak the language of music because I was exposed to the best of both worlds—classical and jazz. The role model who drove the point home for me was Andre Previn, who could arrange, orchestrate, compose, conduct symphonyorchestras, and play jazz piano. Andre’s versatility was a real inspiration in my life as a budding musician, engineer, and producer—he helped me assimilate a generous array of music.
    I’d spend hours listening to Art Tatum, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, or John Coltrane play a solo, and then I’d dissect it. Sitting at the feet of the jazz masters—literally and figuratively—gave me a better education than a dozen classes in music theory ever could.
    One of the greatest things I learned from the jazz players was how to edit. Not how to physically splice tape, but how to condense a musical thought without diluting its coherence or artistic intention. To that end, recording saxophonist John Coltrane’s Olé Coltrane in mid-1961 taught me a great deal. The album came at a moment in Coltrane’s life when the notion of self-editing was foremost in his mind.
    Bebop hadn’t seen a sax player with the emotive brilliance of Charlie Parker until John Coltrane came along. Although he could play sweetly (as albums such as Lush Life, Ballads, and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman demonstrate), Coltrane’s modern improvisations were ingenious. In the period that wrought Olé Coltrane , he attacked every phrase like a pit bull.
    While the jaw-dropping ferocity of Coltrane’s lengthy solos appealed to ardent beboppers, their depth was often lost on the casual jazz fan. Inspired by some patrons who walked out when he launched into one of his abstract meanderings, Coltrane decided to refine the way he collated and framed his thoughts while playing to an audience.
    “Sometimes [I] would get up and play a twenty, maybe thirty minute solo,” Coltrane explained. “Then, [my band] went into the Apollo, and the manager said ‘You’re playing for too long—you can only play for twenty minutes.’ Well, we ended up playing three songs in twenty minutes. I played all the highlights of the solos that [individually] had taken me twenty or more minutes each to play. Itmade me think, ‘What have I been doing all this time?’ If I’m going to take twenty or thirty minutes to say something that I can say in ten minutes, maybe I’d better say it in ten minutes!”
    Although I didn’t fully comprehend their value at the time, Coltrane’s comments—the way he acknowledged the problem, and his thoughts on brevity—definitely affected the way I helped prune and shape the records I was involved in making.
    Another important thing I recognized during my early