Sunday, August 24, 1997

Ritenour’s latest jazz adventure is as a record company executive
By Peter B. King
Post-Gazette Staff Writer

About 27,000 CDs are released in the United States each year, Lee Ritenour explains matter-of-factly. And even if all of them were the equivalent of gourmet chocolate sundaes, the hungriest music glutton couldn’t digest them all. Which means that if you want the public to buy your record, you’d better do just about everything right.

In the case of Ritenour — who will headline Saturday night as part of the three-day Jazz at Seven Springs festival — that means more than merely pulling intricate, tasteful and swinging solos from his electric and acoustic guitars. Ritenour is also a talented producer, arranger and composer. And recently, he’s become a record company executive.

“This is the next adventure for me,” says Ritenour, a former A-list session guitarist who has gone on to make 26 albums as a band leader — not including collaborations with Dave Grusin and Larry Carlton and as a member of the group Fourplay.

On the phone from L.A., Ritenour explains why he helped found the i.e. music label: “First, to really have a little more control in the destiny of my own career, my own product and seeing it to fruition.

“Likewise, I had a big interest to start producing other people. Producing an artist for my own label has a much greater meaning. There’s a way to help that new or established artist find their way.”

The record business, Ritenour explains, has changed radically from when he first saw the inside of a recording studio.

“If (it) doesn’t have any hot records, the company changes very quickly. It’s very sad, in the sense that employees used to be at one of those record companies for 10, 20, 25 years. Now if you’re at a record company for five years, you’ve been there a long time.

“There’s no chance for a group of people to have the solidity of knowing they’re gonna be there, and knowing they’ll have a chance to fail and succeed and learn from their mistakes and grow. And I think this is a problem in general in American big business now. “

Ritenour’s first effort for i.e., “A Twist of Jobim” — an homage to the late, great Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim — was a big hit on the contemporary jazz charts. His second, a disc he produced for saxophonist Eric Marienthal, is off to a great start, he says.

Of course, holding down two jobs can make you crazy. “My career was already very busy,” Ritenour says. “And now it’s just off the map.”

Ritenour, 45, has been busy as a professional musician for 25 years. Shortly after he finished his guitar studies at University of Southern California, he toured for a year with Sergio Mendes and Brasil 77. Then he plunged into the L.A. recording scene, playing on more than 3,000 sessions, including Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” Steely Dan’s “Aja” and The Brothers Johnson’s “Letter 23.” His finesse earned him a nickname — Captain Fingers.

In 1976, he made his debut album as a leader, “First Course.” Three years later, he quit playing sessions.

“I was really kind of burned out with just being the hot session guitar player. I liked having much more control and doing the whole record — I could make a whole pie as opposed to a little piece of a pie.”

He had big success with subsequent records like “Rit,” the Brazilian-flavored “Harlequin” (with Grusin) and “Festival,” and with more straight-ahead projects like “Stolen Moments” and his tribute to Wes Montgomery, “Wes Bound.”

Ritenour has just released a new CD, “Alive in L.A.,” on the GRP label, to which he still owes a recording or two. It’s his first live solo album, and it posed a couple of distinct challenges.

“I wanted to make sure I was happy with the performances. . . . Because a lot of times, the people who put out live records, they sort of capture the great feeling of a live show, but unfortunately the performance doesn’t live up to the kind of quality everyone wants.

“The other thing that bugs me about live albums is the sound. Usually it’s pretty rough, and I pride myself on making sure that I always deliver good-sounding records. So we found a club in Santa Monica called the Ash Grove, a very small club on the beach, which had a terrific sound naturally in the room, and it only sat about 300 people, so it was very intimate.”

Ritenour makes a point of stating in the liner notes that not a note in the performances was enhanced or fixed through overdubbing.

“Today it’s so easy with the technology to actually make a live record a studio record in a minute.”

The new CD has no vocals. But it does have plenty of spontaneous musical interplay and inspired soloing. In short, it’s more akin to “Wes Bound” or “Stolen Moments” than to some of Ritenour’s more elaborately arranged affairs.

Also in the liner notes, Ritenour mentions that his late father, an architect and amateur pianist, took him to concerts in seaside clubs much like the Ash Grove 30 years ago, to hear greats like George Benson, Freddy Hubbard and Wes Montgomery. The last was a particularly potent inspiration to Ritenour — he and his Brazilian wife, Carmen, even named their son Wes.

Los Angeles in the ‘60s was a fertile environment for a musically precocious kid. From the age of 13 on, Ritenour studied with Duke Miller, who went on to head the guitar department at USC. He also took some lessons with Joe Pass and Howard Roberts. At USC, Ritenour spent the majority of his time studying classical guitar with Christopher Parkening. But he also pursued arranging and orchestration.

As for record production, he learned on the job, working with producers like Quincy Jones in his session days and, later, with Grusin.

“I was classically trained, I had a lot of jazz studies, I devoured rock ‘n’ roll and pop when I was a kid. And what I loved about records was not only the soloist on a record. Like if it was a Miles Davis playing with the Gil Evans Orchestra, I was equally interested in the Gil Evans string arrangements. And when I used to buy my Wes Montgomery records, Don Sebesky’s and Oliver Nelson’s arrangements were a lot of the reason for whatever I liked. I was always attracted to the whole package.”

Ritenour has taken some flak from jazz critics — in part because he frequently turns out those radio-friendly “smooth jazz” albums, with their emphasis on arrangement over improv, and in part because he began as a session player.

“As far as the critics go, and as far as the way I’m perceived sometimes, and the way any studio musician is perceived who becomes a soloist, is that they’re always looked upon sort of as the second cousin. Because for some reason the critics think that you’re not a true artist.”

On the contrary, Ritenour credits those years of sessions with helping him to execute his artistic vision.

“The experience I got,” he says, “has come back a thousand times.”