Dave Grusin: Not Enough Time

Any singer will tell you how important it is to have a great conductor, a great arranger, and a great pianist.

And I'm lucky to have all three and his name ladies and gentlemen is Dave Grusin.

Dave is just one of my favorite human beings on this planet.

That's Dave Grusin and it was like talking about a kind of God-like figure in the world of music.

Everyone in LA not only in the music world but in the film world knew Dave Grusin.

Sydney used to say, he plays piano like lace.

He's a very deep, caring, brilliant person.

Most People don't know about what a phenomenal career he's had.

The thing that impresses me about a film and that triggers any kind of idea isn't what the story is about at all or has very little to do with it.

It's what it looks like, what does this picture here sound like you know...I mean it's almost down to that.

You can imagine how many opinions there are in a bunch of filmmakers that are working on a picture what they think the music ought to be.

So I end up listening to myself in terms of the first pass at least.

I want to write a good piece of music.

You know, I want to write something that I like.

He was a guy that was an opera director basically.

And I know when he picked the main theme I know it's because it felt more operatic to him.

Most fascinating thing was when we went to record, when we finally got on the stage.

And Franco would be sitting on the couch sobbing.

(laughs) So I said what did you think?

He said, "there's so many things that are wrong but it's so beautiful!"

My father was a watch maker and he did all of his close magnification stuff all his life, he always had a one of those jeweler's loops on his head and I never could understand how he could bear to do it but this isn't all that different I guess.

My father was from Riga Latvia.

He came over as a 14 year old kid, escaping a pogrom.

And he kinda grew up on his own.

He hid his past from us.

It was a hard past.

Having come by himself to Ellis Island, refused entry because he didn't have the right papers, and immediately they gave him an army uniform and sent him to Belgium in first world war.

He had been to Switzerland and studied watchmaking there.

He somewhere studied violin and I have no idea how that started but he was an accomplished violinist and became a watchmaker by default.

I guess in those years, you learned a trade besides music.

He would fix watches that would take him hours and hours maybe days for $6.50.

It was so incredibly intense to see him do this stuff.

The unattainable goal of perfection which nobody actually ever achieves.

Maybe there's some genetic part of that, that makes me never be satisfied with anything.

When I think about major influences, my dad was probably the biggest one.

He married my mother and came to Littleton Colorado.

She was really a fantastically energetic woman.

She was president of PTA, the toastmistress club, the women's club.

She was a bit of a musician.

She could play the Tennessee Waltz with both hands like big fat chords.

If you were a Grusin and you were 6, you had to practice the piano.

We had one teacher in town.

everybody, you know, studied with Mrs. Stevenson then.

She was the only game in town.

Twenty five cents a shot I think the lessons were.

She was the ideal piano teacher.

She knew how far to push kids, there was very little judgment, even though there was a lot of corrections and instruction.

I think I owe her a great deal of gratitude for having made it comfortable for me to actually learn the instrument.

I remember music not being a focal point during my adolescent years I became interested in ranching.

Probably because I got a great job on a ranch.

During the summer I would live there, in a bunk house with the cowboys, they taught me how to ride in the local rodeo and I did that for awhile without getting killed.

I decided maybe I was interested in Agriculture enough to become a veterinarian.

About three weeks before it was time to start studying vet medicine, I have this image I've never forgotten, I was on a tractor, I think I was baling hay, and suddenly had this terrible pang of guilt about my father, having put all this time and energy into my music education he never discouraged me from going this agriculture route, but I kept thinking, wait a minute... maybe I should try music for a minute just to see if it would work, I know it would make him happier even if he wouldn't admit it.

Storm Bull, was head of the piano department at the University of Colorado.

a Norwegian, he was actually a great grand nephew of Edvard Grieg.

He had a lot of things to say about an attitude of performing.

When he'd have his little master classes he would have us play for each other and he'd have us come out and practice bowing and as we're bowing we're saying to the audience, "you don't... you don't matter at all we don't care what you think."

And just kinda of get your head into the kind of place.

where you just could concentrate on what you were doing as opposed to worrying about who was listening to you I got a notice to appear before the draft board in Denver.

and the Navy guys; the recruiters at least were all sort of "ah, this is really fun, "you're going to have a great time.

"You'll take officer's training, "and then you'll start flight training right after that if you want to fly an airplane."

I said, "let's do it!"

Flight training was fantastic I loved just the aspect of keeping everything in order... all of the instruments being exactly where they ought to be.

Eisenhower became president, and decided that one tour of duty wasn't enough to pay for all the expense they had gone through to get this far, so we had to do two tours of duty they were breaking their contract with us.

Which meant we were allowed to break our contract with them but we had to leave right then.

I still don't know if I made the right choice.

When I talk to some guys that went through the whole program, they were done with everything they were retired on a full pension by the time they were in their late 30's.

But I knew I wanted to get back into music.

I enrolled in a graduate program at Manhattan School of Music.

I had a good friend from Denver named Bob Eaton, we were in the modern choir together.

I ran into him; and he was singing with the Ray Charles singers doing a sort of a summer replacement for the Perry Como show and it starred Andy Williams, this brand new singer from Iowa who was starting to make a name for himself.

Andy was looking for somebody to go out on the road with him to handle the band and do some arranging and some charts.

and Bob recommended me and set up an introduction.

So that's how I got to meet Andy who I went on to spend a lot of time with after that.

Hey um... Dave, Dave can I see you a minute please.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is our musical conductor Dave Grusin.

Dave, uh, what's happening over there?

Well what's he doing in the orchestra?!

Hey Jack... yeah, Yes, Andy?

Jack, uh, can I see you for a minute please?

Oh sure.

(music twang) Well Dave, didn't you say anything to him?

Andy, I'm sorry I really didn't even know he was there.

Well you mean he must be...

There are 27 men over there and we were conducting everything was beautiful and all of a sudden the worst sound I ever... One of the things that happened with Andy, is that he got called by National Guard, to do a recording, about the Guard.

The guy behind it was Quincy Jones, so we had Quincy's band and Andy in a studio owned by Phil Ramone.

I almost get choked up thinking about the the synchronization of all that stuff.

And that's when I met David and like was just match made in heaven.

Turned out to be a fortuitous kind of a thing for all of us.

Right after that Andy wanted to do an album in France.

Quincy had his band in France.

And we were stranded in Europe after that Broadway show closed, "Free and Easy" and I was stranded there with 33 people.

And Andy said, OK well we'll get Quincy to do the charts for this album.

And I said, Andy, get over here fast, man, I'll do the record with you, but I need Bring 15 thousand dollars 'cause we are in trouble.

While they were writing the charts, Andy and I had to spend time in St. Tropez We had hooked up with Michel Legrand in Paris, because he had some tunes that of course Andy wanted to do.

Then back in St. Tropez, to wait out the charts, Burt Bacharach had been working with Marlena Dietrich, he was her accompanist, She had fallen off a stage or something, broken her leg, so he was out of work playing piano in this bar so I met him.

So concentrated in about two years, I got to meet all of these people that I'd always wanted to meet that became my "peeps."

You know, my group.

And I started to think about all the things on the way and how did it happen.

(Whew) Divine intervention.

When Andy went to Los Angeles, I think in 1961, to start the TV show at NBC, I was invited to come out as his piano player basically.

And then for some reason Colin Romoff left and I had to fall into the position of being the director.

So here I was this , uh, sort of wet behind the ears kid conducting the NBC orchestra.

It was fantastic.

Also a lot of work, I must add.

Fox had a staff band, Warner Bros., NBC had a staff orchestra, CBS had a staff orchestra, and that was like 80-90 guys.

And they were all on salary, and they all had a 40 hour work week.

Was the kind of band that could play anything at any moment.

We had this incredible staff of arrangers.

Billy May, Marty Paich, Johnny Mandel.

Guys who were the best arrangers around in those days.

One of the best things about working on that show, was watching these other guys and how they worked and what they concentrated on.

I wrote at least 2 or 3 charts, each week and so I would get little grades from the other arrangers on the show.

One of the most important things about writing an arrangement or a composition and learning from it, is hearing it back.

And in the case of this show, you heard it back really quickly.

It was scary, it was nervous making, but it was also incredibly full of thrills, you know 'cause you never knew exactly what you were going to be doing the next week, and I just got immersed in good solid arranging for television.

I got a call from Sergio Mendes.

He had made a deal with Herb Alpert at A&M records, to record this group.

His unique ability starts with his phenomenal sense of arranging.

Certain records, like all the early Sergio Mendes for example, the Fool on the Hill record, probably the first thing that really caught my ear and eye like, Oh he did that.

The arrangement for Brazil '66, the Fool on the Hill is something so... when I heard that and I say, boy I start to love the Beatles.

I've been to Brazil several times.

I went once with Sergio-- we played seven nights a week for a month.

So it was a gas, we had the greatest time.

I spent a lot of time with Jobim, during the day, at his place.

To be in the same place with Jobim and Dave Grusin, you have to be very lucky.

But there is something about Brazilians at this time, so friendly.

So...anxious to learn.

exchanging ideas; and oh, this chord, Oh, what a nice chord It's 3,4,5 in the morning we're still playing and singing and drinking, and learning Being in love with that kind of music.

It was an amazing experience.

I tried to put at least one samba into every score from that point on.

Donte's was kind of the club where all the studio musicians and wanna-be studio musicians would go hang out... At that time there were all these clubs... Shelly's Manhole, and Dontes, and Ya know, a half a dozen places and so there was always a place to play, and there was always a place to go listen, and be part of the jazz police.

I do remember that we were both devoted to a place called Dontes.

And it became quickly a big hangout for jazz buffs.

Kenton would come in and of course the whole Johnny Carson band would come in.

Who's playing at the Baked Potato every week with Lee Ritenour and it was such a scene there especially when you got a lot of people in there.

It would be packed We would play at the Potato and we wouldn't start until 10pm and we'd finish at 2am and hang out there for a minute and then he'd go home and write...

The only thing the producers really wanted to happen from TV music was to get people to come in from whatever they were doing to watch the show.

So if you hear that theme song and you like it and then you do it on a regular basis, maybe the show would become a hit.

He was the complete Golden boy in Los Angeles.

He was the hottest film composer, he was the hottest TV composer, and everybody just loved Dave and respected him so much ‘cause he was this "musician's musician."

So he started using me and my career just like went completely nuts.

I went from 1 session to 15 a week.

One of the things that I still viscerally feel, the need to get stuff done on a deadline.

You know you have to come up with something and you just pray its going to be useable, never mind good.

Friday night everybody went out and got plastered because it was the end of the week and you kinda start over on Saturday and Sunday.

The Graduate, I think it was one of the really first times that songs were used as part of the score.

A lot of people maybe don't know, Dave did the main score and collaborated with Simon and Garfunkel to make that work.

He was really on the forefront of all that stuff.

Those songs were so critically important to the movie.

and Mike had cut the whole picture exactly to those original records.

Now, in those days, the musicians union had a rule that you could not replay a commercial recording for any other medium.

Not even if you repaid everybody.

You had to do it all over again.

So we went into the studio down at Goldwyn Studios.

Paul was there.

We got this wonderful small band together duplicate those things, we knew exactly what the parts were.

But clearly, you know, the magic that happened when they made the original that's not gonna happen again the same way.

Mike would sit in the dubbing room.

I think we spent 30 days on the dub of this film.

And I knew he was never gonna be thrilled.

I'm gonna do something, I may lose my license to practice music.

I'm gonna go down to Wallach's Music City.

I'm gonna buy a fresh copy of this vinyl disc and we're gonna make transfers.

And that's what we're gonna dub in this picture.

All of a sudden, he had no problems with the mix.

So that experience was not writing score so much as figuring out how to... how to uh... get the director what he... what he really wanted.

Sydney became one of my best friends.

He loved music.

I mean he was a music freak to the point where he would worry that he liked the music too much and was it really working for the film.

It was almost a jazz score as it turned out.

Again, that little rhythmic thing that happened.

Sydney called me after a preview.

Now tell me if I should be worried about this.

I said "What?"

He said "people are tapping their foot in the main title" and I said "Well, what does that mean?

"You don't want 'em to enjoy it?"

"No, I don't want 'em to feel too comfortable."

I said "Well, uh... "maybe they should feel comfortable 'cause everything "that's gonna come after that is gonna "is gonna, uh, shock them."

He was such an emotional emotionally driven director and artist and actor as well and a teacher, a great teacher of actors.

I think I did maybe 12 films with him.

During the Andy Williams years, I made an album called "Kaleidoscope."

I was able to use Larry Rosen as my drummer.

He had this kind of marketing, business, music thing in the back of his head, all the time.

He knew he wanted to produce records.

Larry and I decided Ok we have to form a production company under the name of GRP.

Larry is a natural salesman.

You know, he can sell anything.

And he just, you know, was persistent but in a very positive manner about the potential of the label.

Larry was on an airplane going back to NY, and Clive Davis was on the same plane.

And Larry, being Larry, walked his way up to first class to where Clive was sitting and said, "Clive, hey it's Larry Rosen "I'd like to talk to you about something.

"Dave and I have this label and we're going to have "some great artists on it, "what would you think about having a sub-label deal with us?

"Would you be interested in a distribution?"

And Clive said, "Yeah.

That sounds great."

Larry had this salesman vibe, he could talk you into many things.

He talked me into a lot of things that I'll never get over you know at this point.

I was helping Larry do a couple of things in the studio.

And I did something correctly, and he said "Oh this is great, you want a gig?"

I'm like "ha, ha, ha yeah sure."

Thinking that it would never happen.

He called me up and said, "You've seen my studio, "I need somebody to run it, "it's a permanent full time position for one individual.

"You got eyes for it?"

And I said, "Sure...yeah, that'll be great...thank you."

My parents had a long phone cord in the kitchen and I remember I was on the phone literally pounding my head quietly on the kitchen floor...

I can't believe this...

I can't believe this.

George Benson had a club in Harlem.

So this was The Breezin' Lounge.

A little hole in the wall, 145th Street and Broadway.

Somebody alerted Dave Grusin that there these there were these young bad cats from Jamaica Queens who were jamming up at the Breezin' Lounge so Dave got in a cab and came up to check out these guys.

I had no idea who these guys were until we started working with them And you could tell these guys were um "the real deal" and they would bust out tapes and throw them in their own boom boxes that they had on hand and say "yo yo Dave, listen to this."

We're jammin' man, and Dave Grusin comes out of the control room and sits down at the acoustic piano and starts jamming along with us and we're like OK...you know you know we're 16, 17, 18 years old the old dude's going to come and jam with us?

And man...he killed it!!

That was the beginning of GRP as a record label.

It was a love affair with the music.

They could work with the artist, the artist understood this was somebody that could handle their music, handle... that I can turn my baby over to this guy 'cause he understands what my baby looks like, sounds like, feels like.

They recognize what the artist is doing as far as being exciting and as far as being something extraordinary.

So we'd pick them on that basis, that they were good musicians, not necessarily schooled musicians, but they had something really critically wonderful about them to listen to.

I didn't have to sell a lot of the young musicians on GRP 'cause everybody wanted to be there.

I'll never forget this, "David, this is Larry Rosen.

"Come to GRP, we want to sign you to a record deal."

And it was just like that.

They gave voice to a lot of musicians that I don't think would have had a voice had it not been for GRP.

Because Dave was a musician, he knew guys who were for example great studio musicians, who had a great voice, but nobody knew about it, you know, and Dave would say, "C'mon, "we're going to do an album with you."

A month later, Larry calls again and says, "I'm staying at this hotel, "I'd like to hear some of your demos.

"What you're going to do for this album."

I said, "Oh...OK." So I put together about 4 songs.

I get to the room, and I'm nervous and the door opens and its Dave Grusin!

I almost fell apart.

This is my idol, my hero and he's going to sit and listen to my songs, I had to go to literally to the bathroom and compose myself, I was that freaked out about it.

I'd been playing bars and nightclubs and struggling for so many years.

And then yeah, when I signed with GRP, it just everything changed... Yup.

George and I got the contract offer and we we could barely afford to have a lawyer look at it...

I mean Well, we didn't have any money.

I mean, it was $200 an hour this guy wanted.

We come to the office with Larry and we're going to do the deal.

We say, "But you know we feel that we should change this and change this" and, you know, we started kind of going over it with him.

I just remember Larry looking at us and saying, "I mean... You know, I'm taking all the risk with you guys, "I can't really... "can't really change some of these things.

I...You know, "how are we going to make any money, in case you know..?"

I looked at George we're like, "You know you're right."

"Just sign it you know."

And we just signed it.

George left the room and Larry gave me a big hug, and uh opened his drawer and pulled out a pipe and we smoked a little pot and uh sealed the deal.

I was in Aspen, and I wrote a piece called Mountain Dance, just because I was there, and that was the environment I was in.

I think that was our first digital release One of the best examples I always thought was Dave's tune Mountain Dance.

The sound of that group and the sound of those mixes... you know quick and clean and really tight and fun, and light.

I will always remember Mountain Dance.

A young Marcus Miller came in on that session, he was in high school at the time.

So, I really appreciate musicians who figure out a way to bring their culture into the music.

And when Dave Grusin did Mountain Dance, and he's on the album cover with a big old cowboy hat and cowboy boots.

You know, I'm playing the music and I'm going, "He's not from New York, I'll tell you that."

Playing the music, I could really hear his life, I could really hear where he comes from.

In the beginning when I'd get a call to do a film, I'd first try to find out from my agent, I had an agent by that time, whether they had first called Mancini or Burt Bacharach 'cause I knew I was subbing for one of them in those days.

It had nothing to do with my self esteem about not getting called first, I just wanted to know what they were thinking about in terms of direction of the score.

When I first sat down, I thought, what does New England sound like?

And to me it sounds like Protestant chords.

You know, when I watched the movie On Golden Pond, knowing the guy and knowing what he's knowing fully capable of, to see the choices he made, to hear the choices he made.

On Golden Pond was the film that that allowed the most space for a score... and a lot of it due to what it looked like, all of that empty space without a lot of dialogue and story going on.

Everything they felt, you felt.

And that's his art.

He knows character.

He nailed it as we used to say, he nailed it.

Larry and Dave were forerunners in this kind of music and sound 'cause they were very involved with the technology of the CD at that time.

They'd start talking about the CD.

It's going to be such a pain in the ass, we're going to have to get the retailers to change from 12" boxes to 7" boxes, all of these stupid reasons not to do it right?

But Larry... saw the future.

He was like on it, to say, we're just do this now And it was really Larry's vision to have GRP be the first digital company.

And they beat all the big guys, cause the big guys were still so invested in vinyl.

Larry was a genius in that process too because he gave away CD players.

So you know the radio stations that we dealt with had CD players so they could play our CD's.

What was unique about them at the time was both of them being heavily involved in the actual production of the product.

We started dealing with reverb, echo, placement of stereo elements, where most jazz people even thinking about that.

How to make that kick drum just come across the speakers, so that nobody could deny it.

He could make that clarinet just be a little bit off on the left so that it was so clear where as if it were right in the middle, it gets swallowed by the stereo architecture of the keyboards, or the bass.

The marriage of the music and the technology, one sort of lent itself to the other as far as keeping the that cleanliness, that punch.

They used to use our stuff to demonstrate equipment.

So we had kind of a market in that funny area.

It was like a high fidelity market.

And I swear people were buying albums on that basis alone.

I don't know what they thought about the music, but they loved how it sounded.

Everybody was just on their game.

You know, it was a business but we were all there for the music.

Everybody had to sort of give up their tape machines, and their old LP players and go out and buy CD players.

A lot of that had to do with why we had these relationships for instance with JVC... who were in the business of selling hardware as well.

The hardware, the CD players went from like $1200 down to $200 or $300, and then everybody was buying them.

But they couldn't find any material, they couldn't find the music to play on it.

And the only game in town for a minute was uh...GRP.

Larry would go to stores, go to Tower Records and make sure that if they were supposed to have our product, it was actually there, and if they didn't have it why didn't the distributor get a new order, why wasn't it being taken care of?

If our product was in the shelves and wasn't visible, he'd move it all to the front, you know so you could see it in the rack when you first came in as opposed to having to shuffle through everything to get to it.

Got get the music out there, figure out how to connect with people, not... 23 people in a little club, but 2000 people in a concert hall.

It was sure a great wave.

I mean we were all riding it, our records were entering the Hot 100, we were getting album budgets in the 6 figures, it was a heady, great time...

There was a lot of respect.

People were buying GRP records just because of the label name, the reputation.

It wasn't just selling records, there was a prestige involved in being on GRP, it was like... coolness factor.

We were showing up in towns and people knew our songs before we even had ever played there so was pretty nice.

You didn't get in the music industry unless you were a music lover.

But there's another level when you're talking about someone like Dave Grusin and Larry Rosen who were musicians, who could communicate to the musicians if something wasn't right, exactly what wasn't right.

I think that made it special.

Of the 7 albums I did, 98% of it is what I wanted to do.

So you have to really... that's really quite beautiful.

They didn't seem to be chasing hit records.

They had great artists and they just were building careers.

So...I think that was the difference with most uh, with them and most companies.

Trying things and saying "Oh... uh oh.

Hit the wall on that, "you know.

Better try...you know "let's do this", you know... that kind of thing.

We all created the music together.

It's not just music, any group endeavor that involves people of different personalities, with different talents and different skills, coming together and making something fantastic is always, like, the height of human achievement.

I need more time than I'll ever have.

What happens is, I'll sit down and I'll have an idea.

If it's too early in the process, I know I'm going to have a better idea later.

So I have this...this kind of twisted procrastination thing going on.

Its not that I don't want to do the work now, it just it doesn't feel like it's good now.

I know it will be good later.

So I've always used a deadline as a final motivator.

The fear of failure as the final thing to finally get something done.

The truth is that the song that came out of that was written at the very last minute because we thought Boz Scaggs and David Foster were doing a song, and they never got it done.

I know that song was really important to Sydney, and he was... just felt like he was looking at a disaster.

Sydney panicked and he said, "What are we going to do?"

I said, "Well I have this theme, should we get "Alan and Marilyn Bergman to look at it?"

And then Marilyn and Alan came up with this great idea for a lyric.

Sydney Pollack wanted a noncommittal love song... so a melody and... it might be you...you know?

We got Stephen Bishop to sing it, and this was all like kind of jammed in at the very end.

When he started to play, his door would be closed and I would knock on Larry's door and I'd open it and I'd peep in and say, "Dave's playing!"

And we would just sit there and we wouldn't answer the phone we wouldn't do anything, because Larry and I both knew that we were in the presence of this creativity that was just sort of magical.

Highly melodic aspect of his right hand.

How he can play something so simple and just make it sing.

He has that ability, as a pianist.

Very few do He chooses a piano that he knows will sound good choosing the right studio so the piano sounds good in that studio using the right microphones to mic the piano.

A perfect example, at Gerry Mulligan's memorial in NY, there was one great piano player after another, One wonderful pianist after another!

And then Dave got up to play.

And Marilyn and I looked at each other and said, "Did they switch pianos?"

They switched pianos, didn't they?

Did they?

It was a different instrument... Yeah...in his hands.

Everything is, it's like uh... in the right place...right time.

He doesn't overreact musically, in any moment of this.

There's something about him; it's economic and its brilliant.

And it's emotional.

And it's... it's heaven.

When musicians are really great, the average person doesn't recognize that because it sounds like its so easy, there's so much discipline and there's so much focus.

He's an extremely rhythmic player.

And he may be even under appreciated for his incredible sense of time on the piano.

And then you try it.

(laughs) And then you realize oh... there's a lot in there, there's a lot of study in there.

And that's the way he is.

You know the things that he does sound so clear and so simple, because he's so great.

You know it's hard to explain, he's got it!

you know, I say God left his hands on his shoulders a little longer than the other people cause he's got that God given gift, you know.

If my dad introduced me to some famous jazz musician, that I'd never met before or something, as soon as my dad wasn't there, they would lean and say, "You know your dad is 'the [altered]', right?"

Dave was writing the music to Milagro Beanfield War and his office was down the hall.

And his computer system was like all rigged into this one plug that was attached to the light switch on the wall.

I leaned up against the wall, and turned off the light switch and he lost everything that he had worked on.

I totally destroyed all of the music that he had worked on for the last, like, 48 hours.

He goes, he was like, "Oh God!"

And instantly I knew what had happened.

I felt so bad and I started to cry and he was so nice about it.

He was really generous about that.

I think I would have lost my mind.

One of the down sides of a job like this is you really didn't have any free time to speak of.

The kind of non-stop work that necessitated in my case, not something I could do in a hurry, I had to I had to pretty much stay up all night.

When he's working with music in the studios, he's driven, he's really really really really intense.

He puts so much pressure on himself.

And he also orchestrated all of his own scores, he didn't use orchestrators.

Very time consuming.

And he's a great orchestrator that was part of the sound of his score The amount of work and the amount energy required to, I don't know, like score 5 or 6 films a year and produce these records, and the concerts and the oh, my god!

At one point he had a job, he lived in LA, he'd work in LA, and he would fly to Sausalito to do a show at night and then fly back to LA in the same day.

I remember my dad said it back in the day.

"It's a challenge.

"It's not a problem... it's not difficult.

"It's a challenge."

If you were going to be a musician, and play with other people, you had to be on your game.

That journeyman tradition of here's the music in front of you, play it, let's do it now.

Being somebody who works and being a parent is hard on its own.

And that... you end up sacrificing a little bit of both.

And if you're going to be a very successful person, in the field that you're in, you're probably going to have to sacrifice more of the parenting part.

And its just a fact.

The way it is.

He's married a few times, he has kids from two different marriages, yeah its been, I think it's really hard.

And also he is a perfectionist and so a lot of times I think just feels depressed that he's not able to do everything.

And he can't do everything.

There is never enough time for him because you can't make extra time.

I was having some kind of problem with a score or something was going wrong in the business and I just hated it and I thought, "I wonder if it's too late to go back "to veterinary medicine."

I saw a PBS show about careers.

one of the points of that show was if you are a certain age, and you'd been doing a certain thing for that long, the failure result for changing careers at that point was enormous.

(laughs) So I decided not to explore that any farther.

Somebody said, "There are probably a lot of cows "alive today because you didn't make that change!"

David worked hard.

That's why he's so good.

He's been given this gift from, if it's a god or the universe or however it came together and he bows to it.

He's got this amazing energy.

He's always had that energy and he's just strong.

I don't know if it's his Colorado upbringing or what it was or, you know, whether it was climbing Kilimanjaro in his 70's or walking at airports with me when we're... you know, he's walking faster than the whole band you know and some of these guys are in their 20's and he's in his 80's and its like , "Dave, slow down", you know?

What we have to do as artists, is we have to find a balance in our life.

And I believe it's very important for everyone to have a sanctuary.

Montana became kind of a symbol of, is it still called "the last best place?"

It used to be.

It's become our refuge, and our place where we can feel a freedom that we don't other plac a reminder of the things that we delighted most in as children.

My dad, he was a wonderful fly fisherman, and he taught me that.

And that was uh... something that's stayed with me and is still with me the rest of my life.

A lot of times if I have a big decision to make, I'll just come up and hang around I may fish or may not.

I hike a lot.

I ride.

You know, I'll go out and brush my horse for awhile, you know, take a walk, take a hike up in the mountains, and you know give yourself a little time, sometimes things start to get a little clearer if you've got something you need to think about.

The isolation of the place that allows me to concentrate on what I do.

I've left the war zones to come back here which is an enormous contrast to what is going on and it helps me kind of recoup my sensibilities.

I think one of the reasons I fish or anybody else fishes is that you get such an intense immersion in the natural world, that it makes a much bigger impression on you.

That's a part of the addiction I think.

I did my best cast and laid one down so gently right in those bubbles, its floating along, nothing happens.

And,I reel it in and he's like "try it again."

I tried it again Again, it's a perfect cast... to my eyes.

Lays down, nothing happens.

And my dad's like "let me try it."

And he does what looks to me like exactly the same thing he just lays it down and there's this big explosion.

This fish catches the fly.

And he's laughing and I'm laughing.

How often do you get that in life?

All of us live in these kind of lives with lists, and things that we have to do, big struggle to be in the present at all, always heading for some further thing down the road, until the further thing seems to be death And then you go, "Oh gee what have I missed out on all this time?"

When you're fishing or you're doing things like fishing, there are a lot of other things that are like this, you're not doing that.

You're actually in the moment.

That is very hard to achieve and I think nowadays... harder than it ever was.

I come here I worry mostly about how am I going to get into the stream, what part of the day can I reserve for that?

I'm happier at altitude than I am at sea level.

I know that.

As exciting as it is to work in NY or LA; that's great, but to to be able to come back to a place... it's more like a sanctuary than uh... than either of those places could be.

You want to say that it's relaxing but in a way you're just recharging your batteries here.

You can't totally ever relax when you do this sort of thing but you can certainly find some peace and meaning and tranquility that helps you get going on the next project.

And that's always what it's about, it's always about the next project.

We had a great time recording this stuff.

We would make the cues based on the length of the scene, but then we'd also make long versions of this thing that became great for the album you know...just complete tracks.

What do you wear?

An eight?

Six.

Here!

... How about this?

Here, how's this?

The casting was so perfect with Beau and Jeff Bridges.

both of them are musicians, as a matter of fact.

They both play piano.

And the technology was that they shot an overhead camera above each keyboard so in addition to recording it, the Bridges brothers had all of this footage to take home and see where the hands were, in terms of learning these tunes to play together.

Michelle Pfeiffer became a singer.

It was an extraordinary example, graphic example of what a good actor can really do.

She spent a lot of research time, she went around and heard singers and studied what they did.

When we released the album, they kept calling GRP to see if they could get ahold of Michelle because they wanted to sign a deal with her as a singer.

And her answer was always, "I'm not a singer, "you know I had a role as an actress to play a singer."

I think most composers have a hand full of scores that are super influential to them, and are a part of why we got into the business in the beginning; and, uh, Dave's score to The Firm was one of those scores for me.

All of these sounds that were created by Dave at the piano.

Not him playing the piano but him hitting the piano.

This is before computers, they were looping tape to make a loop out of the percussion parts on the piano.

Monstrous kind of low piano notes that we actually took some of them and lowered them an octave so they're like really sub... sub bass.

Dave you know holding the sustain pedal and doing arpeggios that were the harp parts.

Then he went in and actually played the piano on top of that, too.

Just the idea that someone could sit down at a piano and create the entire soundscape for that film on a single instrument was really exciting for me at the time.

I think I watched it a couple times before I even realized that it really was just the piano and nothing else... You have to know drama.

Dave knows drama.

I had been nominated a number of times, put on the suit, and gone to the theatre and sat through endless evenings and never won.

And this time I knew there wasn't a chance, I stayed home, I was in Santa Fe we were having dinner watching the show with some friends... And the Oscar goes to Dave Grusin for The Milagro Beanfield War.

And Patrick Swayze accepted the award for me.

I'm glad the Academy liked it it means all your compatriots are honoring you for something 'cause they are the ones that are voting.

You know... Driving on the lot at Sony, even the security guards would recognize my name and I'd get, like...treated differently, a little bit, he was that well respected.

Dave is very uncomfortable with too much praise too much attention, too many awards.

All his Grammys and his Oscar he had in boxes all dusty and broken apart some of them from moving from one place to another.

So a few years ago I thought, "You know what, "I'm just going to "take those out of the box, clean them up..." After we sold the label, we continued to make records and it started to make sense to do some, sort of bigger projects, not in terms of what was happening from a hit standpoint, but to do some really nice projects musically.

It's impossible to really talk about this album without mentioning Dave Grusin, who is the producer of it and who wrote all the arrangements.

Really Dave is the reason that it happened.

You've got his sound on there.

No question about who it is.

It was fascinating and really fun.

The great thing was getting to know Dave Grusin and working with him on a musical project.

I'll never forget it.

It was a great couple of months.

And then the final thing was Phil Ramone's idea to do a new jazz version, a big band version of West Side Story.

That was a monumental project.

And it took a long time to get it done.

It was all focused on this same idea that we did with the other big band stuff... how do we present this in a way that is going to have integrity but isn't going to sound exactly like the original?

Dave Grusin presents the music of West Side Story.

I'm not going to be around to enjoy this, but you know when the time comes, and I pass on, I've thought about what I would like the people who are there to hear that reflects my life.

And I would like something by Dave or preferably Dave playing something there at that time.

The era from which he comes is important to me and I want people to be reminded about the timelessness of David's kind of music.

It would be nice to know that he was there at the end as well as the beginning and the middle.

Then they wanted to name it the Grusin Hall.

And I said, "No, you don't need to do that."

And they said, "But that's what we're going to do."

"OK, let's name it in honor of my father then.

"Henri Grusin."

Because we live in a culture which has given great credence to self promotion, that if people don't do that, the culture assumes well there wasn't anything to promote.

And I know some really good people, serious good artists who've just really learned to do that because it was the necessity of the trade.

But Dave has never... never buckled!

He just won't do that.

If you asked any musician, you know Dave Grusin would like to do something with you, boom!

They would jump at the opportunity to do anything with Dave Grusin.

Because he is the example of excellence.

Quintessential professional.

A great musician.

Without getting a category going because he can go in any category.

The beauty of his creations, his songs, his melodies, his scores, that is an incredible contribution.

He gave us... so much beauty.

I have a gratitude factor that I can't even express about being allowed to have this kind of life.

It extends to people who gave me opportunities, and it extends to musicians with whom I've worked.