The intense hymnal slow-build of cuts like "General Confessional" paired well with Axelrod's ear for hooky basslines, emphatic rhythms, and wall-of-sound melodies, giving hip-hop producers plenty to choose from, whether they wanted a simmering weed-church haze ( The Beatnuts' “Niggaz Know”), a heavy-hitting speaker-rattler ( Black Moon's “Duress”), or a skulking midpoint between the two (Wu-Tang Clan's “The Monument”).īefore Axelrod himself became a cratedigger favorite, his role in ushering Cannonball Adderley into the crossover-friendly world of soul-jazz made his production touch a good match for hip-hop right as its golden age was starting to hit a stride. ![]() Fortunately, keyboardist Don Randi, guitarist Howard Roberts, bassist Carol Kaye, and drummer Earl Palmer could all be considered the most omnipresent musicians of the ’60s and ’70s, especially relative to their general anonymity back then, so it could be said that Axelrod traded up personnel-wise. But the band struggled with the complex material, and had disbanded completely by the time Axelrod returned to the studio with some of the session players he'd also brought on to finish F Minor. Their previous album, Mass in F Minor, had started out as an attempt to get the Prunes on board with Axelrod's vision of a classically-indebted take on psychedelic progressive rock, not unlike what the Moody Blues had done the year before with their pioneering Days of Future Passed. Their name was on the cover, but the crossover between the Electric Prunes who hit paydirt with the psychedelic classic “ I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” two years earlier and the “Electric Prunes” that composer/arranger Axelrod and producer Dave Hassinger credited for Release of an Oath was approximately nil. Masta Ace's “No Regrets,” the Domingo-produced closing track from his masterful self-reflection concept record Disposable Arts, is able to find another angle entirely, seizing on the more nuanced, mournful elements of the relatively quieter, flute-laced moments on “The Edge.” Not bad for a track Axelrod slipped onto McCallum's Music: A Bit More of Me because he knew the singer’s face alone would guarantee enough record sales to excuse a little experimentation. That slinky guitar figure is all the track technically needs, but the way Dre preserves the original cut's massive “at the sound of the tone the time will be 100 o'clock” opening fanfare feels like professional courtesy from one Los Angeles music auteur to another. While Dre’s “The Next Episode” was not the first cut to take advantage of “The Edge”-Godfather Don's murky ’98 remix of Scaramanga's "Death Letter" previously had been the most notable track to use it-the wide-open way that Dre interpolated “The Edge” for this 2001 highlight feels like the one that really gets it the earliest. One of the most frequently-sampled Axelrod productions, “The Edge” and its immediately recognizable water-drip plink-plink twang are almost impossible to separate from its role in hip-hop. Axelrod's second life as a hitmaker through hip-hop was perhaps even more productive than his initial run at Capitol-to the point where it feels almost obligatory to discuss them both in tandem. ![]() He was favored by East Coast boom-bap practitioners and West Coast G-funk creators of both the underground and multi-platinum variety. As the raw funk that held sway in ’80s production started to make room for more jazz-based and cinematic orchestral influences in the early ’90s, music that Axelrod brought into the world-whether as a producer for others, or a writer and arranger of his own material-became every bit as sought after as that of Ohio Players or Roy Ayers. ![]() It was that air of majestic intensity around Axelrod’s music that inevitably made him an all-timer in the hip-hop world. ![]() Many of Axelrod’s collaborators were among the era’s most accomplished and well-traveled studio musicians, but the remarkable thing about him was that his uniquely sacred and poetic sense of pop-classical crossover shone through in them. In 1968 alone, he helmed production for “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” actor/easy listening instrumentalist David McCallum, South African Apartheid exile and jazz singer Letta Mbulu, and garage-psych Nuggets favorites the Electric Prunes, whom he tried to refashion as an intersection of classical, religious, and acid-rock music. Despite his hitmaker status for Rawls and Adderley, it was Axelrod's more idiosyncratic work that caught a good amount of latter-day notice.
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