When I asked Skip Heller if he'd be interested in doing this interview, I didn't know what to expect. We spent a month or so getting to know each other, somewhat, via e-mail, before the interview took place, and in that time I learned several things about the man. Here are a few that are crucial if you are to fully understand this interview:

1) The man is probably the smartest person I've ever interviewed.

2) He's a walking encyclopedia, and not just on the subject of music.

3) Even though his peers consider him a genuine player with great chops, he will almost always respond to questions about said chops with remarks about the chops of other players he considers superior.

4) The same is true of questions about his skills in any capacity for which he is well known.

5) None of this is "put on." It's going to take an intervention resembling "This Is Your Life" some day to get him to give himself some credit.

Another important thing to know is that he has a lot of friends, from former Blaster Dave Alvin to jazz innovator Uri Caine to total freakin' genius Phil Spector to NOOOoorm. I'm sorry, I mean George Wendt, of Cheers fame.

By now you've noticed this isn't the typical Cosmik Debris interview intro. That's because I don't want to tell you about details of Skip's early life and musically formative years. Skip does it better than I can and I want you to get it first hand. All you need to know going in is that Skip Heller is an everything man in music. He's a player of several styles, including jazz, bluegrass, country and rockabilly. He's an historian, an arranger, a writer, a journalist (for alas, they can be two different things), a rescuer of lost music, and more. A compilation CD called Career Suicide has just been released, and a new CD called Homegoing will be coming out very soon. Homegoing is a tribute to the Philadelphia of his youth, and in the liner notes he remarks "I live in Hollywood now, and there's no place I'd rather be. But I came up in Philly, and there's no place I'd rather be from."

Hollywood it is, however, near if not in the fast lane, and we begin by trying to figure out when he has time to have lunch or sleep considering all his job descriptions.

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Cosmik: I've never talked to anyone who does everything you do. Where do you find the time for all this? You play jazz, rockabilly, bluegrass, if you don't mind the expression there's alt country, but you also are a writer, an archivist, and the only guy with a chance to beat Tiger Woods at the next Major.

Skip: To me, it's all music. Sometimes it's saxophones, maybe sometimes it's fiddles, but you just play what you like and don't be thinking about categories. If I interview a musician or compile some music for a reissue, whatever, it's still me organizing some stuff and making it into something someone else can check out. Arranging is that, interviewing people is that. As for my reputation as an archivist, that's based on... Hell, I have no idea what that's based on. I find some old tapes and get 'em released. Okay. But I'm not a heavy-duty storage and restoration guy.

By the way, I don't do golf. My one big sports thing is the WNBA. I'm a huge LA Sparks fan. Back to back championships. Lisa Leslie es Numero Uno!

Cosmik: Oh, great, now I'm required to be grumpy with you because of what they did to my Seattle Storm. They made our girls look like cadavers. It was sad. Leslie's tough enough, but what are you supposed to do with someone like Mabika when she's on? So besides the Mabika question, the obvious question here is this: Am I breaking new ground? Have you ever been asked WNBA questions in an interview before?

Skip: Only one: who is my favorite player. Nikki Teasley, the most supportive ensemble player in any medium since George Wendt on Cheers.

By the way, when the Sparks played Houston, Cheryl Swoopes made short order of Lisa and Mwadi Mabika.

Cosmik: She makes everybody look bad, though, so no shame in that.

[Pictured: Lisa Leslie]

Skip: When I played Philly this past June, where they don't have a WNBA team, let alone a WNBA broadcast schedule, I played an outdoor gig and wore my Sparks t-shirt. All these high school age girls from the hood were asking me about Lisa Leslie. She's a legend.

Cosmik: You say you're not a heavy restoration guy, but your name sure pops up in that field a lot. Do you yourself spend time with antiquated 78 RPM records, digitizing and cleaning up the sound and EQing because you got 'hold of something special and it's going to make you crazy if you don't get it out? Or is the process different than I'm imagining it?

Skip: When I'm working on a reissue from any archaic source -- old tape, 78's, whatever -- I really go out of my way to memorize the music before I go to the mastering lab, so I know what's there and what we're trying to uncover from underneath the surface noise. You wind up listening to the shit for a week or a month, depending, at deafening volumes on as many different sets of speakers as you can, making sure to note which speakers introduce highs, mids, or lows. Then, you go to the mastering lab knowing how to deal with EQ, filters, and whatever other software. If you know what's there and your mastering engineer knows his tools, you can generally get that special thing out into the open. Homework and dedicated people who take their job seriously. Plus, a mastering engineer who reads music never hurts.

I wind up going through the same shit even worse when I do something like the Lalo Guerrero Project, where I'm transcribing an entire band's worth of parts off old 78's so we can play the music live. Not only is it a lonely job, it's a tedious one.

Cosmik: How long does a project like that take and can you do that and other projects at the same time, or does it demand your full attention?

[Pictured: Lalo]

Skip: It was a solid week of twelve hour days with headphones and two different sets of speakers.

It depends on if there's a performance or recording deadline attached. It also depends on how comprehensively you have to get into the colloquialism around the music. If you're going to transcribe the music and take solos, especially if it's an earlier style or an ethnic style that's not your ethnicity, you have to get into immersion mode. Like, if we do the Benny Goodman Sextet, I really have to psyche myself into 1940, otherwise I'll be playing inappropriate stuff when we hit it on the bandstand. For Bob Drasnin, it's not that big a deal because he grew up on Benny and Artie [Shaw], so he doesn't have to vibe on it.

With Lalo's music, because it's another time and another culture, I really had to go into immersion mode for a while, not just to get the articulation right, but to memorize the music so I can lead the band. Of course, we've played it so many times now that the band has gotten to the point where we're imposing ourselves on the music, which I think is healthy. It keeps the music alive instead of freeze-dried.

Cosmik: What got you interested in doing that?

Skip: When Don Byron did his Mickey Katz group, I thought it was amazing that anyone would do a group like that - all of one guy's compositions, and do it with that level of musicianship and flair. That planted the seed.

When I moved to California, Lee Joseph of Dionysus Records started turning me onto the East LA bands from the sixties, and I started reading about what an incredible, rich music tradition came out of East LA. David Reyes and Tom Waldman wrote a book about it called Land Of A Thousand Dances, and Steven Loza wrote one called Barrio Rhythm, and they're both great, and both really concentrate on Lalo as the fountainhead of barrio rhythm'n'blues. So I wound up interviewing Lalo about this for the LA Weekly, because the Weekly had never covered Lalo. I asked Lalo if he still had his old arrangements, and he didn't.

We played together at an outdoor thing - just the two of us playing guitars - in the area that used to be Chavez Ravine, and we hit it off. I asked if he would sing if I transcribed the arrangements and formed a band to play them. He said sure. We became close since then. He told me he thinks of me like a son, and I don't doubt it. He was in my wedding. He was really happy to be, too. He adores my wife.

Cosmik: That's one of the things I've learned about you while I researched for this: you've formed a lot of strong bonds in this business. You keep your friends, and this is a business where people don't do that too well. Which makes you a people person, and you do this thing you say is tedious and lonely. Is the payoff in satisfaction that good?

[Pictured: Skip with Lalo]

Skip: It's been worth it. Of all the older players I work with, Lalo's the most fun, both on and off the bandstand. And to be the guy who restored something that's such a huge, strong part of California's music tradition is a wonderful feeling. Plus, I love the tunes, so going to a gig knowing you're gonna play something you absolutely love is worth it unto itself. And I have to say that the acceptance I've gotten from the Chicano music community has been something I never had before.

Cosmik: And figuring you didn't have enough to do already.... How did you get involved with cartoon work?

Skip: A line producer for Cartoon Network, Jennifer Pelphrey, had to find a new composer for a Flintstones TV movie when another composer fucked CN. I'm a friend of her husband, so she called me and asked if I would meet with the producers, Dave Smith and Chris Savino. We hit it off alright, and I did a demo for them, and they hired me for that and to do a tune for Dexter's Lab with Martin Mull and Fred Willard.

Cosmik: I won't put you in the miserable position of having to comment directly on your high IQ, but it's something that's already been commented on by others that have worked with you. It's apparent. In your writing, too. One of the things that the smarter school kids go through is boredom if they do the same thing over and over, which they do in a regular classroom. Do you think you'd become bored and feel unchallenged if you tried to stick to one style of music, or just playing and never writing, the same way you may have in a classroom?

Skip: It never dawned on me to just play one categorically-correct style of music, just like it never dawned on me to just hang out with one kind of person. Maybe other bandleaders can say "we do... (fill in the blank) and that's it," but I could never hang with that for very long.

The only time I ever joined somebody else's band and had a completely satisfying experience was when I spent a week subbing for the guitar player in NRBQ (New Rhythm and Blues Quartet). It felt unified to me stylistically, even if we were playing Sun Ra one minute and a beautiful pop song right behind it. That feels right to me, more than toeing some categorical party line has ever felt. I could never do it without feeling like I was being restricted.

Cosmik: Jeez, I'd think that would be a tough gig to leave after such a short time. It sounds like paradise for a guy like you. When was that?

[Pictured: NRBQ]

Skip: October of 2001. The last gig was in Chicago on October 13. I got married on the 14th, which was about the only thing that could have topped the NRBQ experience. It really was paradise. Also, Terry Adams is the most considerate person I've ever worked for, bar none.

Cosmik: Did playing those gigs reinforce and cement your resolve regarding eclectic performances and not having to stay within boundaries to hold an audience's attention?

Skip: NRBQ definitely helped cement my resolve that way, yeah. But it wasn't playing with them that did it. It was years before I ever played with them. Being part of their audience and seeing how people came to a Q show looking forward to the unexpected -- that pointed out that not only could it work, but it didn't have to be scholarly and boring. Plus, Big Al Anderson influenced me as a guitar player more than I can ever say.

As I've gotten to know Terry over the last couple of years, I really feel like there's a kindred spirit thing between he and I. He's one of the few people I feel that close to in such a short time. I'm sure he believes the same way I do that categories are harmful to impose on music. And the way he loves the music he loves is really inspiring to be around.

Cosmik: Let's go back to BEFORE the moment things clicked in your mind and you said "I know what I want to be," I mean before whatever it was that really turned you on to playing, what was the music in your house?

Skip: I was so young when I got hooked. The music in the house was Petula Clark, the Beatles, and AM radio. I was fascinated by it. I didn't know what it was. I mean, I honestly didn't know what "music" was. Just that I liked those sounds. I remember being about three when I stayed with my grandmother in the Tasker Homes (housing) projects, and there were girls maybe eleven or twelve years old, jumping rope to "Stoned Soul Picnic" by the 5th Dimension, and -- I don't know exactly why -- it made a huge impression on me. I have almost pre-natal memories of some of those rhythm'n'blues records of the period. "Stoned Soul Picnic," "Cowboys To Girls," "Expressway To Your Heart," and all the James Brown hits are just so close to my heart even now. When I first heard them, they were just some gorgeous noise that I didn't know what it was.

Cosmik: Sort of a soundtrack to your life but no liner notes. It sounds like nobody was really taking you aside and explaining it, either. Was it taken for granted by everyone in the house, basically? Just something that was there?

[Pictured: John Hartford]

Skip: Pretty much. Nobody in the house had ever been musical enough that anything on that level was passed down. Some kids saw Willie Mays or Joe Namath and went into Little League or Peewee Football. I saw John Hartford and wanted to do music.

Cosmik: It sounds like your grandmother's home played an important part before you realized what it was doing. What are the stronger memories you have of that place now?

Skip: My grandmother's apartment was, to me, a big one-piece couch, a coffee table, and an early model console color television. That was the living room. The kitchen was a big white Formica table, white Armstrong linoleum, and a small AM radio on the windowsill. My grandmother smoked Tareytons, and the smell of that mixed with lipstick, hairspray, and Jean Nate bath lotion still lingers in my mind. We were about the only white people in the projects. When she moved, it was to a place in South Philly at 16th and Dickenson, a neighborhood that was low income Italian and black. I loved it there. Always a lot of life, with lots of kids and music - dancing was the big social activity - and people of all ages. The old people all spoke Italian and I even learned some, which I've long since forgotten.

My parents' house was in South Jersey, a two story post-war house right near Camden, the city where Campbell's Soup and RCA had factories. It seemed like everyone's father but mine worked in one of those two factories. It was an all-white, blue-collar neighborhood, dreamless, pointless, and free of any kind of life. I hated it. My father was a bus driver who had the same route, Tasker/Morris in South Philly, for about thirty-five years. He ran for union secretary a few times, but his ticket never won. Even so, I was aware of unions and class systems fairly early on, even though that stuff was never really talked about. But it's hard to avoid thinking about, even from an early age, when every few years your father goes on strike for a matter of weeks into months, and keeping the family fed and under a roof gets real tight.

I was shuttled back and forth between my grandmother's place and my parents' even into my high school years.

Cosmik: Grandma's almost sounds like a one of Rockwell's really honest paintings, you know? Real warmth comes through. Okay, so that sets the table, fills your head with all kinds of sounds that you like but don't really understand yet. What was "the moment" for you? You weren't born when Sullivan gave us The Beatles, so I know it wasn't that.

[Pictured: John Hartford]

Skip: Seeing John Hartford every week on the Smothers Brothers and Glen Campbell shows when I was about four. Seeing somebody do music on TV, because I got to see what those sounds were. John just washed over me like a tidal wave. Even though I was young, I think he got through because there was such a huge humor quotient in his music, so I had a way in. Then I noticed the Monkees and, on the Beverly Hillbillies, Flatt & Scruggs. But John was what grabbed me, and he kept me until he passed.

Cosmik: I was knocked out by John on both of those shows, especially on Campbell. He obviously had a better showcase there. It was one of the TV rituals in our family, and when John would come on it was "shhhh!" time.

Skip: Same here. My parents even had his records. Years later, John got me a gig opening for him in Philly in, I think, 1996. I got to introduce my father to John Hartford, which was really a big deal for me. John thought it was great that I wanted him to meet my dad.

Cosmik: Not that Glen was any slouch, but John was special. He's up there with a guitar, with a banjo, with a fiddle. And dancing while he's playing. How did you know what you wanted to play? Assuming this was what made you know you had to play.

Skip: Well, at first I wanted to play banjo, because of John and Earl Scruggs. But the guitar was a little more integral to life in the Northeast at that time. Plus, there were no cheap banjos, and money was a consideration.

Cosmik: You were inspired by a country artist and living in a place where I'm guessing most of the other kids were into rock. What kind of music were you playing in your first bands?

Skip: The first bands I played with around my neighborhood were mostly covers of The Who, Ted Nugent, Hendrix, the Allmans. Plus, as certain new bands came up, like the Talking Heads or the B-52's, we did some of that. I drew the line at Led Zeppelin. Couldn't hang with that then or now.

At home, in my bedroom, with my acoustic guitar, I was trying to learn Norman Blake, Doc Watson, Reverend Gary Davis, and David Bromberg. My junior high music teacher was a huge Hartford fan, so he encouraged this behavior. I guess he played Mr. Kavelman to my Frank Zappa.

The first real band I ever played in, back in 1981, was a new wave band that mixed originals, covers of recent material, power pop versions of reggae classics, and that kind of thing. I was fifteen. Everybody else in the band was at least twenty-one. That was my first experience playing bars. Then I got hired into a band that played Jewish weddings, found my way onto the local jazz scene, and just wound my way through all the different bars and scenes around Philly. Jazz here, rhythm'n'blues there, even playing country music in gay bars on western night.

Cosmik: What was the key for you, going from fledgling musician to working pro?

Skip: I think just becoming a better player by playing with better players.

Cosmik: What do you see as the biggest break?

[Pictured: Lee Joseph]

Skip: Hooking up with Lee Joseph. He believed in everything I did, as a musician, producer, and as a reissues guy. And he put his wallet where his faith is. Because of him, I really got to build a resume. I owe him everything.

Cosmik: Lee Joseph sticks with what he believes in, that's for sure. One of the most amazing albums I ever heard was Harmless, which was Lance Kaufman's band a decade ago. Lee put it out, it never really sold, so he put it out again, and I think again later. Because he knows it's that good. Amazing. Okay, so getting together with Lee was the biggest break. What was the biggest moment for you, excitement and emotion-wise?

Skip: Probably playing with NRBQ the week before my wedding, and then flying home like two hours after the last gig and going right to my wedding. The only thing that comes close would have to be singing those two duets with Katy Moffatt on St. Christopher's Arms.

Cosmik: What do you remember about the time you spent with Les Baxter?

Skip: I don't really talk about the Les Baxter thing anymore because I did it to death seven years ago. Joey Altruda and I actually mounted a performance of the music, I got two reissues together for Dionysus, and was rooked out of the liner notes for the Capitol box -- although the bulk of the information in it came from an interview with me. Nobody ever treated me better than Les or his daughter Leslie. She really helped me out when I first moved to LA. "Grateful" doesn't begin to cover it.

Everything I have to say about Les, my experiences with him, and what a great influence he and his music are on me personally are in the liner notes I did to the Scamp reissue of Que Mango.

Besides, Robert Drasnin has been more of a teacher and influence. People point to Les more, no pun intended, but I only knew him in the last year and a half of his life. Bob has been a mentor for me for the last five years or so. I'm not taking anything away from Les. He was fantastic to me personally and he taught me a lot. But Bob has kind of eclipsed everybody else, except for maybe Dave Alvin and Uri Caine, in terms of teaching me what's in my toolbox and how to use it.

Cosmik: I've been listening to the pre-release of Homegoing, your next CD. It's wonderful. When do you expect it out?

Skip: October 1, and we hit the road in support.

Cosmik: It's definitely a jazz album that swings often, but I love the fact that your jazz music always has that exotic quality to it. It's everything from the composition to the players. You wrote 2/3rds of this one. Knowing you're capable of writing out charts for everybody, I want to know if you take an entirely realized piece to the Quartet or if they chip in. Beyond solos, of course.

[Pictured: Howard Greene]

Skip: Since this band has been together for a while, the amount of actual arranging can vary a lot. The Mahler thing is really arranged very tightly, whereas a lot of the other stuff leaves room for the players to impose themselves on the tune. Some of the tunes just kind of play themselves. There's no hard fast method for all the music. I walk in with stuff, sometimes it works the way I planned, sometimes the players work it differently than I planned. If the players are great players and very creative to boot, let 'em rip. Howard Greene is really good at coming up with ways to take the drum parts and either strip away the excess or flesh them out in ways I never thought of. He's really a benefit to my composing, so it's in my best interest to let him bring that. Bolger is a wild card, and a wild card on organ is a big wild card. But he's got the best common sense of just about any player I know, a really magical sense of the unexpected, and he's just a fantastic musician all around, whether he's on organ or trumpet. Bob Drasnin just has a way of making the style of the group shape itself around his character as a soloist. When you have a group like that, you tend to be flexible about how they deal with the music you bring to the rehearsal.

Cosmik: But the studio can be a different story, huh? You're gonna get called "eccentric" no matter what you do, because you're not going to fit into a category, but some people would say your studio methods really are... okay, at least unusual, right? What's the story behind your session leading technique?

Skip: Except for Howard Greene, nobody in my regular band really believed me when I told them John Hartford's Aereo-Plain was the record that snapped me.

One of the guys in the group was reading an interview with David Bromberg, who produced the album, in God only knows what magazine, and the interviewer was particularly intent on details about Aereo-Plain, which Bromberg provided.

"Nobody was allowed to hear playbacks, nobody was allowed to discuss the arrangements except either to ask what key or to count off the tempo, and often enough, first takes were chosen because, even if there were mistakes in the take, you could hear the guys in the band really listening to each other."

That I would choose this as a working method in a group where the music is far more arranged did not inspire much confidence in the bandmember. He's actually angry at me that I have a method based on historical precedent but never told him what it was.

Cosmik: But how does anything work in that environment!? I mean, I can see that it does because your stuff is great, but I'd think you'd need everyone to be on the same page, and with a method like that it's like they're not even sure which book they're reading. Isn't it?

Skip: You have to get into a different vibe with each player, in some ways, usually by playing some sort of rhythmic thing or echoing a phrase that musician might play, but sending it back to him slightly altered, as if you're saying "Yes, and..."

I don't know if you know anything about the old Second City company out of Chicago, the improv comedy troupe. Their approach to improvising was developed from the texts of a woman named Violet Sprolin. Her primary focus was that, in an interactive improvising ensemble, you should never contradict another player, you never leave anyone hanging, and you never step on anyone's toes. Those are good rules for improvised music as well, and I've been pretty influenced by Violet Sprolin, and the other forces behind Second City -- Fred Kaz, Del Close, and Severin Darden. Fred and his wife Helen performed my wedding ceremony, actually.

On the other hand, if you're the composer and you're setting up these frameworks for improvising, you are trying to put a certain feeling across, so you have to lead the ensemble in that direction. Of course, if somebody comes across with something great that you never thought of, you have to know how to act in support of that and to have faith that what that player is doing is just as valuable to the music as what you had hoped for in the first place.

This quartet that I have now can deal with this, because we've been playing together for a pretty long time -- roughly three years -- and I've gotten to know the players and how they're going to play something well enough that I can leave them alone and be really pleased with what they come up with. Howard Greene, the drummer, is the only one who really tries to break the "no playbacks" rule, but I think he's finally housebroken.

Cosmik: As far as you know. You go to Burger King for a break and he's in the booth. Betcha anything.

Skip: He always tries. But since the engineer knows that I don't want any playbacks, there's no playbacks. It's amazing the loyalty you can incur by signing the paychecks.

Cosmik: Does this apply only to one genre of music, or have you been able to use it playing everything you do?

Skip: Everything, except the cartoon music and the film cues that are composed to coincide directly with the on-screen action. That stuff has to be checked take by take then and there because you have to totally work to a stopwatch there. Which is different than making a record, because the record just goes out into the world as a record, not as music in the service of images and dialog.

But, whether I'm playing jazz or bluegrass or whatever it might be, it's always rooted in improvising and I use most of the same players whatever the style, so my way of setting it up works pretty much the same from style to style. After that, it's up to who likes it or who doesn't. What surprised me is more the audience response. I meet people who love the jazz stuff but just don't like rockabilly, no matter who plays it, which doesn't make sense to me. Of course, in Europe, the critics and the audiences there seem to like the idea of someone taking an approach and working it in different styles. As an arranger, to me the only real difference from one to the other is what instruments we're using. As a player, I play the same way no matter what. I mean, the most harmonically advanced solo I've taken on record is the one on "Slippin' Around," on the Sammy Masters record. In the end, all this music is part of me, so it's probably best for me to just be myself and just follow my impulses, instead of putting on a cowboy hat one day and a jazz beret the next.

Cosmik: Do you find yourself tossing more things out this way? Having more things that are like "well, that was an interesting experiment but it just didn't gel," because it seems to me there's a risk there.

Skip: Well, half the Sammy Masters album, most of Lonely Town, and both Blue Dahlia discs would fall squarely in that category for me, but there are other people who like those records a lot. There are tunes all over the place that I'd like to go back to, now that we play them right, but those are the risks you take.

I don't mind the risk aspect too much, because the players are generally up for it, and I don't mind failing here and there. I don't have anything to prove or to live up to, so it's not like I'm endangering anyone by getting brave. I'm not Dave Alvin. I don't represent anything important to a core of true believers, so I can afford risk and not feel like I've let anyone down if I fail. Don't get me wrong -- I always try my best. I don't phone it in. But I make it a point to challenge myself so I'm not just doing my strengths. When you make records that way, it's impossible to think everything's going to be perfect. On the other hand, it keeps things interesting for me, and, if I can stay interested, it's easier for the listener to stay interested.

Cosmik: Mixing things up on the album keeps us interested, too. I'm crazy about I Just Keep Lovin' Her. On a project like this, what makes you think "Ya know, that Little Walter Jacobs tune would be perfect."

[Pictured: Dave Alvin]

Skip: It was Dave Alvin's idea to have that as a failsafe. I asked him to do Time After Time because I really wanted a Joe Williams kind of baritone singer, and he said, "Well, okay. But in case I suck, can we do something more like I usually do so I can at least walk out of there feeling like I didn't suck."

Well, he sure didn't suck. We got "Time After Time" on the second full take. The first full would have been good enough, but I knew he had a great one in him, and he nailed it. Then "Just Keep Lovin' Her" was the first or the second take. We did the whole album in two sessions, one four hours, the other was three, and "Just Keep Lovin' Her" was the last tune. There really wasn't time for our energy to flag.

Also, since the whole idea of the album was a tribute to my Philly roots, I wanted to do something that would point to Gene Ammons, even though he wasn't a Philly player. But Jug [his nickname] really influenced the tenor players in the organ bands around Philly, and he recorded jazz versions of Willie Dixon tunes, and my favorite of those was his version of "My Babe," which was the first Little Walter song I ever heard, and it killed me for days and I became a Little Walter junkie. So I thought that a Bill Doggett small group arrangement of "Just Keep Lovin' Her," which was the first tune Walter recorded, for Ora-Nelle, before he went to Chess, would be great to do with Dave. And Dave just killed.

Cosmik: He just gets better and better. He was great with The Blasters, but he's really reached guru status now. You and Dave work well together. Some people I've talked to say just having him in the studio, even just to hang out, is inspiring. What's his magic? Because if I hang out in the studio with people... Nothin'.

Skip: He's got this really wonderful charisma, which he's had since I first knew him back in '82. Plus he has the most dedicated work ethic of anyone I know.

Cosmik: Of course everybody has to ask you about this, but what's the story behind Funeral March From Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony and how it became this kind of a "c'mon, baby, let's dance" piece of magic jazz?

[Pictured: Uri Caine]

Skip: Actually, I'm not the first to do that with Mahler. Uri Caine did two discs of Mahler recast in different ways, and -- again back to the Philly of my youth -- I decided I wanted to give it up to Uri on this record, because he was such a strong influence on me when I was coming up in Philly.

When he did the Mahler 5 opening, I razzed him that it was so straight. He said something like, "What? Am I supposed to do it like a blues?" Just to kind of, you know, be a bastard, I decided to do it like a blues. Just to be a dick. And it worked.

From Uri, I really got into Mahler for a bit. And, as I read books about Mahler and listened to his music and heard what Leonard Bernstein had to say about him, I was intrigued, because he had kind of come up with a musical vocabulary that was founded almost entirely on musical memory. He was Jewish, so a lot of cantorial melodies found their way in. He grew up near a military installation, so there were a lot of marches. And I think in Mahler there's a lot of bravura hiding almost a kind of loneliness. When I started getting to know his music, I almost felt as if I was hearing a guy writing movie scores, but, since he didn't have pictures, he had to write the music very visually. A lot of Mahler reminds me of Nina Rota, who wrote the music for Fellini's movies. And you'll notice Rota's scores always have a march, and some minor key homesick music that sounds almost like gypsy music, which is similar to Jewish music. So when I started thinking of how to do the Mahler 5, I started thinking not only about Rota, but of the version of "8 1/2" Carla Bley did for the Rota tribute album Hal Willner produced.

Cosmik: You really get deep down into these things, don't you? I mean it's seriously compelling to you. When you really immerse yourself in something like that, learning about someone's world and hearing what they created, I know sometimes it becomes a short project you'll do, or a song will come from it, but do things always stay in the toolbox, at least within reach if you want it? Will you always be able to draw a little from Mahler?

Skip: Certainly. I think the real influences a musician has - not just the guys whose licks you cop, but the deep influences on how you think about music - are always in the picture, even if they're just lurking in the back somewhere. I'm still reaching back to Aereo-Plain and the Ramones. It's just there in me.

Cosmik: By the way, what does Uri think of what you've done with the Mahler piece?

Skip: I haven't played it for him. He liked the Mahler transcription I did on Couch. I played it for him and he cracked up. Said it sounded like Pierre Boulez trying to do lounge music. And being mentioned in the same breath as Boulez is a compliment to me.

Cosmik: Your guitar playing is - if you don't mind some slobbering fandom here - really cool, Skip. I keep playing and playing the part in Meydele when you step out of the rhythm and you've got the treble all the way off, but you still manage to get this jagged little sound that's almost like harmonics, and all I can think is "how do you get this sound?" It's this pretty song but just for that moment it sounds like you're just attacking the strings. Interesting juxtaposition.

Skip: How I got that sound? I've found that no matter how you set your tone, your right hand still defines your sound. I know the part you mean, and I'm hitting hard upstrokes -- which is a Dave Alvin trick -- on the little chord fragment at the end of the phrase, and getting the pinch harmonics with the side of the point of the pick, which I got from Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. Also, I use Dunlop Jazz III picks, which are medium heavy picks between the size of a mandolin pick and a regular Fender pick, and the points on them are pretty sharp. Strings are Gibson Vintage 010-046, which can really get a good pinch harmonic.

Cosmik: Something I've noticed listening to your records is that each time out you seem to tend more and more directly to the needs of the song. I mean as opposed to using the song as a jumping board for solos. A great example is "The Intensive Girl," where there's this wonderful interplay between you on guitar and Drasnin on clarinet, but you only do that for a few bars and then end the song. So many would just milk a duet like that. Have you noticed this over the years and done it intentionally?

Skip: It's something I've thought about for years. Bob Dorough told me a long time ago that the key to playing Hoagy Carmichael's music is to remember that, even though he was influenced by jazz, he wrote songs, not blowing vehicles. And that really made me think.

When I started to get into film scores -- as a listener, long before I ever wrote one -- I really got into Henry Mancini. And I felt like he was directing his soloists like Ronny Lang or Larry Bunker or whoever to play a certain way to help outline the feeling of the scene he was scoring. I always suspected that, and recently, Terry Adams sent me an album of Ted Nash leading a band doing the Peter Gunn music. The arrangements are the same, but, without Mancini there, the soloists play really differently. That confirmed Mancini's influence on his players, for me.

You've probably noticed that a fair number of my compositions are about specific people. From The Night Before is the Beatles ("From The Night Before" is based on the guitar solo from "The Night Before"), there's one for Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Joey Altruda, Dave Alvin (which hasn't been released yet), Frances Farmer, Carole Simpson, Teller, and a few others. Usually those tunes are trying to be little portraits, so how you draw those people -- musically -- defines how you're going to write the tune.

The actual Intensive Girl is a singer/songwriter from Philly, Lee Charleston, who made an interesting record called Intensive a few years back, which I liked very much. She's kind of a quintessential Philly person, and, when I was writing the music for Homegoing and really trying to paint the city the way I like to remember it, she absolutely had to be on the canvas somewhere. And the way the duet between guitar and clarinet works was really just me trying describe what it's like to interact with her.

Cosmik: With several of the songs, solos aren't even the key so much as the melody itself. That got lost in bop and hard bop and it's probably too much the focus in something like a Kenny G record. Is that a hard fence to walk?

Skip: If you're used to different kinds of tunes having different requirements, it's not that difficult. That hardest thing is explaining things to the musicians. That's not always easy to do when you're trying to describe a concept you've never put to words.

Cosmik: We know what went into the Mahler piece, and there are some covers, too, but are there other pieces on Homegoing that required research or out of the ordinary preparation?

Skip: Not really, because this one was really all about revisiting your roots as the person you are now.

Cosmik: What's your favorite track?

Skip: Believe it or not, Thinking Of You. I think it's Terry's most beautiful composition, and I really relished playing it, because I had so completely been looking forward to recording that one.

Cosmik: Listening to the band, what are some of your favorite performances or moments?

Skip: Bob's solo and obbligatos behind Dave on "Time After Time." The part where I lay out and Howard and Mike are playing by themselves on "Intensive Girl," and you can really hear Howard's sense of how to really play behind a guy and still make a statement, plus Bolger's solo is almost like Sun Ra meets Spike Jones, just brilliant and funny. That solo cracks me up, where he's quoting "Dixie."

Cosmik: Okay, switching gears now, we have the compilation that's just out, called Career Suicide, which is such a great title. It's on Dionysus, and Lee Joseph is credited as the Compilation Producer. My one and only time doing that job, part of it involved picking all the tunes and the running order. Something you do all the time. Did you really let someone else have that control over your comp?

Skip: Everyone suggested stuff -- what to put in, what to leave out, sequencing. My wife was extremely helpful. But I gave Lee final say, because he's really good at sequencing compilations of diverse material. His Tuscon garage band comps are sequencing coup d'etats. I know how to trust a professional.

Cosmik: What was your wife's role?

Skip: She's always my first sounding board about everything. In the case of Career Suicide, there might have been two or three examples of a certain kind of tune, and I generally relied on her judgement about which one was best to use. Like, with the Ray Campi tune, I was really tempted to also use the cover of Jimmy Martin's "Hit Parade Of Love," and she said just to use Until You're Mine. Or for the the Laid Bare backing track, I almost used the transcription of Mahler's "Now The Sun Will Rise As Brightly" from Die Kindertotenlieder that went with the Janis Joplin reading, and Skye said the James Dean one would likely be better because it had a better saxophone solo and didn't weigh down the pace of the record so early on. I have a tendency to pick the cover versions of artists I really like -- Jimmy Martin, Mahler, whatever. It almost doesn't matter if the performance is good. I just like those songs so much. She's one of the people whose judgement I rely on to maybe temper that. Also, my wife did the cover, does all the flyers, lives with all the stupidity that goes on when you're married to a musician and does it all with more grace than anyone I ever met. She let me go on the road with NRBQ -- it was her choice -- the week before the wedding. We got married in Hollywood on October 14 last year. I was onstage in Chicago the night before, playing with those guys. She's extremely supportive about any opportunity that presents itself to me, whether or not it looks like a money maker. Her role just seems to be to make my life better.

Cosmik: About half of Career Suicide is previously unreleased music. That's a lot of fun for us. We crave that, you know. You could easily have made this a double CD. Was there ever a temptation?

Skip: Just the opposite, actually. You want everything to have perfect sound, perfect execution, and all that. But you have to have more than three songs on your record, so you have to be a little more forgiving with yourself. Plus, a lot of the most fun stuff to rediscover was not always the most spotlessly played. I had forgotten totally about I Love You Samantha, and I'm a huge Bing Crosby fan, so to rediscover myself doing a Bing tune was a blast. And the live cuts with Lalo and Big Sandy were really a joy to hear again. They'd been sitting in a shoebox full of cassettes. Kind of nice to bring those moments out into daylight, even if the sound quality was missing something.

Cosmik: The sound quality isn't terrible. The spirit comes through, and it's a blast to listen to. It'd be sad to leave them in a shoebox. You know what I think is an exciting track? The rehearsal recording of Avalon. No polish, no plan, but some intense playing on both sides. Something I'm sure, at the time, you never thought would be on a CD.

Skip: Fred Kaz is just the most sublime duet partner in life. He was, by the way, one of the major formative forces at Second City, and he has that "heighten and explore" quality every great ensemble mind has. George Wendt showed me a videotape of him playing, and I said, "I've gotta meet this guy," and we hit it off, He and his wife Helen actually are ordained minsters, and performed my wedding ceremony, and it was the most beautiful experience I could have hoped for.

Cosmik: And by the way, the Bing thing is sublime. The simplicity of it and the warmth. How was that recorded? Anything special, or just roll tape?

Skip: I did a demo session at Cary Berger's home studio that was demos for what turned out to be Lonely Town. I played all the instruments on two of them, "My Last Affair," which wound up on the album, and another one called "The April Line," which didn't cut it. Plus I did "Samantha," Jobim's "Photograph" with new lyrics, which also ended up on the album, and a version of Caetano Veloso's "Braquniha" with English lyrics. Mostly we just rolled tape.

If I may, I'll tell you how I wound up doing "Samantha." When I was in high school, I dated a girl named Samantha during the summer of 1982, and she broke it off at the end of the summer, and I was bummed, big time. A few days after she ended things, I was watching the Bing movie High Society, and he did that song, and I just had a huge lump in my throat. It really hit me where I lived. So I just always had that song in my mind. Then, years later, I found it on a tape I made myself, and I just loved the lonesome, ambiguous quality of the tune. You can't tell if he's saying these things to her because he knows the relationship is coming to a close, or because he's the happiest man in life. Or if he's warning her.

Cosmik: How difficult is it to listen to a body of work like this, that goes so many directions from different periods over a seven year stretch, and be objective about it when it's your own?

Skip: I don't feel too weird about it. The stuff that finally made the cut all seems to hold up okay. I hear the mistakes and whatever, but you can't avoid that.

Cosmik: Players who aren't really arrangers usually say "sometimes the mistakes are the best moments." When you're a legit arranger, is it harder to feel that way?

Skip: If it's a good moment, then it's probably not a mistake. And I try to arrange the music in ways that make sure the music gets played a little differently each time so unexpected things can happen without anybody in the band getting too thrown. You might be better off asking a legit arranger.

Cosmik: Oh, I think a lot of people would argue that you're a hell of an arranger, in multi-genres. Is it odd to you that someone else might hear a Skip Heller rockabilly number and a Skip Heller jazz number and never make the connection, even if they've got a pretty good ear? You played 'em, so I'm sure you hear the threads clearly, but to someone else...

Skip: That was actually a compelling reason for putting out an anthology that touched on all the styles. My thinking was that, if people heard it all in one sitting, then they'd have a better shot at figuring how it all fits together as one guy's output.

Cosmik: Career Suicide is subtitled "THE Skip Heller Anthology, 1994-2001." Do you see this as being the only logical overview, or good enough that you don't see any need for another? Or can you see other angles?

Skip: For right now, it seems pretty definitive to me, because it represents what I've done and how it's found its way into different contexts. But I don't know what I'll think in a year.

Cosmik: Before I forget to ask, I saw a liner note thank you to George Wendt, good ol' Norm of Cheers fame. You thanked him for a guitar. What's the story there?

[Pictured: Skip with George Wendt]

Skip: George is a close friend of the family, and his son Danny is a guitar player. He needed some work done on one of his guitars, and I hooked him up with Ed from Freedom Guitars. Somehow, it came up that Danny had a Fender Duo Sonic he never touched anymore. Duo's are my favorite, and George remembered this, so he took the guitar in to Ed and had him set it up the way I like Ed to set up my Duos. Then he gave it to me. I was touched.

Cosmik: I don't blame you. They sound like nice guys. Well, looking back at these two CDs again, we've got an overview and something new. You've kind of got a luxury a lot of musicians don't have: nobody knows what to expect from you next so they just don't. Sort of like Joe Jackson used to be, but in different styles. I guess that means you don't have to worry about where Homegoing is taking you. Or does it?

Skip: If you know what you're looking for, you can see how every record I've made fits together. If you listen to the version of "Gee Baby Ain't I Good To You" on St. Chris, it would fit on Homegoing. That's just one example.

It's interesting to note that this question is never asked of classical conductors. Everyone takes it for granted that a classical conductor can mount a performance of Stravinsky at his most polymetrical then turn around and conduct Handel with the same skill. And the space between Stravinsky and Handel is a much bigger space than the difference between Little Walter and Joe Henderson.

But this question is always asked of me or Don Byron. Which I think says more about the perception of guys who don't work the classical circuit.

If you want a guy who protects and nurtures his career, talk to Dave Alvin. He really thinks "Okay, I just did a such-and-such record. Now I had better do THIS next," and he's always right. His audience, his profile, all that -- his stature has definitely grown. Some guys think "Work smart and you won't have to work hard," but Dave works smart and hard. You can't beat that.

I'm a different animal. Dave has definitely taken a career path that you could liken to Cannonball Adderley, who I think was the greatest jazz player and bandleader that ever lived. Cannonball worked with Miles, Dave went with X. Each of those groups was crucially important to its genre. They each owed a lot of who they were musically to their relationships with their brother. When they became bandleaders, they put bands together that were set up to play to the strength of the frontman, and were designed around a specific compositional style. And when they started to really achieve success -- Cannonball with "Mercy Mercy" and Dave with King Of California -- they kept the format together, and made sure there was nothing radical to trouble the evolution of the group or the writing style. If you ever wondered why Dave won't let me anywhere near a bandstand he's playing on, it's that. Dave loathes being anywhere near a wild card onstage.

Cosmik: And you're definitely a wild card in the music world.

Skip: If Dave is Cannonball, I'm the Sun Ra guy. I keep doing whatever the hell it is I'm gonna do, whether or not it's quote good for my career end-quote. If you've ever been looking for someone to feel bad for, Chris Strouth, whose been the A&R guy on the bulk of my records since 1996, is a good start. In 1997, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd have a slam-dunk on my hands if the follow-up to Lonely Town would have been a full-on lounge record. All I had to do would have been to make Martinis With Skip, and I probably would have sold a lot of copies of the right record at the right time. But I didn't just loathe the idea of me doing that record, I question the worth of a record where you write a bunch of music that sounds like other guys' music, sign your name to it, and then claim that your ability to cop their licks means you're in a tradition. If you're gonna do that, then you should just join Sha Na Na and be honest. Of all the lounge revival stuff I heard, the thing that knocked me on my ass the most was "Vertigogo" by Combustible Edison, because there was no way that would ever make it onto a Mancini album. That was so original. And a lot of people around me were advising me against doing anything original.

When I made St. Chris, I honestly thought it made linear sense. Lonely Town had been about California as a central place for an authentic American approach to bossa nova. The follow-up would have to be about something Californian, and I looked to Bakersfield and its tradition of country music, Western swing, and narrative lyrics, which is really Merle Haggard more than anyone else. It wasn't to make a Western swing record, but to deal with the influence of jazz as part of the context of country music, and to bring the atmosphere of jazz into play with a certain lyric-driven concept.

Well, the record didn't sell at all, and I still think it's one of my best. Chris got stuck with a record he loved but couldn't sell. When I started putting Couch together, I think Chris thought I was going to rectify that mistake, based on a couple of tunes he heard over the phone. Then, when he got to hear the whole record, he realized it was a distortion of what he'd hoped for. It's almost like he was hoping for the white album and got Uncle Meat.

Kids, this is not the way to run a successful career.

In the end, I don't have the kind of career that you worry about, because I make every album like it's my first, and I make every album like it will be my last.


Visit Skip Heller's web site at www.skipheller.com.

(C) 2002 - DJ Johnson