David Axelrod, who passed away over the weekend at age 83, was for a while something of an unsung hero of production and arrangement. During his most active years, from 1963 to 1970, he was an A&R man and producer for Capitol Records, with his two biggest commercial successes coming in the form of Lou Rawls' velvet-smooth R&B and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley's funk-crossover soul-jazz. Through those two artists, you get a strong sense of what Axelrod was capable of bringing to the table: a composer and arranger as comfortable with grand symphonic gestures as he was with direct-hit funk. He could make a record sound like it belonged in a small country church or a massive cathedral, whether the spirituality was explicitly divine or subsumed in something more personal. Aside from Isaac Hayes, virtually nobody's compositions could hit that sweet spot between “beautiful music” opulence, uncannily strange pop-psychedelia, and deeper-than-deep soul quite like Axelrod.
Despite his hitmaker status for Rawls and Adderley, it was Axelrod's more idiosyncratic work that caught a good amount of latter-day notice. 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. 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.
It was that air of majestic intensity around Axelrod’s music that inevitably made him an all-timer in the hip-hop world. 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. He was favored by East Coast boom-bap practitioners and West Coast G-funk creators of both the underground and multi-platinum variety. 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.
David McCallum, “The Edge” (1967)
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. 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. 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. 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'sMusic: A Bit More of Mebecause he knew the singer’s face alone would guarantee enough record sales to excuse a little experimentation.
The Electric Prunes, “General Confessional” (1968)
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. 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. 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. 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. 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”).
David Axelrod, “The Human Abstract” (1969)
The same year that Release of an Oath gave Axelrod a breakthrough album in all but name, his own debut, Song of Innocence, gave a more prominent credit to what he'd been doing as a composer, arranger, and producer over the previous year and change. Every single one of the seven tracks on the William Blake-inspired LP and the vast majority of its companion followup, Songs of Experience, has been sampled at least once by an all-time great producer—including Pete Rock, DJ Premier, J Dilla, Lord Finesse, Diamond D, Buckwild, Swizz Beats, DJ Muggs, The Alchemist, and Madlib. None quite compared with what DJ Shadow did when he got ahold of “The Human Abstract” in 1996, intricately reshaping the track while still retaining the original mood. Shadow’s “Midnight in a Perfect World” isolated the piano from the beginning of “The Human Abstract,” laced it with fusion-jazz samples resembling those of mid-’70s Axelrod, and turned it into the lonely soul at the heart of Endtroducing….. The divinity that stood out in Axelrod's arrangements was captured with a quiet simplicity, pitched up just enough to shine a light on another approach to its mournful emotion.
The Cannonball Adderley Quintet, “Walk Tall” (1969)
Before 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. Two classic debut albums of Afrocentric NYC hip-hop that were conceived and recorded as the ’80s flipped to the ’90s—A Tribe Called Quest's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm and Brand Nubian's All for One—wound up finding two unique angles on the Axelrod-produced Adderley cut that opened his Quintet's 1969 album Country Preacher—a cut introduced by a young Reverend Jesse Jackson, no less. Given both Axelrod's repeated returns to religious themes in his music and his own upbringing in a largely black part of south central Los Angeles in the ’30s and ’40s, it's interesting to hear these brushes with spiritual activism linked up with latter-day expressions. Tribe overlaid the titular clip of Jackson's “Walk Tall” speech alongside Stevie Wonder/Donald Byrd riffs and Q-Tip at his most joyously abstract on “Footprints.” Brand Nubian leaned on that uplifting Joe Zawinul-led keyboard riff in “Concerto in X Minor” while explicitly calling out the institutional brutality—police and otherwise—that generations before and after would continue to fight.
Lou Rawls, “You've Made Me So Very Happy” (1970)
Prince Paul-era De La Soul did more than just about any other golden-age hip-hop act to incorporate music-historian enthusiasm into their personalities, which is why there are levels upon levels in their usage of Lou Rawls' Axelrod-produced version of “You've Made Me So Very Happy” for Buhloone Mindstate cut “I Am I Be” and its companion piece, “I Be Blowin'.” Originally a yearning Tamla classic by Brenda Holloway in ’67—which then became a hugely successful slab of jazz-rock pomp for Blood, Sweat & Tears in ’69—Rawls and Axelrod aimed to split the difference between the original and the hit, offering a more nuanced and deeply grooved take on a pop-friendly army-of-horns arrangement than BS&T could pull off. Since Prince Paul is something of a wiseass even when he's creating one of his most beautiful beats, he took that characteristic Axelrod chord progression at the beginning, built a loop around it, and presumably decided that he'd have to pull out all the stops to top that horn section. So he called in Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, and Pee Wee Ellis, because hearing live James Brown Revue horns over an Axelrod beat is a total blank-check dream for any hip-hop producer worth his crates.
David Axelrod, “Terri's Tune” (1977)
When Axelrod jumped ship from Capitol in the early ’70s, his sound took a gradual turn away from the baroque. He hewed closer to the soul-jazz and funk he'd shown in his productions for Adderley—still tautly composed and arranged, but teeming with further possibilities of improvisation. As much as hip-hop producers have favored his Cannonball Adderley collaborations, Axelrod's tendency to get a little more commercial with his increasingly fusion-friendly albums (1974's Heavy Axe, 1975's Seriously Deep, and 1977's Strange Ladies) shouldn't have been such a deal-breaker. Still, the Strange Ladies cut “Terri's Tune” is the closest that post-Capitol Axelrod came to creating a go-to sample source, and its build from icy vibraphone-and-bass minimalism to a wobbly-ankled wah-wah guitar/piano melody to dissonant conspiracy-thriller funk has all the potential in the world. That “Terri’s Tune’s” biggest moment in the spotlight was a 99-second deep cut on a wall-to-wall legendary Ghostface album feels kind of unfair, even if its previous incarnation as Inspectah Deck's “Elevation” at least benefited from a redo with Tony Starks at his peak. Even Showbiz and A.G.'s “Check It Out” just used “Terri’s Tune” for some isolated vibe notes. Dig further and you'll find some gems that make the most of it, though, like Real Live’s “Trilogy of Error” or Freestyle Fellowship member Myka 9's “American Nightmare.”
David Axelrod, “The Dr. & the Diamond” (2001)
Axelrod's comeback after a long hiatus was punctuated by the sort of album that perfectly fit the reputation of a man whose legacy was not just preserved but amplified by the rise of sample culture. His 2001 self-titled album, issued by Mo' Wax—the same label that put out Axelrod-sampling albums like DJ Shadow's Endtroducing….. and UNKLE's Psyence Fiction—is where Axelrod himself finally gets a shot at recontextualizing his old music. In this case, he unearthed the acetate of an unfinished Electric Prunes project based around Goethe's Faust and recorded additional instrumentation over it, reworking a long-lost concept into a statement about revisiting his legacy. It's personal in a lot of ways—the most striking being an album-closing final collaboration with Lou Rawls, “Loved Boy,” about his son who died at 17—but it's also a nod to others, including this track named for Dr. Dre and Diamond D, just two of the producers who helped change Axelrod’s footprints from sand to concrete.