Interviewed by Shannon West

On his latest release, Grand Central, Jeff Golub celebrates the energy of New York City and the club scene there where musicians just hang out and jam.  After venturing into a more produced approach on Temptation he has come out with a scorching set that sounds like it was recorded live, after hours, by a bunch of friends jamming somewhere in NYC, which is the essence of this project.  The excitement in his voice when he talks about the sessions and the CD is tangible.  They had a lot of fun recording it and fans will have a lot of fun listening to it.

SV: This is a showcase CD, for you as a guitarist and for the people who played on it.  There are a lot of stunning songs and solos here, it's like hearing a great group of musicians jamming, totally in the moment, but now we can listen to it any time.
JG: I am very proud of the whole performance on this record.  I set out to do a very live record and capture what the band and I do when we set up and play and I think we really got it.  I think it was an inspired performance. 

SV: It's a real departure from the direction you took with Temptation.
JG: I make a conscious effort to change each record up a little bit.  There are certain consistencies in where I take my guitar playing and what I like that always end up on a CD, like certain blues based things.  Given that, I like to make every CD a little bit different so there is some reason to pick it up.  I don't want to keep doing the same thing over and over.  I want to change at least a little bit of the influences.  I worked with Paul Brown on Temptation; he's an excellent musician, producer, guitar player.  I only have good things to say about Paul, which is why I wanted to work with him on that last project.  I let him take a lot of the control of the arrangements, I guess.  I would see where he was going with it.  If I liked it, we would just keep going and I liked pretty much everything he was doing, so his input was major.  I loved it, I thought it came out great but it was a more subdued approach than what I usually take.  I did work on one track on the new one with him, "Something," which we just kind of did on the fly.  That was a case of Paul knowing me.  I told him how I was approaching the rest of the record and he's talented enough and opens enough to go with that idea and not try to do something that didn't fit with the rest of the record.  We went in and cut that very live.  We didn't have any real arrangement ideas when we went into the studio.  We just let the band come up with it.  That's what I did with a lot of these songs.

SV: The live feel really comes across here.  You've worked that way a lot over the last few CDs, haven't you? 
JG: I like doing that when it's possible.  I have a band that I feel good about and I like to give them an opportunity to contribute to the arrangements rather than dictate the parts to play.  I write the songs, come up with a basic arrangement, and give them a framework but not even always a chord chart.  If we are doing a cover tune where everyone knows the song then we just start playing.  I try to let them be a part of where it's going.  I'll tell them I have an idea that's going to sound like this then let them take it from there.  Sometimes the end result is completely different from what I had in mind but I like it.

SV: That has to be a great experience for the musicians that are playing the session too.
JG: They typically respond to that and I try to work with people who will respond to that because it's the other way so often.  It's more fun to go in and play this way.  I know from being on the other side when I have been a session player on other people's records.  If somebody just comes in and dictates to you what they would play if they could play your instrument it's no fun.  There's nothing inspiring about that.  When you are left to your own devices, and to come up with what you feel, it's fun, and I think it comes out feeling that way.

SV: You commented on your website that you like to keep a really loose vibe in the studio where other musicians can just stop in and play.
JG: I do.  There are people who are more formal and don't want anybody in the studio who isn't working on the project and make it a closed-door thing.  I don't go by that at all (laughs).  When I'm recording, it's more like "stop in, have a drink, play if you want to."  I'm in there with my best friends.  The guys I work with are all my best friends and I like it when my other good friends stop by and we all have a party.  A lot of times, some good music comes out of it.  People stop by and end up playing when they started out just dropping in to say hi.

SV: You've done that on several albums but it really comes together on this one.  Listening to it is like being the fly on the wall in a room where some really awesome musicians are just workin' it out.
JG: That' what I was hoping to accomplish.  These are guys that I play with a lot.  They're guys that really love music and do it for the sake of the music, not just because it's their career.  Money was never discussed with anybody.  I love that idea.  Everybody got paid, of course, but there was never anything like saying "Tomorrow is going to be this session at this time till this time and you'll get paid this much money for this amount of hours of work.”  Since I was producing most of it, I was the one who was contacting people.  It was more like "Hey, wanna drop by and play?"  And that's what we did.

SV: You don't really stay within any boundaries here.  There's some blues, some rock, a real jazz improv thing.  It sure doesn't sound like there was any concept coming in that because this was going to be categorized as a "smooth jazz" album it was going to have to have a certain sound.  It's really cohesive but it goes a lot of places.
JG: I didn't want to hem in the people who were working with me.  These are things that I like.  I listen to so many different kinds of music and appreciate so many kinds of music.  I don't really differentiate between different styles of music.  It's either from the heart or it's not from the heart.  That's all I really hear.  To me it's all soul music; it's all the same thing.  When I hear AC/DC, it sounds the same as Wilson Pickett, which sounds the same as Miles Davis, because it's all just music from the heart and I love it all.

SV: That's how I am and I think more and more people are getting that way as they get to hear more music and more types of music from websites and other people turning them on to different music through social networking sites, forums and such. 
JG:  My moods change and the style of music that I want to listen to changes with that but it's all music.  I didn't go in with these guys and say these are the sounds that work in smooth jazz so we are going to do that.  I wanted us to just play and see what happens.  Because of that, we actually cut a lot more material than what made it onto the album.  We would just cut tracks whenever and wherever the spirit moved us.  In the end I had to whittle down to find which songs fit well together and would make the project sound cohesive but I didn't start with a preconceived idea that it had to sound a certain way. 

SV: Were a lot of these songs created in process while you were in the studio?
JG: Yes.  I think the one that is the most dramatic example of that is "If You Want Me To Stay."
We didn't plan on cutting that.  We were just in a session and I had a number of songs that I had written.  It was one of the rare occasions where everything went right.  Everything actually went better than expected and we finished early.  Everybody felt good and wanted to play.  I asked if they were up for staying and doing another song.  Somebody said, "Do they deliver Irish whiskey in New York?"  That's the nice thing about recording in New York.  You can call up and have anything delivered.  The whiskey was delivered, the party kind of began and the bass player came up with this bass line that didn't really have anything to do with Sly Stone's version and we went from there.  We were in a semi-circle, and I came up with the bridge and said, "Just watch me, and I'll cue you when we make the changes."  And I'd point to someone to take a solo.  It sounds like that.  We worked up a few parts before we played it through but what's there is the first full time we played through it. 

SV: I really lit up when I saw that you wrote "Stuffin' It" as a tribute to Stuff, the band of star session players that did some albums in the late 70s. 
JG: All you have to say is "Stuff groove" and everybody in New York, the musicians that were playing on that track included, knows exactly what that is.  It was Steve Gadd, Cornell Dupree, Eric Gale, Richard Tee, Chris Parker, and Gordon Edwards.  They played at a place on the upper west side every week.  It would always be packed.  Everybody would go in and get a lesson in working together.  They had such a great sound as a unit.  These guys were spending all week in the studios doing records then they would do these gigs and their ensemble work was so great.  They had this thing in particular that they did that was based on an almost country gospel kind of sound.  That's what we did on that song.  The piano playing was very gospel oriented with a lot of great chord voicing.  Chris Palmero, who played piano on that song, knows that style very well.

SV: "The Way I Feel Tonight," the song that was right before it had a real gospel groove to it too.
JG: It does.  I wrote that one really fast which is good because it was so unlabored.  It's also aptly titled.  I was just sitting by myself playing my acoustic guitar one night and I played that song, it just summed up what was in my heart that evening so I wrote it down and that was the song.

SV: You named the CD Grand Central because you wanted to capture a New York Vibe.
JG: I did a lot of the recording in New York and I wanted a title that reflected the city and Grand Central did that, you can kind of visualize New York when you hear the term "Grand Central."

SV: You're in LA right now aren't you?
JG: I am, but I live in New York

SV: Compare?
JG: They're so different. A lot of New Yorkers really dislike LA.  I like them both.  I like just about everywhere I go.  I love New York though (laughs).  I like what other places have to offer.  One thing about LA is cars.  I've gotten accustomed to everything being right there, you go out your door and it's all walking distance or you can catch a cab or the subway,

SV: A lot of the clubs where musicians hang out and play are close by too aren't they?
JG: Yeah, and because of that, there ends up being a lot of impromptu jamming in the clubs and stuff.  People are out.  In the rest of the country, people have bigger homes I think and they stay home more.  People have smaller places in New York.  You don't live in Manhattan to have a sprawling home, so the city becomes your living room.  You're out doing things and seeing other people, being involved with other musicians and making contact.  You have to like that to live there but it's a much more social world.  There's a lot of impromptu jamming going on there which I love and which is what I was trying to capture on this CD.

SV: Didn't "Slinky" start out with one little riff and the group just took off with it?
JG: That's how it happened.  When I did that song, I was thinking of the Miles Davis stuff around the time "The Man with a Horn," the era where he would just have a riff that they would keep coming back to, but other than that, the band would come up with the rest of the song.  It was up to interpretation more than composition.  Having Kirk Whalum in there, you just turn the mic on and say, "Go!" and he's going to play something brilliant.  Everybody did play something brilliant.

SV: There's a lot of brilliant stuff in these songs.  It's one of those cases where you hear new things every time you listen to it.  If you could sum it up, say, if you were trying to turn somebody on to this particular CD, what would you say? 
JG: It's a very diverse, it's very moody, and it's live.  There is a thread of continuity that makes it cohesive.

SV: And, not to put words in your mouth, (laughs), but while it has continuity, it doesn't stay safe.  There's a lot of excitement here.
JG: That's what we were going for; to play the way we love to play, not to fit a preconceived notion of what a smooth jazz album should sound like.  One of my thoughts when we put this together was that we don't need to make music by research, we need to make music by what's in our heart and what we love.

SV: That comes across in every note.  Thank you for the conversation and most of all, thank you for the music!