Hello good cats,

I'm gearing up to produce a full-length, studio mastered, manufactured CD with my little band over the next few months.

I'm the executive producer (that is the money person), plan to co-produce with somebody at a mastering house, and I play in the band, but this will be a first real CD for all of us. (We all do have some studio recording experience, however.)

All of us write music. One of our bandmates is a two-time winner of the Julius Hemphill composition award. I love his stuff and so want to use as much of it as possible, along with at least one original from each bandmate.

My biggest concern at the moment is how to choose tunes that will hold together as an album, so the CD as a whole doesn't sound haphazard. Any advice on this? Do I even need to worry about this? How do jazzers go about making these decisions?

Also, a classical teacher of mine once advised that pieces should be ordered by key to follow the circle of fouths/fifths as closely as possible, to ease the tonal transition from piece to piece. One bandmate thinks this unnecessary in jazz, however.

Any opinions? We're talking contemporary jazz here, not trad jazz, but we'll have some sweet tunes on there too.

Thank you very much in advance!

There are many ways to choose what you put on a new recording, from political slant to what the songs "say" (especially if they are instrumental). Does the group already have a repertoire that it plays at gigs? Is there a list of possibilities from what the group rehearses?

Since you have a lauded composer in the group, you could rely on his material to be the foundation, and then expand by writing material that reflects that approach, thereby holding the material together.

One word of warning from my experience. The worst reviews I got on any record were the one in which I asked each member to write a composition. I thought that the record held together well, but several reviewers wrote that it sounded disjointed and thrown together.

Tonal transitions between songs are not necessary to worry about. One thing you will do when the record is recorded is study it and listen to it over and over...once you get an overall feel, sequence the record for a natural flow, not one based on artificial or theoretical or academic factors.

Most importantly, don't force the music, let the music tell you what needs to be done.

And my good cat...have a lot of fun!

Thanks very much for your great response!

Would you please tell me the name of your CD that has a composition from all of your bandmates, and also name another one (or more) of yours that you're fond of as a complete album(s)? I'd like to get these and really listen to them.

My real job is as a journalist, and I suspect the challenge is not unlike writing about unrelated things within the same article or book. Sometimes you'd like to take such things out, but you can't always do that. So you come up with transitions -- segues -- that get the reader over the bumps, or so you hope.

I think of great albums, like "Kind of Blue," "Sgt. Pepper," that work so incredibly well on the album level despite dramatic differences in individual cuts. I don't feel I understand why they work just yet.

Thanks again!

I'd say just record the pieces you like most, but if you have the liberty to record more do it. Worry about the sequencing later, but keep an ear out for variety so in post production you'll have options, and be able to make it flow. It sounds like you know what you're doing though.

I think song order and choice are extremely important. As it is when you write a set list, the tunes should flow - not necessarily (for me) in the circle of fifths, but with an ear to the movement of the harmony - that is the keys, from song to song. I also like to switch up tempos and styles - my next recording will have three blues, a tango, a calypso, a straight-up swing, a bossa, a bebop line, two waltzes (one minor and one major) and a ballad. I think you also have to really love playing all the tunes, and have a sense of connection with each of them. Best of luck!

Record more than you need. If you think you will need 8 tunes for the CD, record 12. The music will select itself. I had several tunes that I recorded pretty much because we had some time left and I thought I could put the tunes on a CD for subs. Two of those tunes made the real CD. One was because it was a great performance, and the other just happened to fit in a certain spot on the disc. Don't worry about keys or reviewers. Put together music that feels honest and organic TO YOU, and put the sequence together with that same idea. People can sense honesty.

I suppose my "write all the songs down and pick them at random from a jar" method will be completely ignored.

Just for that, I'm hitting "shuffle" on all your CDs!

I'm surprised no one has offered this piece of advice, but I have never done an album without doing demos of every song at home first. They don't have to be fancy, but get at least the melody and an approximation of the groove on tape or hard disk and then burn a CD and drive around, letting the song choice and the sequence wash over you. If you're anything like me, certain songs will leap out and say "Put me first" and "Let me close the album." And other songs will leave you saying "I don't need this on the album at all."

Sequencing can be one of the more complex aspects of putting together an album, at least for me. Out of the 8 CDs I've produced (my own and other artists'), I think I've nailed it twice. All the other ones I wish i could re-sequence. My usual problem is that I pick a favorite tune to go first without regard to what will be most likely to suck the listener into my world and keep him/her there. The problem is that my favorite tunes are usually the ones that I think will challenge the listener right away--kind of like getting in his face and saying "I dare you to keep listening!" I'm really trying to get better at this, and I'm convinced that the answer is doing several rough mix CDs and living with them for a week or so.

I should add (even though I'm probably just talking to myself!) that in every case, I think I knew what the correct order should be, but subverted myself at the last minute because I enjoy the concept of challenging the listener. The reality turns out to be more like 6 months later, when I'm handing over a CD, I say "the first song probably shouldn't have been the first song..."

I too am putting together a cd for the first time and i'm going to approach it as if it were a set list.I know on my gigs i like to ease the audience into what i'm doing and then get more intense as the night goes on.You also need tension and release,mix the ballads with the uptempo tunes.

An album of original music tells a story, intentionally or not. On WELCOME TO THE PARTY, we wanted to create an ebb and flow type thing that worked you up, chilled you out, lather, rinse, repeat, just like a series of good buzzes at a really good party. So we payed a lot of attention to how one song ended and another began, which included focusing on the decay at the end of each piece. An ending can/should set up the beginning of the next song, and it's surprising how much rhythm, how much pacing, you can set up just from the length (or abrubtness) of a song's final decay.

We debated several sequences, and the way we finally decided was simply by singing the very first few notes of one piece, blah-blahing a few seconds, then singing the very ending, waiting a few seconds, and then repeating the process for the next one. If that ultra-compressed runthrough felt good and FLOWED good, we kept it. If it didn't, we looked for other options. It took us a full night of experimenting to decide on a final order, but I think it works.

LIVE AT THE MEAT HOUSE, otoh, was fully meant to be a pretty much nonstop, agressive, in-your-face, slap of joyously frisky spew. Still, sequencing was important, as was the timings and the rhythms of the crossfades and applause fades. When your energy level is up high all the time, pacing is perhaps even MORE important, because there's less "space" to work with and every little rise or drop in energy becomes exponentially more noticable. Kinda like body movement in a packed elevator, only more pleasurable, hopefully. Someting to think about, maybe.

Keys? If you can do something nifty with them without jeopordizing the integrety of the overall flow of the album, cool. If not, don't sacrfice the whole for one cute trick.