Composer Jay Chattaway is best known for the prodigious amount of music he contributed to the venerated Star Trek franchise. He scored 42 episodes of The Next Generation series (1990-94), 59 episodes of the Deep Space Nine series (1993-99), 54 episodes of Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) and 28 episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-05).
In exploring “strange new worlds” and boldly going where no man has gone before, Chattaway has ensured himself a legacy and a fan base in worlds far beyond the one I want to delve into here.
The composer and arranger also scored many popular, low-budget cult films in the eighties and nineties, from the weirdly classic Maniac (1980 – his first feature), The Big Score (1983) and the Maniac Cop films (1988, 1990) to Red Scorpion (1988) and a handful of Chuck Norris movies.
Chattaway’s sole big-budget film, Silver Bullet (1985), may have pigeon-holed him as a horror composer at a time when the genre wasn’t attracting bigger budgets. But, oddly, that Dino De Laurentiis production never led to other high-profile gigs in other film genres either.
What is revealing is that Chattaway, whose tastes did not include a love of horror, offered those genre films something much deeper, more emotional and, ultimately, more profound than the average B-movie score. Here, he composed very much against type – or, cliche. He also notably resisted doing copycat scores – even when requested – that mirrored such popular horror score-makers of the day as Goblin, John Carpenter or Pino Donaggio.
But what is largely forgotten today is that Jay Chattaway entered the music business via jazz, or, more specifically, the trumpeter Maynard Ferguson (1928-2006) in the early seventies.
Jay Chattaway was born on July 8, 1946, in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, an old steel town 17 miles southeast of Pittsburgh – and about an hour away from where I’m writing this now. He started taking piano lessons at age seven, but realized early on that he had an interest in arranging – and later composing – music. The first piece he arranged was a band version of “The Twist” – in the eighth grade.
He went to West Virginia University on a musical scholarship. But with the war in Vietnam at full tilt, Chattaway eventually enlisted in the U.S. Navy Band, just days before he would have been drafted anyway. While there, he met trumpeter Stan Mark (1945-2022), who eventually joined trumpeter Maynard Ferguson’s band in 1973.
Mark recommended Chattaway to Ferguson and the following year, Chattaway contributed three arrangements to the trumpeter’s breakout Chameleon album, including the album’s title track.
Chattaway met Bob James in 1975, when the keyboardist – and then CTI recording artist – was producing Ferguson’s follow-up album, Primal Scream (1975). Thereafter, James and Chattaway forged an important relationship and worked with a unique simpatico on many projects over the next several years.
Columbia hired Chattaway shortly thereafter and months after that, Bob James appointed Chattaway as artists and repertoire director (A&R, or producer) for his newly-formed Columbia-affiliate, Tappan Zee Records. Chattaway stayed with James and Columbia until about late 1980, when he was clearly looking to get out of jazz and into the movie biz.
All of this is covered in the new book Journey to the Inner Light: The Life and Musical Voyage of Jay Chattaway, STAR TREK, Jazz and Film Composer (2024). While the book’s awkwardly-worded subtitle belies the otherwise lovely writing within, there is nothing particularly spiritual or metaphysical about the book’s title.
“The Inner Light” happens to be the title of a 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode (named for the George Harrison song), a fan favorite and star Patrick Stewart’s own personal favorite. Chattaway’s score to the episode is a career highlight and also much beloved: he later turned the score and its memorable theme in to an orchestral suite.
Journey is ostensibly a biography, but it also serves as something of a memoir, having been written by Chattaway’s spouse, Terri Potts-Chattaway. Ms. Potts was a production assistant on The Next Generation – where she first met Mr. Chattaway – before going on to produce many episodes of Deep Space Nine, as well as such shows as Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared.
Potts-Chattaway has also written extensively on boating, a passion she shares with her husband and a subject that occupies some of her interest and attention in Journey. Throughout, her writing style is elegant in its friendliness and down-to-earth qualities. She warmly invites readers into her inner circle, talking about music and boating with the ease of a sparkling conversation over drinks with friends.
But while she details the music from several stand-out Star Trek episodes (all of which can be heard here), she gives rather short shrift to Chattaway’s jazz years – roughly between 1974 and 1981. This period, which, admittedly predates her 2008 marriage to Chattaway, is given over mostly to Chattaway’s work with Maynard Ferguson. Chattaway’s association with Tappan Zee records is noted, but none of the music he worked on there is even discussed.
Perhaps, though, this was intentional. It could be easily surmised that Chattaway himself does not regard this period as satisfying or as memorable as his other work.1 After all, these years found jazz in a state of transition, moving between the electric fusion of the late sixties and early seventies to the smooth jazz of the early eighties and the rise of the rebellious back-to-the-basics of the Young Lions, led by the likes of Wynton Marsalis.
This was the state of jazz when this writer first heard this music and Jay Chattaway’s name was on a lot of the records I had and loved at the time. Years later, when I compiled a discography of Tappan Zee Records, I wondered why the label never gave Jay Chattaway an album of his own.
Maybe Chattaway’s interest in jazz was waning over his dream of becoming a film composer. Perhaps, too, Tappan Zee wasn’t as happy an experience for Chattaway as it may have appeared to be for the too-few record listeners, like me, that glommed on to these records.
But Jay Chattaway’s music during this period remains notable and worth hearing, or knowing about. What follows here is something lacking in Journey and more like a Jay Chattaway fan’s greatest hits of his jazz years.
Jay Chattaway came to the attention of Maynard Ferguson through Stan Mark, one of the players in the bandleader’s trumpet section. In the late sixties, when Chattaway was in the Navy, providing arrangements for the U.S. Navy Band, Mark was in The Commodores (not the Lionel Richie group), a band formed from the Navy Concert Band.
According to Chattaway in Journey, “Stan and I didn’t get off on the right foot.” The veteran trumpet player was apparently hard to please and Chattaway had to prove himself. By the time Mark left the Navy in 1971, though, he was “a huge Jay Chattaway fan.”2 The two stayed in touch and Mark, then with Ferguson’s band, recommended Chattaway to the bandleader.
Chattaway eventually adapted an earlier composition of his, “Lowerglyphics,” for Ferguson as “Superbone Meets the Bad Man,” named for the instrument Ferguson plays here and Ferguson player Bruce “The Bad Man” Johnstone’s baritone saxophone. The very traditional big-band number pales, though, in comparison to Chattaway’s more contemporary arrangements of Stevie Wonder’s “Livin’ for the City” and, most notably, Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.”
“Chameleon” – featuring a metal-edged guitar overdub by an uncredited Joe Beck, who was doing this sort of thing at the time on his CTI albums (and later disavowed his role here as not being “jazz”) – became something of a jazz hit and was highly regarded at the time by a teenaged me and my fellow school bandmates, particularly the well-schooled trumpet players.
Chattaway was invited by Ferguson to contribute to the trumpet player’s next album, Primal Scream (1976). By this time, Bob James was heading up production at Columbia Records. This was the start of a mutually beneficial relationship between the two. Both would work together often over the next several years and, in 1977, James would offer Chattaway that very same A&R job at his Tappan Zee label.
“Primal Scream” was modelled on the then-hot grooves of T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia) and originally called “MFJC” for its composers, Maynard Ferguson and Jay Chattaway, But Columbia, likely sensing the allusion to a profane expletive, changed the title to “Primal Scream,” which sends the same sort of message but in a G-rated way.
The song is a feature for Mark Colby, who takes an electric turn on tenor sax, and includes the typical Bob James rhythm section of the time with James on keyboards, Eric Gale on guitar, the wildly underappreciated Gary King on electric bass and the immortal Steve Gadd on drums.
Primal Scream led to Columbia offering Jay Chattaway a gig as producer, where his first job was working on the follow-up Maynard Ferguson album, Conquistador. Shortly after finishing the record, a colleague at Columbia suggested Chattaway see a breakout film about a boxer called Rocky (1976).
Chattaway wrote an arrangement of Bill Conti’s main theme, “Gonna Fly Now.” Ferguson recorded it and the record-company brass were blown away by it. The album’s original lead track, another Ferguson-Chattaway composition called “Shanti Mantra,” was pulled and replaced – although the Indian-inflected “Shanti Mantra” would later appear as a “bonus track” on a 2018 British CD called Memories of Maynard: The Best of the Columbia Years.
“Gonna Fly Now” became a Top 30 pop hit and in 1977, Conquistador turned out to be Maynard Ferguson’s best-ever selling album (the record went Gold). It was the same year that I saw Ferguson play live – at my own middle school! Ferguson’s recording of the Rocky theme also gave composer Bill Conti his biggest break – and greatest royalties – and the composer returned the favor by featuring the trumpet player on his 1978 soundtrack to Uncle Joe Shannon.
The remainder of Conquistador was even better: an above-average collection of lively and inventive fusion material, with Ferguson’s band getting added help from such studio stars as Bob James, Eric Gale, Gary King, Will Lee, Harvey Mason and Ralph MacDonald.
Chattaway co-wrote three of the album’s best songs with Ferguson: “Mister Mellow,” with guest soloist George Benson on guitar, the Spanish-tinged “Conquistador,” featuring Ferguson, his trumpet section and Mark Colby, and “The Fly” – which riffs off both “Flight of the Bumblebee” and “Pick Up the Pieces” – with Mike Migliore on soprano sax.
Coincidentally, Conquistador features a cover of Alexander Courage’s “Theme from Star Trek,” a series that Jay Chattaway would become affiliated with 13 years later.3
New Vintage (1977) was the last of four Maynard Ferguson albums Jay Chattaway worked on. Like the previous Conquistador, Chattaway also produced. Leading off with a disco-jazz cover of John Williams’s “Star Wars” (featuring an energetic solo by Steve Khan), “Star Wars” was meant to replicate the success of “Gonna Fly Now,” the song that Ferguson had a hit with earlier in the year.
But the success of “Star Wars” went to Meco and his No. 1 hit cover of the film’s main theme that year.
(Ferguson’s single version of “Star Wars” – apparently the 17th cover of the song4 – was rush released in early August 1977, just weeks after it was recorded, and one month after Meco’s version had been issued.)
Released in November 1977, just four months after “Gonna Fly Now” peaked at number 28 on Billboard‘s Hot 100, New Vintage likely had more momentum than most jazz-fusion records of the period. But the thrill was gone, or the formula had worn thin. Jazz fans probably warmed most to the fiery take here on the Sonny Rollins standard “Airegin.”
Fusion fans, though, likely flocked to the Jay Chattaway compositions, from the lovely “Oasis” (co-written with Ferguson) to the unusually soundtrack-like “El Vuelo (The Flight).” Both benefit by meaty solos from the tenor saxophonist Mark Colby, in what became his last outing with Ferguson. The uncredited bass player, who kicks off “Oasis,” is likely Gary King.
In early 1977, Columbia commissioned Jay Chattaway to compose a piece for a performance by a group of CBS All Stars that included Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard and Tony Williams – for a sales conference, of all things! That performance of “Galaxy” was slated for release later that year, but, for whatever reason, that never happened.
The hype surrounding that January performance got the CBS All Stars – some of the finest names in jazz, but not the three musicians from the previous affair – an invitation to the final night of that year’s Montreux Jazz Festival. Chattaway was put in charge of coordinating the musicians and the program. He also contributed the exciting 21-minute “Andromeda,” a sequel to his earlier all-star blowout and the evening’s all-star finale.
(Coincidentally, “Andromeda” is also the name of the 2000-2005 sci-fi TV series developed from unused material left behind by “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry [1921-91]. Chattaway, however, had nothing to do with this series.)
A little bit from Howard Mandel’s four-star DownBeat review: “Finally ‘Andromeda’ comes, a huge big band piece that shoves the deserving into the spotlight once more. [Steve] Khan comes on strong with his rock solo so the dynamics must drop for Dexter [Gordon]’s subtler style. But the rhythm section doesn’t drop its swing. Maynard [Ferguson] gets in his high smears, challenging [Woody] Shaw who follows immediately, tightening his lips, squeezing rather than smearing the notes. Even [Ralph] MacDonald, on congas, gets some space; the pianos add Latin figures behind him. Of course, it’s a huge climax – how else would all these energetic egos go out but blowing?”5
Left out of Mandel’s assessment is Stan Getz’s solo between Dexter and Maynard and Billy Cobham and Eric Gale rounding things out. Talk about wow-factor.
“It was far too much of an all-star band – with too many disparate solo styles – for it to make much coherent musical sense,” wrote Mike Hennessey,6 “but the sheer splendor of the assembled talent and the power of the sound made it a fitting climax to one of the most impressive Montreux Festivals yet.”
The third of four albums the Fania All-Stars waxed for Columbia in a production deal with Fania Records, Spanish Fever is the second (and final) of those records arranged and produced by Jay Chattaway (he’d work on another FA-S record for Fania). His job was to take the popular salsa group FA-S, a favorite among NYC-based Latinos, and provide a more commercial allure for crossover appeal.
The first of these records, Rhythm Machine (1977), hued much closer to the salsa the FA-S was famed for. Even Chattaway’s “Jubileo” was nearer to their sound. Chattaway spiced up the band with the crossover musicians (Bob James, Eric Gale and Gary King) to take it to the next level – and it worked. Rhythm Machine brought the band to the attention of many more jazz and pop listeners, particularly those outside of NYC.
But, like so many records of the period, Spanish Fever leaned heavily in to disco. And while it’s hard to say why some of this disco-fied fare succeeded and some of it failed, listeners likely felt this one was a bridge too far.
Chattaway’s sole contribution to the album is its title track, a pleasant, if not entirely successful hybrid of Latin, jazz fusion and disco. Boasting star turns from guest guitarist Jay Berliner and the signature trumpet of Maynard Ferguson, “Spanish Fever” mashes up the Bee Gees (“Night Fever”), Ferguson’s Chattaway-arranged takes on Rocky and Star Wars with, surprisingly, comic TV personality Charo, who is, in fact, a hugely talented and underrated Flamenco guitarist.
“Spanish Fever” is hardly a highlight, but one well worth checking out even so.
After two years as a featured soloist with Maynard Ferguson’s touring band, saxophonist Mark Colby (1949-2020) became the first artist signed to Bob James’s Tappan Zee label in 1977.7 Colby also joined James’s touring band during these years. Colby recorded two albums for the label, neither of which caught on nor performed particularly well. Which is a shame.
Serpentine Fire is an absolutely under-appreciated gem – particularly the two pieces featured here. The title track, which is, of course, a cover of the 1977 hit by Earth, Wind & Fire. The other piece worthy of note is Jay Chattaway’s lovely (and Bob James-esque – think “Piece of Mind”) “Daydreamer.”
Chattaway’s dynamic arrangement of “Serpentine Fire” here recalls Bob James’s own handling of Freddie Hubbard’s “Dream Weaver” (both feature many of the same players, most notably drummer Steve Gadd). Aside from Colby himself. this “Fire” features an entrancing acoustic piano solo by Bob James while “Daydreamer” spotlights Eric Gale on guitar.
But Serpentine Fire was not received well at all. “The beautiful packaging promises more than it delivers, wrote the usually upbeat Billboard. “Colby blows competent tenor and soprano saxes…and although the comparatively unknown Colby desperately requires annotation, he gets none.”8
DownBeat was even harsher: “Records like these help define that fine line between music as artifact and music as a product. … What’s certain is that a date heavy on uncommitted soloists, slick production values and sentiments like those in Hallmark cards doesn’t have much worth paying attention to.”9 Over four decades later, Serpentine Fire still has this listener’s attention.
During Maynard Ferguson’s Conquistador sessions, guest guitarist George Benson suggested that fellow former CTI All Star Bob James consider signing Cincinnati-based guitarist Wilbert Longmire to the keyboardist’s emerging Tappan Zee label. Despite infrequent records with Gerald Wilson and Rusty Bryant, as well as a little-known solo album on the World Pacific label in 1968, Longmire (1941-2018) was always more of a regional presence than a national one.
Longmire’s three high-profile Tappan Zee records did little to change that. But, to be fair, these records found some unexpected, if not cult-ish, outside of the United States, particularly in Japan.
Jay Chattaway’s “Good Morning” is a pleasant, if slight, bit of ballad fusion from Longmire’s first Tappan Zee album, Sunny Side Up (1978). It is surely intended to fit in to the mold of the million-selling George Benson album Breezin’ (1976).
On the other hand, though, Longmire builds his own brand here and, frankly, solos magnificently on Chattaway’s piece. The guitarist is accompanied by a dream team of New York studio gods, including Bob James, Cornell Dupree (on rhythm guitar), Gary King, Harvey Mason and the ubiquitous Sue Evans on percussion.
Chattaway’s ever-so subtle strings and horn charts hint at his strong capabilities to compose for film (and, more importantly, the Star Trek franchise). But the gorgeous horns Chattaway arranged here include only Eddie Daniels on flute and George Marge – who notably factors significantly on Chattaway’s 1980 Maniac score – on oboe and English horn.
The bird sounds tap in to Chattaway’s love of nature and allude to the scores he would later provide to so many National Geographic specials.
But Billboard was – again – remarkably critical of this Tappan Zee release: “Virtually unknown young guitarist gets a lot of production help on this debut LP [sic] comprising only five selections. One track features birds chirping, all tracks showcase synthesizers and electric pianos. A vocal choir further clutters the sound, yet Longmire impresses as a musician who, with more simple and more musical backup, may soar into prominence.”10 As we now know, that never happened.
Mongo Santamaria (1917-2003) was probably the highest-profile artist ever signed to Tappan Zee in its brief recorded legacy and – oddly – his sole release for the label, Red Hot, is, as well, Jay Chattaway’s most notable production for Bob James’s record company.
In all likelihood, it was Chattaway himself who signed Santamaria to Tappan Zee, through his connection with the Fania All-Stars (Mongo was, at the time, recording for the Fania-distributed label Vaya, between 1973 and 1980). I’m guessing it was Chattaway’s sole signing for the TZ label.
Santamaria revisits his 1963 hit version of “Watermelon Man,” this time dressed up in Chattaway’s era-appropriate disco finery. And it works, driven on by Gary King’s rollicking bass lines and fired up by Santamaria’s percussion (the 12″ version of the song – heard here – extends the song for nearly two minutes by repeating Santamaria’s solo spot). Michael Brecker takes a typically inspired solo but the song is marred by the unnecessary exaltations of La Lupe (1936-92) on “vocals.”
Also from Red Hot is Chattaway’s thoroughly intoxicating “Afro Cuban Fantasy,” a feature for Mark Colby on soprano sax (his solo is echoplexed, giving the song an appropriately sailing quality, something Chattaway likely intended). Opening with the haunting synthesized “electric logs,” Bob James goes on to offer a typically warm solo on Fender Rhodes. Guitarist Eric Gale, bassist Gary King and drummer Steve Gadd round out the rhythm section.
Dismissing the disco tracks on the record’s first side, DownBeat concluded that “the LP ends with three pleasing tunes
and a softer touch for Santamaria, the production a direct descendant of the Creed Taylor School. Had more of Mongo Santamaria’s personality gone into these natty arrangements, the recording would have been more noteworthy. As is, fans of lightweight, glossy jazz will enjoy Red Hot.”11
This writer agrees: the arrangements are natty. But one track here, “A Mi No Me Enganon (You Better Believe It),” is arranged by Marty Sheller, Santamaria’s longtime musical supervisor, and sounds as though it comes from an altogether different record.
Hearing Jay Chattaway’s work with Maynard Ferguson, Argentinian tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri sought out the arranger for help on his 1976 A&M debut, Caliente! Although the record was produced – lavishly – by West Coaster and A&M co-founder Herb Alpert, it was recorded in New York with with such session players as Don Grolnick12, Joe Beck, Eric Gale, Gary King, Lenny White and Ralph MacDonald.
Chattaway returned for orchestrations and some arrangements on Barbieri’s follow-up, Ruby, Ruby (1977), but the two only found their groove when Gato Barbieri asked Jay Chattaway for assistance on the saxophonist and composer’s score to the 1979 Michael (The Mechanic, Death Wish) Winner film Firepower.
Barbieri had previously provided the score to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), with the help of arranger and orchestrator Oliver Nelson. Here, Jay Chattaway was challenged to match music to film for the very first time in his career. And not only did he succeed at the job, it turned out that he loved it.
While there was never a soundtrack album for the quirky action-adventure thriller Firepower, even with such heavy-hitters as James Coburn (in for Charles Bronson, who left early on), Sophia Loren and, umm, O.J. Simpson. Two songs from the soundtrack (“Theme from Firepower” and “Sophia”) were included on Barbieri’s worthy 1979 Chattaway-produced-and-arranged album Euphoria.
Players here include Pat Rebillot on keyboards, Jeff Layton on guitar, Neil Jason on bass and Alan Schwartzberg on drums.
After his work on Firepower, Jay Chattaway decided to pursue a dream that was born when, as a college freshman, he attended a Henry Mancini concert in Pittsburgh. Like Mancini – who grew up in the Western Pennsylvania town of Aliquippa – Jay Chattaway decided then and there that he wanted to write music for films and television.
The following year, film producer Andrew Garroni approached Chattaway to suggest a CBS artist to score Maniac, a low-budget slasher film being directed by former porno director William Lustig. Chattaway pitched himself and, remarkably, he got the job, charting a course into new and different waters – after a few more jobs in jazz.
To these ears, Champagne, guitarist Wilbert Longmire’s second Tappan Zee disc, is his best – but not necessarily because of Jay Chattaway. The album boasts two breezy Bob James originals, Longmire’s ever-so brief return to funk (“Funshine”) and a program that pushes the guitarist more towards George Benson (on Warner Bros.) territory. Even so, hardly anybody noticed.
If the record was a critical and commercial flop (and it was), though, it’s not Chattaway’s fault either. Chattaway is credited as co-producer (with Bob James) and arranges only two of the record’s six tracks, his own “Pleasure Island” and another cover from Earth, Wind & Fire’s All ‘N All (1977) album, the dreary yet soapy “Love’s Holiday.”
Chattaway’s “Pleasure Island” is a proto-smooth ballad with little to no fanfare that seems informed again by EW&F. The melody could have easily accommodated a lyric that never comes, but a chorus of vocalists provide a wordless “bah bah bya-yah” that practically sings out “I’ll find you on pleasure island.”
Longmire is, as always, lovely: as much Benson as Eric Gale in his ministrations to the melody. He is accompanied here by Richard Tee on piano, Bob James on Fender Rhodes, Gale himself on rhythm guitar, Gary King on bass and Harvey Mason on drums. But no one was listening.
Guitarist Wilbert Longmire’s third and final Tappan Zee album, With All My Love (1980), was more of a mixed bag than the previous two efforts. The challenge to model Longmire after fellow guitarist and silky-smooth crooner George Benson’s example was probably doomed to fail from the start. Even with a hit-worthy ballad here in “Music Speaks Louder Than Words,” Longmire just couldn’t break through. Certainly not on his own terms.
When this album found its way into this listener’s collection, circa May 1980, only “Hawkeye” had much appeal. But it was limited at best: here was basic funk that wasn’t very funky. But, of course, funk was on its way out by then anyway.
All these years later, though, it is Jay Chattaway’s ultra-smooth “Crystal Clear” that stands out most on Longmire’s last-ditch effort for any sort of mainstream appeal – jazz or otherwise. Chattaway’s melody seems to riff on The Brothers Johnson’s exceptional “Tomorrow” (1976), but goes its own breezy way fairly early on. Longmire serves up a genuinely meaty solo – urged on by Chattaway’s muscular musical waves – before Bob James delivers a warm and sunny Rhodes solo of his own.
In one of his last duties for Columbia, Jay Chattaway was tasked with coordinating and producing two concerts devoted to featuring the keyboard players on the label’s roster. Both shows were to be called (oddly) “One Night Stand” and scheduled, first, in Los Angeles and, second, in New York City in January 1981. The New York City concert was captured and released on the sprawling – and wildly uneven – two-disc set One Night Stand: A Keyboard Event (1981).
Chattaway also contributed his own “Hexagon” to the program, an unusual feature for six pianists, supported by Ron Carter on bass and Buddy Williams on drums. The pianists (in order of their solos) include Herbie Hancock, Rodney Franklin, Sir Roland Hanna, Ramsey Lewis, George Duke and Bob James. Duke, Lewis and Hancock then return for what I think is the scrum or storm cloud toward the end of the piece.
At a little over 18 minutes, it is probably much too much of a good thing. Chattaway’s basic theme is anthemic in a cinematic sort of way, but after the first solo, it is difficult to hear where one soloist begins and another ends. Then the composition just devolves in to a showy, yet excruciating mash up that probably pleased no one except the players.
According to Chattaway, 93-year old pianist Eubie Blake (who opened the concert) was supposed to come join the other pianists when the group hit what the composer called “the dream chord.” “Instead,” Chattaway said, “he came out and played a ragtime version of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever!”13 Apparently, the audience loved it.
Jay Chattaway produced the 1981 Fania All-Stars album Social Change and contributed one composition, the ever-so smooth Latinate “Salsalito.” Again, the sound is more crossover jazz-lite than classic FA-S fare. But the gentle groove is so pleasant that it could just as easily have come from a James Last record of the period. (That works for this listener, but might not appeal to the average FA-S fan.)
“Salsalito” is a feature for (probably) Juancito Torres’s trumpet and David Spinozza’s guitar. It’s not clear, though, apart from the All Stars themselves, who the other musicians are, but Idris Muhammad is probably on drums. Gary King, who is not credited, may be on bass – at least on some tracks. No keyboard player is credited. But elsewhere on the record, guests include Steel Pulse (“Shining/Beautiful Morning”), Eric Gale (“12 Bar”) and Gato Barbieri (“Gato’s Tune”).
Social Change – followed by a Gato Barbieri record in 1982 – also happens to close this chapter in Jay Chattaway’s musical career. Likely tiring of the business side of the record industry, he was probably just as happy to move on. By this point, Chattaway had already scored his first film, Maniac (1980), and was actively engaged in scoring others. He would ease into his best-known gig, as part of the Star Trek franchise, by 1990.
But the music Jay Chattaway made during these years, especially the songs presented here – in this admittedly long and sprawling post – is what this listener will always consider his finest and very best.
Endnotes:
- Terri Potts-Chattaway recounts only one Tappan Zee moment in her book and it’s a telling one. After hearing the solo soprano sax of Marion Meadows in New York City’s Grand Central Station, Jay Chattaway brought the saxophonist to the attention of Bob James. But no deal was made. “The label was going through a transition period,” writes Potts-Chattaway, “and the roster was full.” That’s probably code for something else altogether. Shortly thereafter, Tappan Zee was shorn of all its acts – except one – and Meadows’s first record wasn’t issued until a full decade later and on an altogether different label. (p. 97) ↩︎
- Terri Potts-Chattaway, pp. 51-52. ↩︎
- In 1979, Maynard Ferguson oddly included the Jay Chattaway-arranged recording of Courage’s “Theme from Star Trek” on his otherwise Nick Lane-arranged album Hot. Later in the year, Columbia released Ferguson’s single-only version of Jerry Goldsmith’s “Main Theme from Star Trek – The Motion Picture,” arranged by Nick Lane. This rarity was later included on the 2018 CD compilation Memories of Maynard: The Best of the Columbia Years. ↩︎
- Billboard, September 17, 1977, p. 64. ↩︎
- DownBeat, May 4, 1978, pp. 20-22. ↩︎
- Billboard, August 6, 1977, p. 65. ↩︎
- Billboard, June 17, 1978, p. 6. Despite whenever Mark Colby was signed, the Tappan Zee releases of Bob James’s Heads (1977) and guitarist Steve Khan’s Tightrope (1977) preceded Colby’s April 1978 Tappan Zee debut. ↩︎
- Billboard, April 8. 1978, p. 87. ↩︎
- DownBeat, July 13, 1978, p. 32. ↩︎
- Billboard, July 15, 1978, p. 72. ↩︎
- DownBeat, May 3, 1979, p. 22. ↩︎
- Keyboardist Don Grolnick (1947-96) also recorded with Chattaway on three tracks from singer-songwriter Libby Titus’s eponymous 1977 Columbia album. Ms. Titus, who was later married to Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, died as this piece was being written, on October, 13, 2024, at age 77. ↩︎
- Terri Potts-Chattaway, p. 91. ↩︎
Thanks for this very interesting overview of Jay Chattaway’s arranging and producing career: like you, I always enjoyed the Wilbert Longmire releases on Tappan Zee; I also really admired his arrangement of ‘Morning Glory’ on Eric Gale’s ‘Multiplication’ album, so much so that I transcribed and adapted it for one of the BBC Radio Orchestras to play in the 1980s.