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From 1972 to 1981, producers Larry and Alfonso “Fonce” Mizell helped create some of the most popular and recognizable recordings in the history of jazz.
These include Donald Byrd’s “Black Byrd,” “Stepping Into Tomorrow” and “Places and Spaces;” Bobbi Humphrey’s “Blacks and Blues” and “Fancy Dancer;” Johnny Hammond’s “Gears;” Gary Bartz’s “Music Is My Sanctuary,” and many more. Yet as prolific as they were, the Mizells’ instantly-recognizable sound was disparaged aggressively at the time by critics who balked at their pioneering but decidedly untraditional combination of jazz and R&B.
Even so, their legacy would eventually prove both commercial (“Black Byrd” remains one of Blue Note Records’ best-selling records of all time) and inspirational. More than 300 songs sampled their work in intervening decades, among them Stetsasonic’s “Talkin’ All That Jazz,” DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince’s “A Touch of Jazz” and “Brand New Funk,” A Tribe Called Quest’s “Footprints” and “Butter,” Ice-T’s “New Jack Hustler,” Brand Nubian’s “Love Me or Leave Me Alone,” Nas’ “N.Y. State of Mind” and Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s “All the Places.”
It’s the latter cultural footprint that has driven younger generations back to the musical strides that preceded it, and now to an event celebrating the somehow still undersung duo. Commemorating Larry Mizell’s 80th birthday in 2024 (Fonce passed away in 2011), record label and live music company Jazz Is Dead has assembled former collaborators Gary Bartz and members of The Blackbyrds, along with contemporary artists Katalyst and Melanie Charles, for a concert Aug. 28 at the Ford Theater in Los Angeles that organizer Dru Lojero describes as a “mix tape” that will be “pure flames.” Ahead of the show, which promises performances of songs produced by the Mizells from Bartz, Byrd, Humphreys and more, Larry spoke at length to Variety about his and Fonce’s densely-packed discography, their unconventional working methods, and much more.
[This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
When they approached you about this, who among your collaborators, or disciples, did you want to be involved in this?
But everybody that we worked with, I would be glad to see on the roster. The more blaring fact is that not all of them are still around, so I will be happy to see who can come on board.
Your introduction to Donald Byrd was when he was a teacher of yours, correct?
He came to Howard to teach, and I had graduated by then. But Fonce still had a year to go, and so he got to know him and took part of some of his classes. And Byrd came out to L.A. and was recording a few things that Fonce helped him with before we did “Black Byrd.”
What were the important lessons that you and your brother took away from Byrd that became guiding principles?
Byrd was more about preparing yourself for real life in the music business, and Fonce attended some of those classes. They were informative to be sure — I sat in on a couple of those when I had the time to come down and hang with Fonce before he graduated. But Fonce worked with Byrd just as an advisor before “Black Byrd.”
You studied electrical engineering. Was there any synergy or influence in studying engineering that may have fed your musical creativity?
The electronic part of it was coming into the music with the Moog synthesizers and the ARP synthesizers, and using them to beef up a bass line or sometimes to play a solo lick. I went to work for Grumman Aerospace in New York City, and we were doing the lunar module for Apollo. I was going to grad school for my master’s at NYU at night at the same time. I also had an R&B band in New Jersey, and a doo-wop group, and I was doing all of this after I got off of work at Grumman Aerospace. And it all consumed most of my time just playing music and going back to work, but I dug both sides of it.
When you started producing, were there instruments that were easier for you to write or produce for?
Mainly keyboard, because it covers a lot. The synths hadn’t really come out yet — the Moog was out, but it wasn’t the Minimoog; it was a huge panel. You had to really be focused to do that, and you could only get not that many notes out of [them] in those days. So it was either an acoustic upright piano and drums and a bass.
I feel like the records that you worked on sound almost more like your own than the artists that you produced.
It’s really not by design. We would write and improvise and play just to be doing it, almost every day. Fonce and I, and later on with my brother Rod, we had all the equipment in the studio to jam and we would just be recording. And then after the fact, it would come about, “This would be good for so-and-so.” But if it was a specific artist, we would sift through to see what we had and it would go from there. I remember when Herb Alpert asked us to work with L.T.D., with Jeffrey Osborne. We had them come up to the house, and we played them 12 bars of a groove that we had been working on. It was “Love to the World.”
Then there were artists that were getting released from a label, like Johnny Hammond was with Creed Taylor at CTI Records, and he got my number and called me up. We were big fans of Johnny with his funk and his timing, so I called up the head of Fantasy Records, Ralph Kaffel, and I said, “We’ll cut a couple of tracks and see if you bite.” So it was a varied process, not a calculated one.
How quickly in your career did you settle into a rhythm merging the often-unconventional structures of jazz with something more traditionally song oriented?
On without-a-vocalist-type projects, we would enjoy working with a real open, spontaneous structure of the music. And we would put together three or four 8-bar sections, just intuitively, each of them different from each other, and when we went into the studio we had our working guys: Harvey Mason, Chuck Rainey, Joe Sample, Wah Wah, John Rowan. And each one of those sections would have their own character, and the only thing that held them together, the glue, was that they were the same tempo. Typically, recording sessions were pretty much rote — you would come in and play the music how the producer wanted it, but it would all be written out most of the time. But our technique was to mix it up: Instead of A and B, we would go A to C, then back to D, and then the F.
It was challenging at first, but after we found the guys that could really hang with spontaneous changes like that, we would get performances out that were way different from when we were doing a typical pop or R&B record. We had signs with letters on them, and we would wave the letters four bars before we were ready to change. We would have them grooving, say, on part B, and they would be grooving, and then we’d say go to part F all of a sudden. And after a while they were expecting it — and in fact enjoyed it.
I feel like I can hear that process in tracks from “Blacks and Blues” or “Places and Spaces.” What ended up becoming the key for you in figuring out how to best highlight a feature artist’s instrument?
We would put together a cornucopia of grooves that we dug, and the artists pretty much all came in expecting that type of behavior from us. For the different rhythm sections, it was confusing in the beginning because they weren’t used to that type of changing and freedom at the same time. Some of them were, we might’ve taken them out of their comfort zones, and if it wasn’t working, we would act accordingly. But for the most part, they went along with it.
In fact, after we did “Black Byrd,” and I guess that was kind of seminal, we had several people contacting us on a regular basis to, quote, “do them.” And we loved that kind of a vibe because we knew we were getting somebody who was ready to put themselves in our hands. So we didn’t get a lot of pushback or need to come up with a different thing for whatever project it was.
For a long time, “Black Byrd” was the most successful bestselling Blue Note record of all time. But jazz critics at the time didn’t embrace the style that you had created. How challenging was that?
We were surprised at first. But, in our minds, we weren’t trying to do jazz … we didn’t look at it any other way than that we thought that this sound was going to work. Jazz artists from other labels were calling on us to do them, and some of it happened, some of it didn’t. Sometimes we passed on people. And I understand that jazz people, critique-wise, were coming from, “Well, it’s not jazz,” which it wasn’t, and they didn’t like it. But we were just doing our things with no rules or plan embedded in our minds.
The bass line in “Jasper Country Man” seems similar to the bass line on Edwin Starr’s “Easin’ In.” Are there certain note progressions or instrument choices that became, if not signatures, then things that you found were comfortable places to be?
It would be in the moment — we never knew which sign we were going to put up. The point was that the musicians got into it. We would cut tracks that would go on for maybe nine or 10 minutes, even though we could only usually typically use five or five and a half on a typical record, because the guys were jamming. They really didn’t feel like they were under the gun to do this a certain way, and we chose them because of their propensity to just groove.
Along with L.T.D. and “Love to the World,” you later worked with A Taste of Honey on “Boogie Oogie Oogie” and some more defined-as-pop artists. Was that an easy transition?
We had a singing group in college, and we would sing all kinds of different things — jazz things like The Four Freshmen would sing, four-part harmonies. We even would do a Beatles tune. We did some Broadway-type tunes. Donny Hathaway was one of our piano players, and he was just off the chain then, just as a youngster, as a freshman, he was an incredible guy. But we were just all over the place, and not with any particular design, because we would just be jamming in the studio.
In the 1980s, what prompted you guys to step back from recording and producing, given that there were lots of people who were still eager to work with you?
We were born and raised in New York City and also across the river in New Jersey, and at one point we decided we were going to move the folks out [to L.A.], mom and dad and our younger brother, Rod. And then it was just a great time. And we took them traveling, and we would be jamming all the time. We had a pretty decent war chest. We even had a deal with Warner Brothers to do an album, they signed us as artists. And there’s a few rips of those tracks that sometimes can be found on eBay. I don’t know how it happened, but I found out later on that, obviously, somebody in the studio had made [recordings] after we left because there’s been several of them that were out. In fact, I was able to buy one a few years ago. And they were going for anywhere from $500 to way more than that. And Warner Brothers wanted us to go out and do touring and things like that. But we never really did. So we were hanging with the folks and we were cutting tracks. We started getting into the Bay Area a lot, we would record up there at Fantasy Studios, and we just kicked back.
And then hip-hop sampling started coming in, and it was like newfound exposure for our songs. And we had put together some groups we were going to do on our own, a group called Mademoiselle in the Bay Area, we cut a whole album on them. I talk with them every now and then. But we never finished it.
Do you have any of these recordings that may get released or re-released at some point?
We had them up to a point, but we had a damaging fire in the studio. And we lost some really irreplaceable stuff as far as the only copies that we had of them. That was a downer. But the new sampling by rap and hip-hop was really enjoyable. And then the Red Bull Music Academy, those were some very good guys that reached out to us. So we were invited to a lot of their get togethers. We would meet kids from all around the world who were really into some of the records that we had done. And with us traveling as well, it was some fun times.
How does it feel for your work to get celebrated now in this way? Does it feel overdue?
It always makes me feel good. And as time moves on and we get into the next generation and the next, I feel blessed. And my brother, Fonce, we were on the same page.
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