John Beaudin - Hi Dave, are those royalty checks rolling in from Canada? (Laughing)

Dave Koz - (Laughing) Hi John, how are you? Well, over the last ten years I don't know. I bet it didn't buy me my house.

John - (laughing) You can't lose track of those big Canadian checks.

Dave - (laughing) No, I won't. How's everything in Calgary, man?

John - Great. Smooth Jazz is catching on. Carol (Archer) of R&R wrote a nice piece on the station (The Breeze 103.1) and that was great.

Dave - I've been on the road so I didn't see it.

John - We've been getting some great buzz from your show.

Dave - I so appreciate that. I don't know if you know that my whole family is from Winnipeg.

John - Oh Yeah!

Dave - I have actual relatives who live in Calgary and I'm getting messages from them that they're hearing the music anyway. Everyone is spread throughout the whole country but my parents were born and raised in Winnipeg so any kind of Canadian love is more than special to me.

John - Well, Winnipeg has one of the three Smooth Jazz stations in the country. They are very traditional though. I think maybe thirty percent of their sound is Smooth Jazz.

Dave - What about Vancouver wasn't there something going on there?

John - Well, I was the only game in town in Vancouver from 1990 to 2001. I programmed and hosted between 28 and 42 hours a week but there is a rumor on now that X-FM a Rogers station will flip in the next few months to Smooth Jazz.

Dave - Well, thank you John for spreading all the good vibes up in Canada all of us really appreciate it and I saw your website last night in preparation for this and it looked great! I'll go into it right now. I see you have Marc Antoine as a featured artist who's one of our artists.

John - You and Marc obviously go back a long way. How did Rendezvous Records come to fruition?

Dave - It primarily came about by working with two phenomenal partners. One of them comes from the record company side of things, Hyman Katz.

John - He's been great to work with from my end.

Dave - Yeah, he developed the careers of Keiko Matsui and Paul Taylor.

John - And you have Fran Cody, nothing wrong with that. Man he was one of the godfather's of the format.

Dave - Yeah he's pretty much a radio legend. He kind of got word on what we were wanting to build and he moved out to Los Angeles from Princeton, New Jersey. He left Broadcast Architecture which is a company he started. So it's the three of us, you have a record company person, a radio person and you have an artist in the format. We think this is a pretty good team that we've built here. Primarily it got started because my brother and I recorded "Golden Slumbers - a Fathers Lullaby." Instead of just giving it to another label we decided to see if we could make it happen for Rendezvous so that was our first release and subsequently we've signed Marc Antoine. His record "Mediterraneo" is out and doing great. We also have Praful from Amsterdam and his record is just burning up the charts in the United States and selling records like gangbusters because I think his music is so different than anything else. I'm really excited about it.

John - So are we. Praful's "Sigh" is one of those songs that gets attention on the first spin.

Dave - (laughing) Yeah. Well, you know that just adds credence to the unique. If you do something different and it musically sounds good than it'll just stand out. It has all the qualities that I think people want to hear on a radio station such as yours. It has a real hooky melody and all the little intricate parts inside the song are hooky and it has some unusual sounds too. So, when it comes on the air you kind of turn it up and say, "What is that?"

John - With you new album "Saxophonic" did you just follow your nose with a more open mindset? Sounds like the saxophone is leading you on this album.

Dave - That's exactly what happened John. In other projects that I've done in the past I've been a little bit more of a self editor. I'd go into record in the recording studio with friends or co-writers and we would be starting something and I would say, "I don't think this is going in the direction that it should be in so back then I think really good ideas may have been squashed before they could be fully realized." So I made a conscious effort this time around to just let the saxophone lead. We found ourselves going down a street which was a little bit uncomfortable at first but I at least got to the end of the street before I said whether I liked it or not. As a result there is a lot of this record that is new territory for me and new sonic landscapes. I'm really excited about it because I feel very much alive and I feel that this project really reflects who I am at this time. I just turned forty so it's a little bit more of a maturing process for me at just being okay with exactly who I am and what I do.

John - I first played the album in our Breeze vehicle last weekend and this baby has a great stereo and the first song in there was "Sound of the Underground" with Chris (Botti). Now that's expanding the old boundaries. It sounds like a lot of work went into that.

Dave - Well, it all started with a sample of Lee Morgan's "Sidewinder" and this is a perfect example of something I would have turned down. I would have walked into the studio they would have presented it to me and I could hear myself saying, "What are you nuts!"(laughing) I couldn't do that then but of course now I would say, "Okay, let's spend the day on it." You know by the end of the day I was totally in love with it because it's just so different you know. We took this old sample which is a great traditional Jazz song and we put this jungle drums and bass and created this jungle beat under it and then we created this new melody coupled with this vocal sample. We just tried to do something that was different but it's still musical that's the thing that's very important to me in the process. We wanted to remain true to the music and we didn't want to do something just to be different or just to make it sound odd. It's the same thing we were talking about before with Praful's track and that it works from a musical standpoint and when you listen to it you feel good. It's rooted in just the natural way that music flows as opposed to something unnatural.

John - I was just talking to Chuck Loeb, Eric Marienthal and Chieli Minucci about tunes that kick ass like "Sound of the Underground" and how radio won't play them but it would be a more interesting terrain if radio did.

Dave - Well, I would love that too but I don't know if that would happen at least in Smooth Jazz that sound is a little on the edge. I will tell you that we play it live in our shows and it goes over great so I know people like the song. Whether it becomes a radio song I'm not so sure about that but I like the way you think and I can completely concur.

John - I think I'll always be a big pusher of "Driving Songs" in the format. Smooth Jazz needs more and the envelope has to be pushed, not a lot that would certainly be a mistake but lets grow here and "Sound of the Underground" is one of those songs that can do it. The Vancouver show at QM-FM was very successful with those kinds of songs.

Dave - Well, I think it lends the same credence to what we were talking about before when you have passion for the music that you're playing whether you are the announcer or recording artist in the studio, if passion is behind it, it comes through and people can pick up on that. I don't know how they do. (laughing) I've have been that way as a fan too because there are some pieces of music for whatever reason when you hear them they immediately grab you. There's something there, an intangible. Maybe it's the melody, maybe it's the groove, maybe it's the intent of the songwriter, maybe it's the clever twist of the lyric or something like that. I wish that you could know exactly what that is so you could put it in every song but there is no way of knowing.

John - No kidding, bottle that if you can. My favorite song on the new album is "Definition of Beautiful." I first heard it on your radio show and I just love the vocals by Javier.

Dave - John, that's my favorite song on the album as well. It is one of those hybrid type of songs where it's not really an instrumental and it's not really a vocal. Yeah, Javier who's a label mate of mine on Capital Records did a beautiful job on the vocal and it's a very romantic song. Who wouldn't want someone singing to them, "You are the definition of beautiful." It's hard to resist that lyric and the melody is quite haunting also. It is another one of those songs that I've written with my long time collaborators from New York, Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken. When we get together we always have a pretty darn good time.

John - The tune "Only Tomorrow Knows" is another one of my favorites. I love the catchy almost haunting whistle and that's a pretty good beat on there. It makes me feel like I'm in a little French restaurant or cafe in the 1940's or 50's.

Dave - Yeah, that really sets the mood for that song. It's a very special song and a different one on the album mood wise. We wanted it set up on the album in a provocative way so you hear this man walking on a kind of rainy street and you hear him whistling this little tune and then that becomes the motif for the song that you hear again. When I make a record I want it to be a listening experience from start to finish. So, often I've noticed how my nieces listen to music as their ages are eight and ten years old. They like to put in a CD and they say, "Put on number 5 or number 9." (laughing) After they've heard their favorite songs they take out the CD.

John - My older kids are the same way. It drives me nuts. (laughing)

Dave - (Laughing) Sure and you remember John we would buy albums and we'd listen to side A and Side B and it was an encompassing listening experience. A lot of that hope at least went into the making of "Saxophonic." So, if people wanted to they could listen to it from start to finish and get a real whole experience of it.

John - I like the way you broke it down in three parts.

Dave - Yeah, it's actually broken down in three acts kind of like a play. Three acts and a little curtain call which is a song I wrote with Brian McKnight that he plays beautiful piano on and sings also. Getting back to "Only Tomorrow Knows" it comes in act three and you need a song like that at that point and it's kind of a story before the story to kind of get you into the song.

John - You also go through the stages of a relationship. Did the concept part of it just happen?

Dave - Totally just happened. All the music was recorded and I never thought of doing it in three acts or what those acts meant but then I started looking at the song titles and listening to the songs next to each other and it quickly and easily broke up in three acts of four songs.

John - Of course you can enjoy it with or without the concept that is what I like about concept albums.

Dave - Yeah, you can listen to the album from start to finish and not pay any attention to that and you'll never know the difference but if you want to go a step deeper it's there.

John - The album has at times rawness and it even at times sounds live.

Dave - I think it really had to do with where I was at in the record making process in my career of not being as picky or looking for too much perfection. You know you run the risk sometimes of polishing something too much and you can polish the personality out of it so that certainly didn't happen here. There was a conscious effort on this album to just let things happen and not be too concerned about making things perfect. The more imperfect the more personality it has and of course you don't want it to sound bad. (laughing) You'd be surprised as far as the sax takes are concerned as many of those are first takes. I tried to do them over again to make them better but every time I would it would take the personality out of them. It would take away that immediacy away when you're stepping off a cliff and going to jump.

John - I like the subtle wall of sax sound on the first single "Honey-dipped" which you did with Jeff Lorber.

Dave - Yeah, I wrote it with him and produced it with him and I've been working with him for years. He's the person I credit for giving me my start. He's out here on the road with us right now and he's so funny you wouldn't believe it, so we've been having a blast. Working on "Honey-dipped" was just a typical day where we had a short hand when we get together, we're in the studio, and he's on the keyboard I've got my sax and the next thing you know we have a little funky tune going. That's what happened with the sax section your talking about but there's a lot of sax section work. There are a lot of saxophones on this record and that's really where the term "Saxophonic" comes from because it's almost like an orchestra of saxophones that you're hearing in different shapes and different forms throughout the album.

John - How did you come up with the name "Saxophonic?"

Dave - I was actually in St. Lucia in the Caribbean and I was sound asleep in my bed. We were actually there because we were doing a broadcast for my morning show at 'The Wave.' Anyway, I woke up in the middle of the night at four o'clock in the morning with the term "Saxophonic." Then I thought this could be the record title so I wrote it down, turned down the light and went back to sleep. Well, usually I found out in the past that usually the next morning it sucked. (laughing)

John - Yeah, it's like a moment of inspiration that druggies get and the let down when they actually read what they wrote, the let down is hard to describe. (laughing)

Dave - Yeah. (laughing) I was lucky the next day I looked at it and thought it's not a bad album title and it stuck.

John - So Dave is it true that you are the busiest guy in freakin' Smooth Jazz?

Dave - (laughing) You're funny, I like the way you say that. Well, John I have a lot on my plate and I love all of the different things. I love being on the road, I love making records, I love nurturing other artists on the record company side and I love sharing my enthusiasm for the music on the radio. Whether it's on a syndicated show which you're kind enough to run and I love the morning show in L.A. but the common thread to everything is the music and the passion for the music and that's what makes it work for me. So, yeah there's a lot of work and I have the most incredible people around me to make it work. I couldn't possibly do it alone nor would I want to do it alone. I thank God for those people because they allow me to enjoy all the different facets to the utmost.

John - Well, the key to success is to surround your self with really good people.

Dave - And I've learned the hard way but fortunately I'm set up so well right now that I've got the best people on my team and I get to be on their team too.

John - I'm curious what would you tell the Dave Koz in 1990, now that you've been in the game for so long?

Dave - I would say slow down and enjoy it a little bit more. I think right now being a product of being a little older I'm really savoring it a little bit more, maybe a lot more than I ever have. I remember when my first record came out it was like, "Oh, my God. It was like go, go, go!" There are still some wonderful memories there but I was moving so fast for so many years. For the first five years of my career I was like on a treadmill.

John - Before that you must have been moving pretty fast working with Richard (Marx) because he was at the height of his career?

Dave - I learned a lot from that too. I saw an artist go from selling twelve tickets a night to selling twelve thousand. He's really a talented guy and I really learned a lot there before I had a chance to be an artist myself.

John - Were you always aware of those good opportunities?

Dave - Sometimes you know when I was thirteen years old I had been playing sax for about two years and I begged my brother to put me in his band. We did weddings, bar mitzvah and fraternity parties and I was always playing with people who were much better than me. So, that was a great training ground to get good really quick.

John - Where do you think the Smooth Jazz format is at right now?

Dave - I think we're at a crossroads right now. Some stations are doing really, really well and some stations are going out of the Smooth Jazz format. I think the music itself shows some wonderful glimpses of the future of people just pushing the boundaries and I'd like to see more of that. I'd like to see more artists taking some risks with their music and I'd love to see radio embracing those risks as opposed to being afraid of them. I think we're starting to see that happen right now so that's a very good thing.

John - That's why a lot of people like Praful. Hey, I've been listening to this stuff since 1975 and I don't want a rehash from some artists.

Dave - John You're not that old are you?

John - I'm forty-three so when "Breezin" came out I was at the sponge stage where I wanted everything and there were some good albums out then. Next time you're in the site check out some of my favorites in the "Top Albums" section. I was telling Chuck (Loeb) the other day that I love the fact that he crams as much music on an album as possible and gets in under the wire to still be called Smooth Jazz.

Dave - Yeah, that's true that's what an album is as opposed to just releasing a single for the radio. I mean you want to make sure that you're covered with singles that will support the album but when someone buys the album not only do you want to make every song good you want the album to present a few other things that may surprise the audience, it's good to surprise people. To this day I love being surprised by tracks on people's albums. If it was exactly what you'd expect why do you need to buy another record.

John - Are you still involved working with the Starlight Children's Foundation?

Dave - Yes I am. I sit on the Board of Governors and they have been granting wishes for fifteen years nourishing the lives of seriously and terminally ill kids pretty much in the whole world. They're great and they put fun centers and activities centers in hospitals. I've seen first hand the smiles that they put on kids faces so I've been very much involved with them for many years and serve at their global ambassador and I'm just interested in spreading the word and people who are interested in helping can visit their site which is starlight.org.

John - Dave thanks a lot for chatting with me and please spread the word on the website to your Smooth Jazz friends.

Dave - Thanks John, I'll tell Chris Botti about the site since he's on tour with us right now. Thank you very much John I really appreciate it. Take care.