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Warren Hill - I'm great John. I love your site, it's a great site!

John - Thanks a lot. So, you were a big Zeppelin fan. What's you favorite album?

Warren - Well "Houses of the Holy" was really something. That album had a lot of cool stuff. They ventured into a lot of good areas there but you have to love number 4.

John - Everyone does.

Warren - Yeah, it's kind of a given. You know it's tough for me John because I don't remember what song was on what album because I'm an I-Pod MP3 guy now. I just have a Led Zeppelin file and all the songs are in there. So it's tough to remember what came from what.

John - "Physical Graffiti" was by far my favorite. A little "Custard Pie" and "Kashmir" goes a long way.

Warren - (laughing) Absolutely.

John - You of course put your own big festival together once a year with the Warren Hill Smooth Jazz Cruise.

Warren - Sure the camaraderie is great on the cruise. Basically I book all my buddies. (laughing) We're out at sea for a week drinking margaritas in Cozumel and playing great music and jamming with each other all night long. So yeah these festivals are always a combination of a bunch of guys who know and respect each other and for the most part are friends with each other or soon to be friends with each other. When you're finished your spot on stage you get to sit and watch the next guy. Hanging back stage is where all the fun is for us.

John - An old buddy of mine from CHUM radio in Vancouver Ross Langbell who now works for RCS
Canada was on your cruise and was nice enough to supply the site with pictures, he really enjoyed it.

Warren - I remember Ross really well. He participated in our passenger star search.

John - He plays a mean bass.

Warren - Yeah, he plays a mean bass. The hang on the ship was amazing. You have true music fans mixed in with artists that are not divas, everybody checks their egos at the door. I should say they leave it on the mainland. (laughing) We just had an amazing time. We had nine artists on the cruise we just had in January.

John - How many artists have you booked so far for the 2005 cruise?

Warren - I think I have eleven or twelve booked. It's going to be huge.

John - Doing an event like this on a yearly basis is a no-brainer. I'm sure people will come back.

Warren - Sure. It's been a tremendous amount of work but seeing a couple of thousand smiling faces getting off the boat and almost crying because they feel it's the end of summer camp. (laughing) It's a great event and the gratification in that is tremendous.

John - Other than maybe scheduling problems I would think you don't have any trouble getting artists to participate?

Warren - No, not at all. That's why I choose January to do it. There are just a couple of things going on in January on the islands. For the players it's after the holidays and they're just sitting around and there really isn't a lot going on so yeah most of them are available. It's January so nobody wants to be freezing at home so what a better place to be than down the Caribbean.

John - Tell me about the line-up?

Warren - Well you can either go into www.warrenhill.com and click on the banner or you can go directly to www.smoothcruise2005.com. So far we have Rick Braun, Norman Brown, Oleta Adams, Peter White, Euge Groove, Brian Culbertson, Kirk Whalum, Jeff Golub, Marc Antoine. There are also some people that I'm days away from confirming.

John - We will place updates on the line-up as you feed them to us. By the way, congratulations on winning "Smooth Jazz Artist of the Year" at the National Jazz Awards In Toronto.

Warren - Thank you so much. It was an honor and a privilege. It's great to have the format in Canada and it's even better to be nominated and win and especially in the company of the other artists that were nominated.

John - Your parents were there which was really nice.

Warren - Yes, my parents were there and thank god that it was in my home town of Toronto. My first record came out in the early nineties and that's almost 14 years for me and it's always been a struggle to try to get recognized in Canada. I had to come to the States to actually get a record deal. I'm still a Canadian citizen, I always will be and I'm still trying to get my wife to get some real estate in Vancouver because I'd really like to spend some time up there. (laughing)

John - Real estate in Vancouver isn't cheap but I spent over ten years there, it's a gorgeous city. I want to talk about Doug and Mary Kirk who play Smooth Jazz in Hamilton at The Wave because they love it, not because they have a specialty license and have to play it. I admire what they're doing.

Warren - No kidding. They were on my cruise in January. They are just a wonderful couple and they're very passionate about the music and I'm a huge supporter of them. We had a great time on the cruise with them. I actually got sick on the second week of the cruise and I know that Mary picked up the same flu bug.

John - Well, they're good people. If I was living on that side of the woods I'd be on their doorstep asking for a job. Are you doing one cruise after another again for 2005?

Warren - No, but we are chartering the whole ship this time and it's going to be one full week unless it just goes through the roof.

John - Word of mouth for this kind of vacation must be great.

Warren - Oh it is. We had close to two thousand passengers spread out over the two weeks on the last one and they all had an incredible time and my feeling is that's two thousand pied pipers out there. (laughing) So it's just a question of getting people to find us and go to the website www.smoothcruise2005.com to find out information.

John - Well, it's already a great lineup and it's a cruise on top of that.

Warren - Yeah and we all hang out and it's a lot of fun. Unfortunately with the way touring is these days there isn't always a lot of time to get close to the fans. This is very different. With regular touring sometimes you don't have the energy to hang out for hours especially knowing you have to wake up early the next morning. On the cruise everyone is chilled out and relaxed but was all on this gorgeous ship together.

John - So all your obsessed fans can go there and stalk you. (laughing)

Warren - (laughing) It's funny but that was a fear of some of the artists thinking that maybe they really couldn't have a real vacation. I told them they would be surprised. Those fans get it.

John - Well, they're adults for one thing.

Warren - Yeah they're adults and they understand. They respect other people even if you're an artist. We had all kinds of events scheduled for "Meet and Greet" with the artists and the fans knew that those events were the appropriate time to do that. As a result everyone had a great time. The artists were having a great time and since it was so much fun for them they were expressing it through the music. They were sitting in on all the jam sessions, interacting on each others shows. Those are the things that you don't get on mainland events.

John - I liked that quote on your website on how having your daughter changed your life.

Warren - Sure. Now she's five and she's still doing the same thing. If you get to their level and you just look at things differently. Now that she's older and we talk about what a booger is. (laughing) It's just hilarious at times.

John - (laughing) Hey, a booger can be a very intense conversation with a kid that age.

Warren - (laughing) It can be. You don't share them with other people, where did it come from? With life it's all in the details and most of us miss the details but kids see every single detail.

John - Well, they're great teachers.

Warren - Yeah. They teach us so much. We home school Olivia and I work at home of course so I have the pleasure of being around her as much as I want. Obviously the road takes me away a fair bit but because we home school we can pick and choose when she gets to travel with us.

John - Was your schedule the reason you went with home schooling?

Warren - Well, you're up there in Calgary and we're raising her in the States and the school system is very different here in the States but yes we do move around a lot. Let's just say something comes up and I can go to South Africa on a gig well I don't have to worry about pulling her out of school. We can just go out and do it. With home schooling you're much closer to your children plus she's a very good candidate if you've met Olivia you'd see that she has no problem whatsoever with social interaction. She's one of the most social children you'd ever meet. When she's in the park she'll have no problem coming up to any kid and talking to them. So home schooling has been great, my wife actually who does 75% of the work. They have an incredible relationship.

Part Two

John - You know when I think of physics it sets me up for a great nap but it wasn't boring to you was it?

Warren - No, it was never boring. I was really into it, besides music what interested me the most when I was in high school and the first year of college was math and sciences and of course physics. I just used to love that stuff. They say that musicians are adapting to that because they use the same side of the brain.

John - Well, I know music is definitely right brain.

Warren - Music is right? Well, it can be a very analytical process to write music and arrange it. That was always one of the things that fascinated me about music. I got into music theory very early on in my life. I was probably eleven or twelve when I fully understood it all and I could read music. It really came very easy to me. I think the problem was I had to make a choice. In order to go into physics which was actually called Engineering Science at the University of Toronto, anyway in order to just pass I literally had to give up music and it was an intense amount of work. I've never been against working hard. My wife accuses me of being a workaholic all the time but it was the fact that I had to give up another passion of mine. I had to sit there and determine which one of these is my true passion. Really what I did was literally experiment. I got through the first year of physics and then I applied and got a Canadian Council grant and I got a scholarship to Berkeley in Boston and I thought I'm going to try a year of music now. Where I give up math and sciences for a year. I felt a lot better about doing that. After I got through my first year of Berkeley I realized that it was my true calling.

John - There are parallels between you and your Guitar and Saxes band mate Marc Antoine considering he had to choose between swimming and guitar. His father sat him down and told him that he probably wouldn't be able to make a living swimming when he was forty. (laughing)

Warren - Yeah. (laughing)

John - So the choice for him was easy.

Warren - You know that's a big issue for young people. I don't envy people in their late teens and early twenties because there's so much pressure on them to make these life choices, you know? When I was growing up we still had grade thirteen in Ontario which has since been abolished but I always thought it was a great extra year to have. It was more time to try to figure out what you want to be and where you want to go. A lot of people don't figure it out until well into their twenties. There's a lot of trial and error but the way things are set up especially here in the States kids go to college when their eighteen and their done by twenty-one or twenty-two and that's it. They are on their way to whatever it is that they are going to do for the rest of their life.

John - How did you meet your wife Tamara?

Warren - Tamara and I met in a recording studio in Reno Nevada. She was a singer songwriter and she was recording her own record. We both lived in Los Angeles at the time and her producer was a fan of my playing and hired me to be the saxophonist on the record, so I flew up to Reno and for me it was just another session but I walked into the studio and met this beautiful blonde singer and we hit it off.

John - Was your opening line, I'll only play sax if you marry me?

Warren - (laughing) Yeah, we really hit it off and we spent the whole night just up talking and it was love at first sight there was no doubt.

John - It's not something that can always happen but that instant chemistry can be one of the most magical things in life.

Warren - Oh yeah. There was major chemistry and I waited for her to finish her project and get back in to L.A. and we dove right into heavy dating. We met in June and by the next March I had proposed. We just celebrated our tenth anniversary.

John - Congratulations.

Warren - It was on Valentines Day. I'm very lucky, I'm blessed. I have a wife that supports this crazy live that I have.

John - But she also must really understand probably more than most artists wives since she's a musician herself.

Warren - Yes and before she was a musician she was a model and an actress and she's always been in the entertainment industry and it's a tough industry. She definitely had her share of ups and downs before meeting me and understood that it takes a lot of hard work and dedication. A lot of people think it's just this fun easy ride. (laughing)

John - Yeah for five minutes out of the hour on some days.

Warren - Oh yeah and when I was at Berklee I spent about five or six hours a day in a practice room that was about five feet square so it's a lot of hard work and dedication. Then once you master your craft then you have to go out and promote yourself. That's not easy either because that's a whole other world. Now I'm kind of going into the whole music business side of things.

John - Lets' talk about that. You were with Narada and now you're forming this label. How did the idea even come up?

Warren - Well, it stems from the way the record business is being decimated right now and artists do have to take matters into their own hands. With the fact that we do have the internet existing is a double edged sword. On the one hand with free downloading is why the industry is having such a hard time but it's a blessing because now artists can use it as a vehicle to reach even more fans but not just in their own country but also worldwide. I think it's just incredible not just to mention the fact that now we'll be able to express ourselves in different ways as artists. In the instrumental world and the Smooth Jazz world we're able to really branch out and you can post whatever you want. If I want to do a rock'n Blues tune because it's in me.

John - No label executive guy will be telling you not to do it.

Warren - Exactly. It's really about freedom. I got into music to express myself. It's a creative outlet. I guess one of the things that does bother me about being under a typical recording contract is having people who really know nothing about me as a person and telling me what to do creatively. It really goes against the whole idea about the creative process. What I found after doing this for so long is that there's really starting to be a disparity between the music that's being put on the records and the music that's being presented live. The fans become true fans of the format when they see the music live.

John - It's a great point.

Warren - On the cruise I had this thing called 'Behind the Instrument.' It was a question and answer period with the fans. You have to understand that the people who come on the cruise and spend that kind of money to experience the event are what we call our P1's.

John - Yeah, you're most loyal of fans. I had no idea musician used the word P1 since it's a real radio term.

Warren - (laughing) Yeah, I'm using it on the other side of the fence here man. These are the people who are our core audience. The people that are keeping this format thriving and you have to listen to them. They are the ones urging their friends to turn on the radio stations and buy the records. They are the ones that are driving it.

John - You are always creating relationships. That's what good programming is all about. Music is a large part of that but selling a product is a well rounded activity of forming bonds with the people and that includes listening to their opinions. Isn't that part of any healthy relationship, musical or otherwise?

Warren - We had some interesting conversations and one of the things that came up was they're not as enchanted by what they hear on radio anymore and they're trying to get their friends to get into the music but you turn on a radio and it's almost becoming like background music." Then we bring them out to the live shows and it's the greatest thing they've ever heard. So people always pose the question and that's why can't we get what you do live on record. I'm trying not to let the cat out of the bag too soon since I'm still formulating my new thing but in the back of my mind I'm thinking don't change that dial we'll be back to that shortly. It's definitely something I want to do in the future is offer the recorded version and here's the live version of the song. When it's your own label you have complete control over what you want to distribute and with the magic of the internet people can pick or choose. They can take it or leave it. This thing is definitely a passion of mine. I've self managed myself for about seventy five percent of my career so I've been involved on both sides of the industry, the business side and the music side. I've learned a lot but I've also learned that it's not rocket science. We make a product and we try to get the product out to people. We try to have as much integrity and creativity in it as possible. At the end of the day that's what it is the product that you want to turn people on to buy.

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