W hen I first saw the credits on those mid-’70s Roy Ayers Ubiquity LPs like Vibrations and Lifeline , I wondered who Edwin Birdsong was. Here was a left-field keyboardist and songwriter who not only worked as coproducer on those pivotal Ubiquity LPs but also had writing credits on classics like “Running Away” and “Red, Black & Green.” Deeper digging revealed a series of his own experimental cosmic-soul LPs that began in 1971 with the Polydor debut What It Is and ended with his Salsoul outing, Funtaztik , in 1981. Despite his prescient and unique music being heavily sampled (De La Soul, Gang Starr, Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, et al.), Edwin Birdsong remains a cultish figure whose genius is shrouded by anonymity. Born in Los Angeles in 1951, Edwin Birdsong was raised in a religious household where his pastor father, who sang in a church quartet, instilled a love of the spirituals. “I started playing piano in Sunday school when I was about eight or nine, playing simple things like ‘Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross,’ ” he tells me over the phone from L.A. “So that’s really where I got started at the Solid Rock Baptist Church, although I didn’t realize at the time how influential it was going to be.” Following his father’s path, he also started singing at the church and as a teenager joined the Los Angeles Community Choir, meeting such luminaries as Merry Clayton and Billy Preston. An equally important formative experience for Birdsong came from outside of the church.“I started studying classical music when I was about six years of age through a piano teacher who lived a few doors away,” he recalls. At the same time as he was developing his classical piano techniques, he was also beginning his first attempts at composition: “I would improvise and make things up while I was playing at the church. I always had that urge to try different things on the piano around the songs I was learning.”While the church would provide his foundation, young Edwin’s ears were opened further to secular music through local radio:“I would hear boogie-woogie tunes, and I noticed that they all had that left-hand movement. And because I was left-handed, it was never really difficult for me to play.” At junior high school, he formed his first small band playing piano with a group of friends.“It was a very rough thing,” he says,“just a group of kids getting together and trying to imitate other people.” But through one of those kids, he was soon to discover a new instrument that would change his creative path: “A friend had taught me how to play a twelve-bar blues in the Jimmy Smith style, on an old Hammond. So from there, I learned to play jazz organ.” Birdsong earned his spurs on the organ when he moved to Germany as an army serviceman in his late teens during theVietnam War.“When I got there, I was already playing the blues, so I would sit in with the band and play the popular songs. And the bartenders, who were the guys in those days who would hire the musicians, would ask me if I had a band. So I put together a group, and that group was called Birdsong and the Sounds.” Stationed in Baltimore for his last six months of service, he put together various bands in the clubs down the famous jazz hub of Pennsylvania Avenue.“Most clubs there at the time had a Hammond organ, which was perfect for me,” he says. With his horizons opened by his trips abroad, Edwin moved to NewYork after he left the army in the late ’60s.“I was going to a music store called Manny’s where I could get hold of the ‘fake books’ that had all the popular jazz classics. So it was through going to Manny’s that I really started to want to learn more about serious jazz. I would go to the clubs up in Harlem and say to the guys,‘Hey, how do you play over these changes?’ ” He was soon sitting in on jam sessions around the city and started to make some influential contacts:“George Benson was playing in one of the clubs uptown, so I sat in with that session.There was always a jam session like that in the week, and I would learn a lot from that.” His serious musical intentions were furthered when he attended both Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard.“People at Manhattan School of Music were more hippy-like, but those at Juilliard were much too serious for me, because I was running around smoking marijuana and having fun with all these different musicians,” he says.“But when I left Manhattan School of Music to study at Juilliard, I did become much more serious in my own studies, because they really challenged you.All the students there studied really hard. I didn’t want to be Bach though, and I certainly didn’t want my music to be so stuffy that it couldn’t be commercial at the same time.”
( previous spread ) From the front cover of Edwin Birdsong’s Super Natural (Polydor; 1973). Original photo by Tack Kojima. ( opposite ) From the back cover of Edwin Birdsong’s Funtaztik (Salsoul; 1981). Original photo by Benno Friedman.
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