Through his wife, Michelle, who was working as a stewardess on American Airlines, Birdsong was introduced to Wes Farrell, cowriter of the hit song “Hang on Sloopy.” “Wes had his own publishing company, and I let him hear some of the songs I had written,” he recalls. “I didn’t know until then I could just get paid as a writer for other people, but that’s what I started to do. I was also playing at a club in the East Village called Pee Wee’s, and Wes came to hear me and invited Jerry Schoenbaum, the President of Polydor. So Jerry heard me play, and it went from there.”
Alongside other socially conscious numbers like “Pretty Brown Skin” (cowritten with Michelle Birdsong and Roy Ayers, who also recorded the track the same year) and “The Uncle Tom Game” was the gospel-influenced “My Father Preaches That God Is the Father.” Despite his new connections with the hip jazz world of New York, this dedication showed the respect Edwin would always have for the church. “Coming from a religious background, I didn’t want to go back to California and be playing in the clubs because of my father being a pastor,” he says. “So that prompted me even more to stay in NewYork.” Perhaps the standout track on the LP and certainly the most progressive was “The Spirit of Do…Do,” which was later slowed down into a woozy jazz-funk cut on the Roy Ayers Ubiquity LP Mystic Voyage .
Roy, and I actually did my first recording session for Herbie at Atlantic Studios.” Birdsong and Ayers soon entered the studio together, beginning a long creative partnership. “I think my main influence on Roy at that time was getting him to move from being a purely jazz musician to become more bluesy and commercial,” he says. “I also took him from just playing jazz into singing more.”
Roy Ayers’s 1970 LP, Ubiquity , would be a milestone recording both for Ayers and Birdsong. “That was the start of our publishing company, Ayer-Bird Music,” says Edwin. The exploratory sound of “Pretty Brown Skin” and “Hummin’ ” (most recently sampled by Kendrick Lamar on “Celebration”) worked like a template for the pair’s future explorations into cosmic jazz-funk. It was a sound founded as much on Birdsong’s complex organ arrangements as the elegant, shifting vibraphone work of Ayers. In 1973, Birdsong furthered his musical partnership with Ayers, penning the classic title track of the Red, Black & Green album. The same year, Edwin returned with his second LP, Super Natural .“How that [album] differed from What It Is was that I wanted to do a more rock-influenced album,” he says. “I had used Eddie Kramer on the first album to mix the LP, and on Super Natural, I brought him in as a producer and engineer. I had a young guitarist by the name of Ronnie Drayton. He was such a great guitarist in that Hendrix tradition that it blew Eddie’s mind.”The LP was recorded at Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studio in New York.“When we were there, Jimi’s stuff was in the hallway—his amps and stuff were scattered about—so his spirit was really all over that album,” says Birdsong. However, Polydor’s lack of promotion for the LP left Birdsong frustrated. “I had
Edwin Birdsong’s debut LP, What It Is , was released on Polydor in 1971.The album was recorded at the Fame Recording Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with executive producer Ted Cooper and engineers like Jerry Masters. It would prove to be an LP of great depth and maturity for a young man who had just turned twenty.“It was nothing for me to write those songs, really; it came very easy to me,” he says.“Ted Cooper really knew his way around the studio, and I also became very interested in that. I had studied technical illustration in college, so I always embraced that kind of stuff, because I was something of a nerd. I was very technical in my approach to music.” Drawing heavily on the social and political issues of the time, it sat comfortably next to LPs like Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On and Gil Scott- Heron’s Pieces of a Man . “This was just after the ’60s at the time of the protest songs and stuff like that, and so I came up with numbers like ‘It Ain’t No Fun Being a Welfare Recipient’ and ‘Mr. Money Man.’ ” These were just two of the songs written with his wife, with whom he’d set up the Michelle-Bird publishing company, and who went on to write songs with both Edwin and Roy Ayers.
Edwin’s relationship with Roy Ayers went right back to their high school days in Los Angeles: “Roy went to Jefferson High School, and I went to Freeman High, which were rival schools. At the time, I was a member of this group of guys called the Continental Gents. We would put on parties and stuff, and Roy was in one of the groups that we had hired to play for us out at the beach.” The pair’s friendship would be rekindled when both relocated to New York: “I lived on Eighteenth Street, and he moved just around the corner on Seventh Avenue between Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets. So he and I became friends.This would have been around 1969.” Roy Ayers was already making his name in the city’s jazz scene as Edwin recalls: “He was playing with Herbie Mann at the time.” Ayers and Mann’s relationship had been cemented on the 1969 heavyweight LP Memphis Underground .“I really liked Herbie’s music but hadn’t realized Roy played in the band. Anyway, I was introduced to him by
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