Secret Sessions
Producer/guitarist Eric Krasno and jazz legend John Scofield let us in on The Secret.
Choosing the right producer for a project can be tough.
You want someone who understands your musical
vision but pushes you somewhere you can’t get to on your
own. For
The Secret, Vieux Farka Touré chose Soulive guitarist
Eric Krasno. Though they hadn’t previously worked
together, the connection was there from the outset. “I was
a fan of his father, for sure,” says Krasno, “I heard about
[Vieux] through his manager, Eric Herman, who is also a
bass player and musician.”
Eric Krasno lays down the funk at a Soulive gig with his Gibson
ES-335
plugged into a Mesa/Boogie Lonestar combo.
Because Vieux is based in Mali, most of the preproduction
was finished before the two met at a Brooklyn recording
studio. Krasno and Touré traded digital files back and
forth to get a better idea of the direction they wanted to
take. “I would say that 70 percent of the demos were done
in Mali. We would send them back and forth, and I would
listen and give my feedback.”
The title track is a duet between Vieux and his father,
Ali Farka Touré. Krasno was careful not to embellish the
original track too much. “We were going to revamp it
and add some different instrumentation. In the end, we
decided to add a little percussion, but for the most part
we left it how it was and just mixed it.” Although many of
the demos were tracked before the sessions in Brooklyn,
that didn’t prevent them from trying to capture some in-the-moment magic. “There were a few tracks that we just
recorded fresh in the studio—including ‘Lakkal (Watch
Out),’ which I played on. That was pretty much one take
in the studio, and turned it into a song. We used a few different
ways to get from A to Z on this record.”
Because Krasno and Vieux are no strangers to improvisation, getting the right performance was more a matter of getting the
right vibe than a note-perfect take. “Vieux’s approach to recording was all about ‘catch the magic.’ He would rather spend the
time cleaning it up and adding overdubs than recording more takes, if he feels like the magic is there,” says Krasno.
Bona fide jazz-guitar legend John Scofield—who joined Vieux on “Gido”—came to the project through Krasno. Sco wasn’t
familiar with the younger Touré, but he was already interested in music from the region. “I have been aware of North African
music and its similarity to blues. I read some treatises from academic guys saying that a lot of blues sounds come from Mali.
When I heard his father, I just loved it,” says Scofield. When he arrived at the session, the track was mostly complete. “It was
very natural for me. On my solo, I used a 1974 Gibson ES-335 with a Bigsby going into a DigiTech Whammy pedal and a
Bad Cat amp. I did a faux-Eastern sort of thing that is very much related to my blues approach to guitar. It felt right just to
play. In other words, I didn’t even have to know the tune. The music felt very much at home for me.”
Krasno says he wanted to push Vieux to go out of his comfort zone when it came to gear so that the tones would be different
than on previous albums. “I had him use a Jerry Jones sitar on some stuff. You can hear that in there,” mentions Krasno.
“It sounds like a guitar with a weird phaser pedal. We also used a cranked 1968 Fender Super Reverb for some of the more distorted
sounds you hear. He really likes using a chorus pedal, too, so I was trying to pull him away from it. We recorded at this
place called The Bunker Studios, and John Davis, the engineer, had a lot of tricked-out weird stuff. I would say the primary
gear was a ’90s Fender Strat through the Super.”
Throughout the sessions, Krasno got an up-close view of Touré’s style and even picked up a few things. “Every time I work
with a new person, I take a little piece of that with me,” he says. “His rhythm and how he hears it is just amazing. On some of
the tracks, he would count them off and I would hear them in a totally different place. His innate feel is just in a different place
from where I am at—but at the end of the sessions, I knew where that was.”