Jessica

I was a fan of the Allman Bros. Band when I was a kid. Back in the '80's when I was a member of the house band at The Saddle Rack, Jessica was in our repertoire and I used to look forward to playing it. Back then, our arrangement was pretty similar to the original Allman Bros. Band version. Adapting it to this album was a little tricky because in the Allman Bros. Band's version the melody and two harmonies are distributed among two guitars and organ, all with two drummers, percussion, bass and piano to boot- 8 musicians! It was important to me on this album to have arrangements that could be played by the quartet live, so what they did with 8 we've done with 4. I hope we did it justice! It's challenging to simultaneously and fluidly cover the melody plus a harmony on pedal steel, but it was fun to figure out how to do it!

Many thanks to John R. Burr for helping me in pre-production to come up with the arrangement for this version! And by the way, can John R. (and Jeffrey and Jason) play, or what?

This track features Jeffrey Wash on electric fretless bass, John R. Burr on piano and Jason Lewis on drums and was one of three produced and engineered by Mark Needham at Fantasy Studios, Studio A, on June 13, 2011. David Cilberti led a video crew and shot the session. Videos of the making of Jessica, and the other two tracks we recorded that day, Weather Report's classic Birdland and Bob Haggart's 1939 classic What's New are available at youtube.

Bruce Kaphan
P.O. Box 2012
Fremont, CA 94536
USA