February 11, 2005

Back to the table of Contents Page

Classifieds

Palo Alto Online

A sort of homecoming

by Allen Clapp

In the main studio at Skywalker Sound, on a rainy January day, a song composed and recorded just moments ago streams out of the control room monitors.

The light meters on the console stop their dancing, and there is a profound silence, broken only by soft sobs of emotion. The music comes courtesy of Olympia, Wash. pianist Karen Garrett, and the man holding her and whispering words of encouragement is producer Will Ackerman.

The song doesn't have a name yet, but the composition -- which occurred nonchalantly, almost accidentally, following an extended lunch break and tour of George Lucas' Marin County Skywalker Ranch -- was cathartic for the composer and anyone else who happened to hear it.

"He encouraged me to push myself outside the classical box I was in -- encouraged me to explore emotion, and not be inhibited," Garrett says moments later, still a little teary-eyed.

It's nothing tangible, but it's easy to see how an entire musical movement coalesced around Ackerman and his Windham Hill records in the late '70s. With Ackerman's encouragement, anything seems possible.

His own solo career was launched inauspiciously with a self-produced solo guitar album funded by friends and sold in shops on University Avenue in 1976. The now-heralded "The Search for the Turtle's Navel" and the label it launched has led him on a journey that is equal parts success and sadness. From the burger joints and Laundromats of a pre-Silicon Valley Palo Alto to the wealth and disillusionment of running a multi-national record label in the '90s, Ackerman, now in his mid-50s, arrived at a point in his life where he wanted to look back.

The result, 2004's "Returning," sees him re-evaluating his own back catalog and re-recording favorite guitar solos from his nearly 30-year career. The album is nominated for a Grammy Award this Sunday-- his third such nomination -- and he's hoping to win.

It's Ackerman's first album to lack new, original material. Meticulously recorded at his Imaginary Road studio in rural Vermont on state-of-the-art digital equipment, the performances bear little resemblance to his early attempts.

"I was a kid marching through the songs. I was nervous -- the studio clock was ticking," Ackerman said. "Nuance and emotion -- playing a heartfelt melody -- those are my gifts. I'm not an incredible tap player like (the late) Michael Hedges, and I'm not the technician that Alex Degrassi is."

There is an urgency to his early recordings that impart a buoyant energy, but Ackerman wanted to be "emotionally connected to every note" he played.

"Returning" finds the artist's talent aging gracefully, even as the movement he unwittingly helped create has all but died.

"If I ever catch the guy who invented the term 'New Age,' I'll nail his forehead to the wall," Ackerman said.

According to Ackerman, the moniker was coined by major-label executives in the mid 1980s to market their own Windham Hill-esque music.

"They flooded the market with undifferentiated product, and compromised what we were trying to do tremendously," he said. Ackerman tells of a Capitol Records executive who once said, "All we have to do is get a guy who plays piano and put a lot of white on the cover."

What most New Age music lacked was soul. Lambasted by critics, it's been called sleep-inducing, elevator music, modern Muzak and worse.

Ackerman agrees. Most of it bears little resemblance to the minimalist acoustic music he and his friends were releasing on Windham Hill in the late 1970s.

"What we were doing was utterly honest. It was a grassroots musical movement. Not 'lifestyle' music."

It was a movement that grew naturally out of Ackerman's childhood fascination with folk music. Growing up in College Terrace, Ackerman -- the adopted son of Stanford English professor Robert Ackerman, and his wife, Mary -- was a bike ride away from seeing the Kingston Trio's regular performances at the Student Union. A beatnik babysitter would take him to a basement cafe on Ramona Street to see a young, unsigned Joan Baez.

One of his favorite performers was a woman named Thelma, who would clean the laundromat near JJ&F Market.

"I would just sit there and listen while she made up her own spirituals."

Nourished in his teens by the likes of John Fahey, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake and Jimmy Page, Ackerman quickly found his own voice as a guitarist. He dropped out of Stanford to start Windham Hill Construction, figuring woodwork would pay his bills while he struggled as an artist.

Not long after the release of "Turtle's Navel," which he sold on consignment to local record stores, he began producing albums by kindred spirits such as Hedges and his own cousin, Degrassi. It wasn't long before a rabid music fan named George Winston auditioned for his own acoustic guitar album.

"Alex and I were staying with George after a show in 1979. We were in his kitchen, and he played some slide guitar for us. He was really good, and we talked about putting out a guitar album," Ackerman said.

"Later on, when we were getting ready to call it a night -- we were going to sleep on the floor in his living room -- he said, 'Mind if I play a little piano before I go to sleep?' We said, 'Sure,' and what he ended up playing was most of what would become his first (Windham Hill) album, 'Autumn.'"

The next morning, the pianist was still talking about making a slide-guitar album, but Ackerman knew Winston was onto something unique.

"I had just heard what I thought was probably the first folk-piano album."

Winston would quickly change the fortunes of Windham Hill. Suddenly the label was selling millions of albums, and the label's imprint became a prestigious international brand.

But at the height of his label's success, Ackerman was not a happy man.

"I should have been dancing on a cloud, but I ultimately felt I had betrayed what I felt I should have been doing."

It all came to a head one day driving his Mercedez-Benz through downtown Mill Valley in an episode he says made him aware of his "poodle existence."

"I was driving a nice car, I was wearing a nice suit, and I was coming from a nice restaurant when I saw this attractive young woman riding her bike. I looked over at her, and she just looked at me with utter disdain -- as if everything I represented was a total sellout. And suddenly I realized I had become the thing that I hated the most."

Not long after, in an effort to shed his corporate identity, Ackerman sold the car, sold the Mill Valley House -- he had left Palo Alto in the mid-1980s when the label began to boom -- and even sold his record label to BMG.

"I always thought I'd be a carpenter, drinking beers on the back of a truck at the end of the day," he said.

It's one thing Ackerman has taken time to do since selling Windham Hill. He builds in the traditional post-and-beam style, keeping his projects fairly close to his Vermont home, where he has lived since the early '90s. He recently constructed a home for writer and NPR radio personality Tom Bodett.

Back at Skywalker Ranch, Ackerman studies the Art Nouveau-inspired architectural details in the main house, marvels at the retractable acoustic baffles in the studio, and generates theories about how it all might have been built. Passing by a vintage Steinway downstairs from Lucas' office, he plucks out a melody from Erik Satie's "Trois Gymnopedies."

He's in his element as a producer, and the surroundings are a source of inspiration.

"What a great idea. Build a ranch, fill it with the best technology available, and just let people be creative," Ackerman said.

The sessions are moving along nicely, as well. The combination of Garrett's melodic compositions, the 9-foot Bluthner piano and the heavenly Skywalker Sound acoustics are producing ethereal results. It's safe to say Ackerman knows how to produce a successful solo-piano album.

And he's clearly glad to be back in Northern California, although he laments the days when one could drive from Palo Alto to San Jose on El Camino Real and encounter only three traffic signals.

One place he won't be visiting is his childhood home on Amherst Avenue, where his mother committed suicide when Ackerman was 12. He planted a tree on the property in memory of her, which still grew there on his last visit. It's the inspiration for his latest record label, the Decca-distributed Mary's Tree.

It could be taken as proof that "Returning" marks more than just a re-evaluation of Ackerman's back catalog.

Ackerman is a man who appears to be at peace with his past and optimistic about the future -- producing, performing, building -- and taking the time to appreciate each hammer-fall and every note.

If there's any justice in the world, Ackerman will be able to add a Grammy to his varied list of accomplishments. Without his little Palo Alto record label, the "New Age" category in which the album is nominated wouldn't even exist.

E-mail a friend a link to this story.