Collection: David Axelrod

David Axelrod came up in Los Angeles as a session musician before joining Capitol Records as a producer and A&R man in late 1963, where he quickly proved himself one of the most ambitious thinkers in the building. His production of Cannonball Adderley's "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at 'The Club'" in 1967 was a genuine crossover success, and his work with Lou Rawls generated a run of gold albums and R&B hits through the mid-decade. By 1968, Capitol gave him space to pursue his own records. The three solo albums that followed, "Song of Innocence" (1968), "Songs of Experience" (1969), and "Earth Rot" (1970), are the ones collectors come for: heavy-bottomed, baroque orchestrations built around booming drums and themes drawn from William Blake's poetry, environmental collapse, and Black consciousness. Axelrod worked with a core group of Los Angeles session players including Carol Kaye on bass and Earl Palmer on drums, and the results sit in a zone that jazz, soul, rock, and classical all touch without quite claiming. Obscure for most of the 1980s, his catalogue was systematically excavated by crate-digging producers in the 1990s. DJ Shadow, Dr. Dre, Madlib, and Lauryn Hill all drew from it. Original Capitol pressings of the solo albums are genuinely sought-after objects; the 2005 Capitol Jazz compilation "The Edge" remains the best single-volume introduction to his work.