Collection: John Klemmer

John Klemmer grew up in Chicago surrounded by Muddy Waters, Chess Records and the city's R&B scene, started alto saxophone at eleven, switched to tenor in high school, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Interlochen's National Music Camp, and signed to Cadet/Chess Records in 1967 while still a teenager. The debut album there was co-produced by Marshall Chess, and "Blowin Gold" (Cadet, 1969), with its rock rhythms and innovative production techniques, is cited by multiple sources as one of the earliest jazz-rock fusion records. He moved to Impulse! for five albums in the early 1970s, where a Coltrane influence sat alongside Eddie Harris's electrified saxophone experiments in shaping his developing echoplex-augmented tenor sound, before ABC Records signed him and the trajectory changed completely. "Touch" (MCA, 1975) used the echoplex and a spare, melodic approach to produce something entirely new: intimate, production-heavy, deceptively simple solo saxophone music that reached a large pop and adult contemporary audience and is now widely credited as a direct precursor of smooth jazz. Klemmer himself described it as never commercially intended. The hip-hop sampling that followed in the 1990s brought a second wave of attention to those MCA and Elektra records. Two distinct careers with two distinct audiences, and they intersect uncomfortably.