Collection: Steve Khan

Steve Khan grew up in Los Angeles as the son of Sammy Cahn, one of the most successful lyricists in American popular song, which tells you something about why he moved to New York and spent his career in a very different direction. He started on drums, switched to guitar at nineteen after hearing Wes Montgomery, graduated from UCLA in music composition and theory in 1969, and arrived in New York in time to become one of the most in-demand session guitarists of the 1970s, working across jazz, pop and R&B with Maynard Ferguson, Buddy Rich, the Brecker Brothers, Joe Zawinul's Weather Update and Blood Sweat and Tears, and contributing to Steely Dan's "Aja" after engineer Elliot Scheiner recommended him to Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Bobby Colomby and Bob James signed him to Columbia Records, and between 1977 and 1979 he released three well-received fusion albums, "Tightrope," "The Blue Man" and "Arrows," all featuring Michael and Randy Brecker, David Sanborn, Don Grolnick, Will Lee and Steve Gadd, a band that was essentially the first-call New York session pool of the late 1970s playing his compositions. Columbia dropped him in 1980, and his response was to record "Evidence," a solo acoustic guitar album built around a nine-song Thelonious Monk medley and named for a Monk composition, which announced a more searching direction entirely. The Eyewitness quartet that followed, with contrabassist Anthony Jackson, percussionist Manolo Badrena and drummer Steve Jordan, developed a post-bop electric style that had largely shed the fusion markers of the Columbia years. Japanese Trio Records pressings of the early Eyewitness albums from 1981 to 1983 are among the most collected of his catalogue. He remains active.