My boy Mark Ledford was on trumpet and Vince Henry, who later went on to do the Amy Winehouse record was in the horn section as well. We also had Regina Carter, a world famous jazz violinist in our violin section, and I was on tenor sax, piccolo, and flute in the horn section. I had some of the best musicians in the world to come in and work on this record. We brought Paul Pesco and Victor Bailey in to play on the song. I wrote out the parts for the musicians to play. He came in and started writing out the horn parts, and I told him to write out the string parts. A very good friend of mine Mark Ledford, who is no longer with us, was a multiple Grammy award winning trumpet player. I agreed to do it, and I went in and started off looking at the song from 1972, and since I’m a musician, I started writing out charts. So, I’m thinking, if I go in and make it happen, I’m going to be able to get some production credits. He called me and said, “I want someone to go in there and hook the song up.” What he was really asking me to do was to produce the record, but he didn’t ask me outright to produce it. To this day, I don’t know how much Puffy knows about how much of a musician I am, but maybe he knows more than he was letting on.
Then, I got a call midway through the making of Mary’s album, because Puffy wanted to do a remake of the 1972 Rose Royce song, “I’m Goin’ Down.” He called because he wanted to use a live musician. I was working on Biggie’s, Total’s, and 112’s albums, while the early work was going on with Mary.
Initially, I got called in on the back end of the album. When Jodeci left Manhattan to go up to Rochester, NY to work on their album after A Diary of a Mad Band, Puffy called me out of the blue. I was working with Jodeci and Puffy was the A&R guy. Being involved with Puffy was how it all started for me. So, by the time I heard the What’s the 411? album, it just felt like my calling.īad Boy Records was kind of like a factory back then. I play about eight different instruments and the fact I was into hip hop enabled me to put melodies over hip hop music and blending different ideas. I was just fortunate to be able to play a lot of different instruments, and the songs I was working on before I got there, helped turn the page. We were all young, and we all knew that the soul brought us together. We both knew older soul music, and it was just a whirlwind of things happening. So, are you down or what?” I said, “Down? I’m willing to do her album for free.”īecause I was a fan of her work, and when we met in relationship to our backgrounds, we connected instantly. It started off of as one song, and then Puff came to me and said, “Look man, we really have a chance to do her whole project and it’s not going to be for a whole lot of money, but the opportunity will be there. It actually changed the direction that Puff had for her My Life album, and it really opened the gates to make them say that this album could really define her. So – I’m the new guy and I had one song done with her, and she loved that song. They were coming back with prices like $80,000 for one track. The money they were asking for from Uptown Records for their tracks was outrageous. Due to the success of her first album, the prices of a lot of the producers who worked on the What’s the 411? skyrocketed. At that time, he was only interested in me doing one song for Mary’s album. Right around the time I met Sean Combs, I was dealing with him from a management level. How did you become involved with the process of making this album?
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