waka waka waka

On Thursday, the 24th of March, New York City’s musical family assembled at the Church of the Tranfiguration on East 29th Street to say goodbye to the gifted bassist Wayne Pedziwiatr (a.k.a. Pedzwater), who had died the previous week after a long and grueling struggle with gastric cancer. To know Wayne was to love him, and since pretty much every professional musician in New York knew him, the gathering was not small.

Wayne was a remarkable figure; he seemed to glow from within. He was tall, athletic, and strikingly handsome, with the sort of physical presence that one might imagine could only be the result of a carefully managed eugenics program. He had a dazzling smile, a nimble, curious and capacious mind, and a splendidly pungent sense of humor. Above all, though, were his extraordinary musicianship and his dedication to excellence.

I probably did more sessions with Wayne than any other bassist. I first met him when I was starting out as a staff engineer at Power Station Studios back in the late 1970s, and from then until my semi-retirement from recording in the last few years I worked with him on hundreds of recordings. During the bustling 1990s, as I went from studio to studio for different sessions, there were many weeks when I would find myself working with Wayne on almost every date. Wayne was the caring engineer’s dream: a perfect tone, round and clear, an impeccable feel for the “pocket”, and the technical ability to play whatever was put in front of him, even when it was some keyboard-written bass line that looked fine as a MIDI display but was an ungainly monstrosity on a stringed instrument. His greatest gift, though, was his faultless good taste. He never overplayed, never showed off — though he certainly had the chops — but instead always managed to understand, and then play, whatever was exactly right for the track. Often he would ask to do “fixes” on what he had played — even when everyone involved already thought it sounded wonderful — and sure enough, he would find and repair some little weakness, some slight divergence from his idea of what the perfect performance ought to be, and make the track even better.

Bass can be one of the hardest things to get right in a mix, and whenever Wayne was on a session I always knew that I would have one fewer problem to solve. As our friend Michael Golub said at the memorial service, when Wayne was on your session, he just made everything better.

Many of us, given Wayne’s good looks and abundant talent, would have succumbed to the egotism that is such a common spiritual pitfall in the performing arts — Lord knows the music business is full of insufferable narcissists — but Wayne, far from indulging such weakness, had a keen eye for such types, and an equally sharp tongue, when the occasion arose. Often during sessions, in the presence of some preening popinjay, I would glance over at Wayne; he and I would exchange a look that was a conversation in itself about the foolishness of human vanity, with an unspoken joke or two thrown in about the particular jackass at hand. It always made things more bearable. I think I miss that more than anything else about him: his ability to say so much to me with just a raised eyebrow, a loaded grin, or a weary shake of the head.

As befits such an ubermensch, Wayne had also found the perfect companion to be his wife: the beautiful Patty Forbes, tall, blonde, warm-hearted, intelligent, and charming. All of us who joined them at their wedding were surprised not to see the Valkyrie in attendance.

I was sitting at my computer on a Sunday night last November when I suddenly thought of Wayne. I hadn’t seen him for at least a year or two; the recording industry having fallen on some difficult times, I had decided to do something else for a while, and had been working at a friend’s startup company as a software developer. But suddenly, there he was, in the forefront of my mind, as if he had just walked into the room. The impression was so strong that I was quite startled, and resolved to get in touch with my old friend the next day.

When I got to my office the following morning I found an email; the subject line said “Wayne Pedzwater”. I was shocked by this remarkable coincidence, and took a long breath before opening the message. What I read was, as I feared, bad news: Wayne, that glittering exemplar of health and fitness, had been stricken with stomach cancer shortly after I had seen him last. Chemotherapy had not halted its advance, and he had resorted to drastic surgery — the removal of his stomach — to halt the disease’s progress. This had seemed to work, though, and he had gradually put his life back together, had begun riding his bicycle again, and was beginning to take up his career once more, when the cancer reappeared.

Wayne fought grimly, but his foe was relentless. His medical insurance was soon exhausted, and he and Patty were faced with financial ruin. The email I had received was an announcement of a fundraising party and concert — “Pedzwaterpalooza”, to be held at the Cutting Room in Chelsea on November 22nd.

The party was all that anyone could have hoped it would be. The club was jammed beyond capacity, with people spilling out into the street. I can’t imagine that there was any music played anywhere else in the city that night, because every musician in town turned out to show their love (and turned out their pockets as well) for Wayne and Patty. In various combinations, the cream of New York’s players and singers took the stage, and nobody was “phoning it in” that night, I can tell you.

Wayne couldn’t be there; he was too sick to make it. He saw it all on video. I hope he had some sense of the love that accumulated in that room that evening — love not just for Wayne, although that was offered up in abundance — but also for the entire community of musicians, a family that is slowly breaking apart as recording passes from the communal activity it has always been to a solitary one. Until recently, making a record meant going to a studio and gathering together players, singers, engineers, and producers; music-making was as much about the interplay of personalities as of instruments. Now, though, it is almost entirely a solitary craft — the studio is a computer in a tiny room, the basic tracks are collages of pre-recorded samples, and human players, when needed, are added one at a time. I felt the hunger for our vanishing collaborative family in everyone I saw at Wayne’s party; it is a tremendous pity that it takes such tragic circumstances these days to bring us all together again.

My friend Wayne Pedzwater died peacefully in his sleep in the early morning hours of March 17th, 2005, in the company of his loving wife and those closest to him.

He was a gift to us all, and he is irreplaceable.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2005 at 11:17 am and is filed under Music and Recording. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.