Amarcord Hal Willner

The iconic producer Hal Willner passed away a little over a week ago, on Tuesday 7 April 2020. The same day, John Prine and Eddy Davis also took off. It felt like a COVID-19-induced Black Tuesday for the music world, but maybe Hal had simply invited them to join him for a follow-up to Lost in the Stars, together with Sun Ra, William S. Burroughs, Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Jaki Byard, Hunter S. Thompson, Dr. John, Ken Nordine, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jimmy Scott, Jeff Buckley and a whole bunch of other merry friends who had been waiting for Hal to finally bring his brand of controlled chaos and unbridled fun to heaven.

The last few days have been, to paraphrase the title of one of Willner's most acclaimed projects, a weird nightmare. The disbelief and sorrow that overtook social media is a testimony of how many people Hal Willner's work touched.

To celebrate his visionary legacy, we have collected remembrances, anecdotes and reflections from many among his closest collaborators, friends and admirers. To be consistent with the Hal Willner style of music production, all contributors were asked to bring to the table whatever they felt was right. As a result, the contributions are quite varied in terms of length, format and style. All perfect in their own way. Going through these gems, several recurring themes emerge, which manage to perfectly illustrate who Hal Willner was, and why people loved him. Read together, these "Sketches of Hal" also give an insight into why he liked to work and spend time with these artists. You can go through these remembrances and feel the original voices behind all of them, appreciate the total absence of cliches, and enjoy the underlying sense of humor and fun despite the circumstances in which they've been written. Thus, they collectively mirror the spirit behind the projects that Hal Willner liked to concoct.

I'm sure that this article is going to be just one of many tributes that will be paid to honor Hal Willner in the months to come, especially as we will be emerging from our seclusion. Producer and engineer Marc Urselli, a long-time friend and collaborator of Hal (see his remembrance below), has already started working on a website and a tribute to his legacy that will bring together many of the musicians that knew and worked with Hal. An homage to Marc Bolan and T.Rex, the latest recording produced by Hal Willner, should be released in the coming months. Hopefully, the tribute to Nino Rota at Lincoln Center, produced by Hal Willner, will be finally staged after it got cancelled in June 2018 due to weather problems. And, a few days ago, Saturday Night Live ran a touching homage video (see below). So stay tuned, because even though Hal Willner is no longer with us his legacy will always be, through the work of those who admired him.

The article includes contributions, organized in alphabetical order, by: Art Baron; Steven Bernstein; Mark Bingham; Carla Bley; Greg Cohen; John Corbett; Adam Dorn; Terry Edwards; Donald Fagen; Sharyn Felder; Bill Frisell; Amy Gordon; Robin Holcomb; Iggy Pop; Kramer; Mary Lee Kortes; Michael Leonhart; Gary Lucas; Karen Mantler; Eric Mingus; Roy Nathanson; Janine Nichols; John Patitucci; Shawn Pelton; Bobby Previte; Marc Ribot; Marcus Rojas; David Sanborn; Jenny Scheinman; John Scofield; Syd Straw; Matt Sweeney; Marc Urselli; Suzanne Vega; Steve Weisberg; Doug Wieselman; and Robert Wilson.

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Art Baron

musician

There are a few Giants who walk the Earth, and beyond a doubt, Hal Willner was absolutely at the top. Since his passing I have thought a lot about him. He was a Gentle Giant. At first glance you might have missed his brilliance, his amazing depth, all those kinds of things. And beyond that he made what he did look easy. He just did it!

I am fortunate to have worked for him since 1989, starting with Weird Nightmare (Meditations on Mingus). At the time I was too busy to notice, but now I have the time to, that he brought together the most outrageous groups of musicians, singers, spoken artists and engineers. He had a gift for this, and he gave the right people music to arrange, create and live in a Hal kind of world.

At first, I did wonder what he actually was doing, sitting quietly in the control room of the recording studio; really quiet, indeed! And when things weren't moving he would gently chortle "C'mon, ya bastaaaads."

But now I get it. He was the most "hands-on" type of producer, in the most subtle of ways. He was a remarkable catalyst in creating a multitude of works, an incredible body of work for one man to have been the major force in creating. What brilliance, having Elvis Costello singing the title song "Weird Nightmare" or Leonard Cohen reading Mingus poetry on "Eclipse" or Lou Reed and James Carter playing together, enticing each other to go to the next level, and the next, and the next...

I do have one final request; a couple of summers ago we rehearsed the music for the concert version of his Amarcord Nino Rota recording. Yet again, it was an astonishing group of artists gathered together for this beautiful experience. Some came in from Europe as well! There were rehearsals, and then the Lincoln Center Out of Doors soundcheck. During the soundcheck (outdoors) the skies were darkening, and the stage manager was monitoring the coming storm, a big electrical storm. We were hastened off the stage. We waited and waited. Some rain fell, and we finally were told we would not be playing. Everyone felt beyond dismayed. The core orchestra got amazingly tight in a short period of time. What a let-down, not to perform. The line to get into the event went around the block... We were so saddened, and Hal was so fired up he wanted us to get a studio and record it that night! It didn't happen, yet we all held hope that it would. So here is my wish: that somehow, some way this project be put back together, and as an homage to Hal, we have a stellar performance, just one last time...

The life of Hal Willner is something we all can learn from, for a really, really long time.

Steven Bernstein

musician

I first started working with Hal 31 years ago, playing on the TV show Night Music in 1989 with Karen Mantler, Carla Bley, Allen Toussaint and Bootsy. Hal came up and told me he had been hearing me at the Knitting Factory, and enjoyed the cooperative trio I was in, Spanish Fly. This led to him producing our first two records, and a working relationship that included numerous recordings and live shows often with me in the role of "musical director." We made a lot of music, we took a lot of chances, we had a lot of fun, I can't even start that conversation...

Reflecting over the last week, it is now even clearer to me how much Hal was part of my life. Everywhere I look there he is. So many of the gifts he gave me were obvious, but so many were stealth gifts, and now I see where they came from. Kind of the way Hal did everything. He helped guide me through the darkest part of my life. He was as special and unique as a friend as he was as a visionary artist.

In the 21st century everyone gets their information from one source... the computer has your music, your movies, your newspaper, your politics, your dirty pictures. Whether you are searching for Husker Du or Jimmie Lunceford it's still just a click. But before all of this technology we went to record stores. You walked in and the pop/rock section was up front. Jazz, R&B and Blues was behind that. You went to the back for classical, comedy, and "International." A friend said that Hal "Could see around corners." Hal saw a world where it was all one shared expression. Not sections in a record store, the vision of one large community, and he created and nourished a community. A word that keeps coming up when people describe Hal is "generous." His generous vision changed our culture for the better. Thank you Hal... I'll be seeing you. xxoosb

Mark Bingham

musician, producer

I don't have just one memory of Hal to share. I have, at least, 12:

• Woodstock, 1988. It took us 24 hours to mix Garth Hudson's "Feed the Birds" for Stay Awake (Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films) (A&M). Joe Ferla, Hal and me.
• Los Angeles 1985. Mixing Lost in the Stars at A+M. We went to Club Lingerie to see Thelonious Monster. The waitress had a name tag that said "Aidszilla." Hal tried to get her to give it to him. She refused.
• Los Angeles, 1999. I'm down and out after my 19-year marriage ends. Broke. Hal "hires" me, uncredited, to watch the movie Finding Forrester with him and "help" him choose music for the soundtrack. He pays me when he didn't have to. We take bike rides from Venice Beach to Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway and back.
• New Orleans, 2017. U2 is ready to record "Bang a Gong." With Marc Urselli engineering, we try to use the old Piety Street studio, which is now a private studio. It's my first recording session with alleged ex-Mossad agents protecting the studio. I bring mics and help get players. Hal pulls it off.
• New York, 1988. We record a version of "Alice in Wonderland" for Stay Awake using porn stars as vocalists. Disney has been hard to deal with and we are foolishly trying to fuck with them. The track is great but in the mastering process, Bob Ludwig convinced Hal not to include it. Hal ended up calling one of the medleys "3 inches is such a wretched height."
• Los Angeles, Summer of 1987—Stay Awake sessions. Hal lives an entire week on challah bread, mustard and Hebrew National Salami. Throw in a few Pink's hot dogs.
• Summer 1987. Hal and I share a 2AM "Festive Fruit Cup" with Allen Ginsberg at Vim and Vigor, a 24-hour health food place which no longer exists, gearing up for the recording session of The Lion For Real.
• New York, 1985. Crashing at Hal's 58th Street apartment while he's gone, I discover the old dude sleeping on the couch is Terry Southern.
• New York, 2005. Hal picks the Davell Crawford song "Gather by the River" as the "hit" from the Our New Orleans record. He was right.
• New York, 1983. Hal lets me do a track for the Monk tribute album That's the Way I Feel Now: A Tribute to Thelonious Monk. "Brilliant Corners" is well received, which changes my life forever.
• New Orleans, 2010. Hal asks about local hip-hop. He wisely includes Big Freedia and Katey Red on Son of Rogues Gallery: (Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, & Chanteys).
• Los Angeles, August 1987. After a harrowing day recording Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson, we unwind by breaking into the South Pasadena High football field. We spend two hours looking up at the sky. Not a star to be found.

Carla Bley

musician

My friendship with Hal was one of the most enduring I have had. 40 years of crossing paths. Always glad we existed on earth at the same time.

Greg Cohen

musician

When I think back to the adventures I went on with Hal Willner, it's dizzying! There was never a dull moment, with portals opening into a fathomless ocean of ideas.

It was during the production of Weird Nightmare that I got a call from Hal. He wanted me to go with him to Madrid, Spain. At the last minute, he got Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and the musicians playing with the Rolling Stones on their Steel Wheels tour, including their horn section, the Uptown Horns, to clear a few days and go into the studio and record wherever they happened to be on those days. Madrid as it turned out. We cut "Oh Lord, Don't Drop that Atomic Bomb on Me" featuring Keith, and "Tonight at Noon" featuring Charlie.

I didn't know what I was getting myself into at the time. The trip all happened on a day's notice. The next morning I found myself in a studio with these nine legendary figures. Keith and Charlie were two of my biggest influences in my formative years. There was only one person on the planet that could have tossed me into a room with them... Hal! I will miss him as a dear friend, as a mentor and inspiration to reach for the stars at all times.

John Corbett

journalist, producer

Car service, 1AM, after a long night in the studio. At the last minute, Hal had invited me to observe some recordings, so I'd changed my return airline ticket and tagged along. Now we were on our way back from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Hal's approach to recording has been described as controlled chaos, and nothing on this day contradicted that. Two additional sessions, one of them involving a Salvation Army Band, had been scrapped for one reason or another, but not without numerous contingency plans being hatched and ditched, alternative venues contacted, complex personalities attended to, charts reorganized, the possibility explored of calling in one or two of the unlimited supply of favors owed him, a small pit crew spiking and dipping adrenaline along the way.

The evening with Todd Rundgren had gone smoothly, however. Easy setup. Crack band helmed by Steven Bernstein. Donald Fagen. Takes and playbacks and new approaches and more playbacks. Hal in a porkpie hat, T-shirt and unbuttoned overshirt, peering through the control room glass, stealing into the live room for a huddle with the musicians or a conference with Bernstein. A case study in improvised record production.

Waiting for the car, exhaustion had washed over me. I tried to imagine how tired Hal must have been. We were quiet in the back seat. Seemed like time for a nap. Hal took out his iPad. End of day email check, I figured. He scrolled a little then leaned toward me. "What do you think of the new Odean Pope record?" Hal pressed play. "It's pretty great. And that Jim O'Rourke solo record, you dig it? Oh, and what about this...have you heard this?"

Adam Dorn

musician

I've never not known Hal. This is just such a shock for me. Hal has been a constant presence in my personal and professional life. For 40 years.

Hal was a student of my father (Joel Dorn) and his very close dear friend. In turn Hal returned that favor with me, and I owe him so much for it. 23-plus years of magical live shows, recording sessions, SNL spot work and film scores. He always found a way when it made sense to involve me on projects.

More than the art. More than the music. More than the work, the thing I loved the most about Hal was the laughter. So many inside jokes. So much appreciation for comedy from 100 years ago. So many in-depth conversations about Shemp.

I wish this amount of joy and laughter that we shared on everyone. It's the sort of thing that makes the world a better place. Hal Willner made this world a far, far better place.

Terry Edwards

musician

Hal's sudden passing was a kick in the stomach for us all, whether we knew him well or not. It struck me shortly after attending the online "Easter Parade for Hal" (arranged by Pamela Esterson and Ed Harcourt on Easter Sunday), that whilst I can only be described as a minnow amongst the big fish in Hal's weird and wonderful aquarium, my experience was Hal's world in microcosm.

We met on the occasion of David Sefton and Amanda Hogg's wedding at the bride's parents' home, east of Edinburgh. Whenever I looked up Hal was staring through me. Lord knows why... I got to work with him three times. The Disney night for Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown at London's Royal Festival Hall where I played second trumpet amongst a roll-call of astonishing and odd bedfellows (the norm for these productions, as others here will testify), then a day in a recording studio in Los Angeles in 2006 where several tracks were made for the Rogues Gallery double album, and lastly in Adelaide in 2015 for Eric Mingus's visionary take on The Who's Tommy."

I'll not go through the Rolodex of astonishing people involved in all three productions, but it strikes me that Edinburgh-London-Los Angeles-Adelaide, with four disparate reasons to be there, might give an inkling of what Mr. Willner got up to with the heavy hitters. I'm but a footnote to his output.

I always thought I'd get to do something with him again. I guess everyone did.

Donald Fagen

musician

I've known Hal since frogs ruled the world. Once, in the late '80s, he approached me at an SNL after-party and said he'd just got back from William Burroughs' home in Kansas. He'd persuaded Bill to record some word jazz, and he was now calling in various people to create backing tracks for the routines.

A week later, at a midtown studio, Hal played me the recording. Although Burroughs' performance was adequate, the sound quality of the tape was just horrible. It sounded as though Burroughs had droned out the bits while frying himself up some liver and eggs, with Hal following him around the kitchen with a miserable, cheap little cassette machine.

The thing is, I knew that Hal not only didn't care, but probably loved the fact that he'd caught the old hipster in his natural habitat. The track came out pretty nice, crackle and all.

That was Willner, working to document something he loved while accepting the world in all its messy, authentic suchness. That's a rare quality these days, and it seems at the point of extinction. With the culture in steep decline, I've been missing all that, a lot. And I'll be missing Hal.

Sharyn Felder

old friend

I loved Hal very much. I've known him for about 45 years. He was close to my dad, Doc Pomus, by way of Joel Dorn. He opened my world to countless friends, shared hilarious joyful memories, and many gutting funerals (Lou Reed, Jimmy Scott, Joel Dorn and Mac Rebennack).

I will end here with one beautiful memory of introducing Hal and his gorgeous new puppy River to the East Hampton Springs dog park. I was blown away by how prepared Hal was as a new dog father with every possible puppy accoutrement in his shoulder bag (collapsible water bowl, back up bottled waters, balls, toys, dog treats, whistle, towel etc.). It was very tender. He was eager to send pictures of River to his wife Sheila and his son Arlo.

We walked on the dog path talking obscure comedians and the life of Paul Winchell that day...

Bill Frisell

musician

With a friendship that spanned four decades, it is very difficult to recall just one episode with Hal. A lot of the memories have nothing to do with music or our work in a recording studio. For instance, I can think of the time spent together outside of the recording studio when we worked on my album Unspeakable. It was pure joy for me. Just being together all the time during those days in Los Angeles.

Often when you do a recording session in a city where you don't live, you go to a hotel. For that session we decided that, in order to save money, Hal and I would stay in this tiny one-room beach house he had in Venice, California. Every day we would wake up around seven o'clock. Hal had two bicycles and we would ride all the way up to Malibu. Sometimes we'd go for a hike up the canyons, and then ride back, before going to the studio later in the day. Then we would go to movies or we would watch videos all night. These kinds of memories can be even stronger that the studio ones. It was so amazing just to hang out and hear what Hal had to say. His mind was going, going, going. All the time. Just trying to keep up with the enthusiasm that he had for things was tremendous.

Click here for the full interview with Bill Frisell concerning his work and friendship with Hal Willner.

Amy Gordon

old friend

Dear Hal,

Your off-beat humor always got me, since our high school days; you got me, and we got each other!

You laughed easily, at yourself too (even while attempting your first yoga lesson...)

In high-school you were a bit of a loner; standoffish, quiet, awkward.. and I related, we connected on a deep musical and poetic level. Listening to music together endlessly and attending concerts: Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Sun Ra, etc.

You brought me to third street jazz indirectly orchestrating even back in high school.. influencing the future of my life by introducing me to the father of my three children.

You visited me in college in DC, continuing to attend concerts together, meeting some of your cronies like Leon Redbone, John Prine, Taj Mahal, Stevie Wonder to name a few... and Bill Murray in Philly (trying to sing!!) backstage he drank bourbon straight out of the bottle! And last fall in Brooklyn, you brought me to meet my idol, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds & Warren, what a gift!!

In California you cheered and comforted me through my darkest moments as my sister was dying, and you knew just the right things to say, what not to say, what to do... you drove me to and from the hospital sometimes, we'd sit shaded beneath your big fig tree in Venice Beach eating those figs, sushi, scrambled eggs, that your son Arlo fixed for us, listening to music... you just let me cry with a heart as big and sweet as that fig tree...

One of my biggest thrills was turning you onto music that you were not already familiar with, a very rare occasion!

A few months ago you visited me and we walked on a nature trail, you stuck earpods on me so I could listen to your most recent creation, the tribute to T.Rex / Marc Bolan and then you read me the magnificent liner notes you had just written, dedicating them to another High School fallen hero of ours.

You sent me videos of your beloved dog running around in the dog park and of your beloved puppets, three stooges too shrieking and dancing to x-rated rap songs, I could hear you chuckling in the background!

Thank you Hal for being my zany musical partner in crime, my heart friend. Wishing I could hear your laugh right now, sometimes I think that I still do, but I'll settle for guardian angel just to keep you around...

Robin Holcomb

musician

I loved getting calls from Hal to perform in one project or another. I always reconfigured whichever songs we chose, which I think amused him. He would ask, "Are you ready for more of this mayhem?" Following hair-raising rehearsals, the epic shows always came together beautifully and dangerously, with many riveting performances. Hal had enormous faith in the music.

I miss him and miss knowing he is out there doing his thing. I met and played with many wonderful musicians because of him and his alchemy. He was such a delight.

Iggy Pop

musician

Hal knew everybody in New York City, and half of London and LA. His taste in music was epicurean; he was a hipster's hipster you might say. Although he had very strong opinions, I never saw him frown at anybody. At the end of the day, he was a good person.

Kramer

musician, producer

Hal and I were pals for 40 years, but it just wasn't long enough. I need more.

The memories are drowning me. In 1980, Hal invited my band Shockabilly to contribute a song for That's the Way I Feel Now: A Tribute to Thelonious Monk. A few years after that, he called me up on a Wednesday and said, "Hey, can you get your band Bongwater together this weekend? Nobody at the network is paying attention right now, and i think i can sneak you in the back door and get you on the last episode of Night Music before the assholes in charge fucking cancel it." [Editor's note: season 2, Episode 15].

"Wow. Hal. Holy shit. Can i choose any song i want? Like, can we play a Roky Erickson song? That'd be a first, for national TV."

A few days later i was on NBC-TV playing a Roky Erickson song with Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Bob Weir, Hiram Bullock and Rob Wasserman as backup musicians. It was completely ridiculous. And it worked. And my mother was watching from her condo in Florida. Thanks, Hal!

As I read all these other heartfelt tributes, I'm trying to think of a personal story that offers a different perspective than offered in those already here in such loving detail. It's hard. Everyone here knew the same man i knew; a lovely, gentle and uber-generous man who always made time for you, no matter how busy he was. Hal was the sweetest guy on earth, to everybody. No one escaped his open spirit and giving nature. And his honesty. Oh yes, indeed. Hal would always tell you how he felt, and he felt it was his duty to do so. The Truth meant everything to him. And he could smell bullshit a mile away.

But i do recall there was one huge lie he would tell, over and over again. He really loved to say... "I have no fucking idea what i'm doing."

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Hal may never have known exactly what was going to happen in the recording studio, but he sure knew what to do once it was happening. in his mind, if the idea was good enough, and the musicians he brought together were talented enough, then there was just no reason on earth for it not to work. Hal's process emanated from the center of that universe; a universe in which anything assembled without pretense could be spun into audio gold, if the idea was great. And for Hal, those great ideas just never stopped coming. They never even slowed down. He was that generous, and that inspired.

Here's a story that may provide a unique view into the mind of Hal Willner. Just weeks ago, in the dead of winter, I visited Hal at his little mixing room on 9th Avenue to have one of the hundreds of "listening sessions" we'd enjoyed together over the years. We were always sharing our respective works, bouncing ideas off each other, etc... he'd play whatever he'd just finished, and i'd play mine. On this particular day, I'd brought the debut LP by my new band, Let It Come Down, and he had some of the finished tracks from his upcoming T.Rex / Marc Bolan tribute.

"Ya gotta hear U2 doing "Bang a Gong" with Elton John," he told me on the phone earlier that afternoon. I'm still not sure I even heard that right. Was he kidding? Probably not, knowing Hal.

So there he was at his mixing console when i opened the door and walked in. He turned to me with a dead serious look on his face. I'd barely pulled my coat and scarf off when he hit me with it.

"OK, Kramer. Tell me who you think did the best Hitler impersonation. I mean, like, of all time. Who's the best ever?"
"OK, well, Chaplin is the obvious choice, and an obviously wrong choice, so i'd have to say, i guess it'd have to be Bruno Ganz. Hands down."
"Wrong! Try again!"
"OK, who's YOUR favorite?"
"Nope. Guess again."
"Wait a minute! you tell me who YOU think was the best!" <
"No way. Keep guessing."

This went on for a while (Anthony Hopkins, Alec Guinness, even Noah Taylor), 'til I insisted he spill the beans.

He looks straight into my soul (Hal was really good at that), grins, leans into his desk, and presses PLAY on his iMac. He had it all cued up and waiting for me: Moe Howard, in The Three Stooges short, "You Nazty Spy."

I'll miss a billion things about Hal, but the thing i'll miss most of all, is Hal. And this was Hal.

This was Hal telling me for the thousandth time that we were all just kids, and we were gonna be kids forever. He had a beautiful way of reminding you of that. We were all at our very best, when we were at play.

Kids forever, til the day we die, and for every day that follows. Play on, Hal Willner. Dear friend.

Mary Lee Kortes

musician

I am loath to talk about Hal Willner in the past tense. He is a great and gifted artist. But here goes: a few years back, Hal produced an album of mine, Will Anybody Know That I Was Here: The Songs of Beulah Rowley. This is a record we'd been wanting to make together for quite a long time. At first, I was very self-conscious being around him. He'd worked with so many legendary people, and now me. But he's all about music and art and what people have to say. He loved my project from the moment he heard about it, even though he'd barely heard of me (I may be wrong about that. What music ever escaped him?).

As a songwriter, I loved how he worked from my lyric sheets. He didn't say, "Banjo should come in two bars into the second verse." No, he looked at the lyric sheet and said, "Banjo should come in when Mary Lee says 'Stolen gold and spirits drown.'" There was something about that, everyone focused on the words, the story.

One particularly vivid memory of Hal comes from when we were doing the basic tracks for the song "Big Things." He was trying to get something out of us he wasn't fully feeling. As the band was playing, he got up from his seat amidst them all in the tracking room. He ambled about, circling his right hand around in the air and said, simply, "New Orleans." It might not sound like such a genius direction, but it created a short-hand gear shift and everyone fell into a groove, into place, into the new moment. That's what Hal does. He creates moments, all of them new, fresh, and unlike any you've ever heard before. I hope he's circling above us all now, still waving that arm, giving us genius direction whether we know it or not.

Michael Leonhart

musician

The last I time I saw Hal was when we were seated near each other at David Byrne's Broadway show American Utopia. After the performance, we lingered and talked as the crowd emptied out and we began serpertining through numerous staircases to the backstage area. I introduced him to my 10-year-old son, Milo, who I had taken to the show for a little father & son music hang.

With his infectious and ageless curiosity, Hal started gently interviewing Milo, asking what he thought about the show and music in general. As they talked, a spark grew in Hal's eyes. He began reminiscing about his teenage son Arlo, and how much he had loved taking him to shows when Arlo was Milo's age.

In great detail, Hal passionately described his Marc Bolan/T. Rex project to me, and we began brainstorming about the possibility of bringing the project to life with my orchestra in the future.

Hal's encyclopedic knowledge and voracious appetite for music and art was legendary. His musical choices were fearless.

Thank you, Hal, for making the world a more beautiful place.

Gary Lucas

musician

I remember receiving a phone call from Hal around March 1991 in which he invited me to take part in his planned Tribute to Tim Buckley at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn. I was a big Tim Buckley fan so of course I said yes. Then causally Hal said: "Tim's son Jeff has contacted us about wanting to perform at this Tribute to his Dad." "I didn't know Tim had a son!" I replied. "Neither did we... but now he's come forward, and I think you two guys would be good working together." "Sure, Hal, I'm always up for collaborating..."

The rest is history. I owe Hal so much for having the vision to suggest this hookup, which had a profound effect on both Jeff and myself and our subsequent musical adventures. You can read full details about my subsequent meeting and tempestuous collaboration with Jeff in my book "Touched by Grace: My Time with Jeff Buckley" (Jawbone Books). There is a lot more about Hal in that book too. Hal had the sensitivity and the genius to foresee that Jeff and I would be ideal collaborators, which we were for about a year before the music biz got in the way.

Hal had exceptionally good taste in music and musicians and had the gift of putting them together artfully, and he didn't give a fuck about commerciality, he only cared about whether the resulting music was excellent. I owe this guy so much! I've been in shock since I heard the news—there will never be another Hal, he was one of a kind and irreplaceable. If you are on Facebook, please check out my Tribute to Hal Willner here.

Karen Mantler

musician

I always felt lucky to know Hal. He put me in many interesting situations. I didn't realize until now that he was only 10 years older than me. He is the first and hopefully the last friend of mine to be taken by the COVID-19 virus. I still can't believe it's true.

Eric Mingus

musician

Hal never saw genre in music, never saw a line between one kind of expression of art or another. The things that seemed an odd creative blending to most, were very obvious to him. If you followed him down that path, even if you were unsure of it, you were shown an amazing world. There was a tremendous amount of trust, love, respect, faith, care and kindness in what he did. Sometimes it was unnerving and uncomfortable. But that brought out the best in those of us that created with him. He really set us up to do our best and something we didn't expect from our own selves. A setup man.

The last time I saw Hal, we listened to hours of old comedy records for a project we were thinking about putting together. Pigmeat Markham was one I recall. There was some music too. Watched footage of Lenny Bruce and some William Boroughs... Amazing! To get to sit in that studio and have Hal Willner choosing videos and records! Shit man, that's fucking heaven right there! He always brought me back to the joy of it all.

Roy Nathanson

musician

I'm sitting here in the middle of this crazy dark time listening to a Theodore Bikel version of a Yiddish folk song, now on YouTube, that after diligent research 20-some years ago, I thought no one knew about. My great-uncle sang the song, while the other alta kakas lounged on pillows and banged their hands along on the giant table in an old Brooklyn world of Passover. It's the kind of moment from a memory netherworld that Hal would score with Sun Ra, John Kelly and Debbie Harry all blasting over some kind of post-bop groove he'd have us Jazz Passengers play. And that would be before Hal had his 2PM breakfast.

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