Although to his critics, he is yammering and self-absorbed, to generations of listeners, he is a gifted storyteller who brings aboard gold-standard musicians.
The recording session seemed unusual by today's standards — musicians playing instruments in real time with an engineer sitting behind a mixing board, and the sounds being captured on an eight-track tape machine.
And while Mr. Gemignani has high standards, his musicians say, he is not a taskmaster.
But then Mr. Lloyd, a tenor saxophonist and flutist, isn't a standard jazz musician, if such a thing exists.
Playing Mr. Camilo's "From Within" as well as two standards that musicians like to Latinize, "Mambo Inn" and Dizzy Gillespie's "Night in Tunisia," the two musicians locked horns in thrashing, powerful displays, with Anthony Jackson mediating on electric bass.
His biggest hits were "Memories of Vienna" and "El Rio Drive". He also could play country, jazz and standards, and musicians of all genres often sat in with his band.
Although Guerin participated in recording sessions with the band and appeared on stage with them from September 1972, he was never an official member of the Byrds and instead received a standard session musician's wage, while continuing to undertake work for other artists as an in-demand studio player.
The romancing continued with "The Fabulous Baker Boys" (1989), Steve Kloves's appealing romantic standard about lounge musicians that brought the Bridges brothers together for an emotional ménage à trois with Michelle Pfeiffer.
The market for home recording software has become important enough for Digidesign, distributor of Pro Tools, the de facto software standard for professional musicians, to offer Pro Tools Free, a limited-function, free version.
From the 1990s onwards, their operating system and hardware combinations have been the de-facto standard for professional musicians and for many of the world's best recording studios, alongside companion equipment and software ecosystems such as ProTools.
