Artist
Session II
United States • 1977 – 1977
Session II is a music group from United States, active 1977–1977. Their discography on Gatefold includes 1 record.
1
Albums tracked
2
In collections
1977
Since
Biography
Recording live to two-track at Kendun Recorders in Burbank wasn't about capturing a performance—it was about surviving a technical gauntlet. These guys were the high-priced hired guns for everyone from Steely Dan to Joni Mitchell, and they treated this one-off session like a high-stakes heist. No overdubs, no safety net, just a room full of session monsters trying to prove they could cut the hardest fusion on the planet without the benefit of a console mixdown. Lee Ritenour was fresh off his 'Captain Fingers' reputation and brought in Ernie Watts and Don Grusin to provide the muscle. It’s a studio-pro masterclass that sounds like a bunch of guys finally letting the leash off after spending months playing polite backing tracks for pop stars. There’s no commercial padding here, just the sound of a Neve board being pushed to its absolute limit by players who knew exactly how to manipulate the air in a room.
The Arc of Session II
The pivots — what forced Session II to reinvent.
The Direct-to-Disc Gauntlet
In 1977, the audiophile market demanded records that bypassed the hiss and compression of magnetic tape, forcing the band into a high-pressure one-take reality at Kendun Recorders. Ritenour and Grusin had to arrange every transition and solo in real-time because any mistake meant starting the entire side of the LP over from scratch. You can hear the tension in the tight unison lines between Watts’ sax and Ritenour’s guitar, a level of precision that only comes from the fear of ruining an expensive master lacquer. It resulted in a dry, hyper-focused sound that stripped away the glossy veneer of late-70s studio production in favor of raw, technical violence.
Influences
- Weather Report — Alex Acuña was literally the drummer on Heavy Weather right before this session. You hear that specific syncopation and world-fusion drive across the entire Session II record. It’s the same rhythmic DNA, just stripped of Joe Zawinul’s heavy synth layers.
- Wes Montgomery — Lee Ritenour has cited Montgomery as his primary blueprint for octaves and melodic phrasing in dozens of Guitar Player features. The clean, thumb-driven warmth in his lead lines on this session is a direct evolution of Wes's Riverside era. He’s playing the stuff Wes would’ve played if he’d had a high-end rack system.
- Cannonball Adderley — Ernie Watts grew up on the hard-bop phrasing of Adderley, which provides the grit needed to keep this from becoming elevator music. When Watts digs into a solo, he’s using that soul-jazz vocabulary to anchor the band's more experimental fusion excursions. It’s the difference between a clinical session and a real jazz date.
- The Crusaders — The band shared a common lineage with the L.A. session scene that birthed the Crusaders' groove-heavy jazz-funk. You hear it in the way Don Grusin locks his Rhodes patterns with the percussion instead of just playing chords. It’s that West Coast pocket that prioritized the '2' and '4' even when the time signatures got weird.
- Return to Forever — The high-velocity unison head arrangements on Session II are a direct nod to Chick Corea’s writing style. Ritenour and Grusin have both spoken about the technical bar set by the 'Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy' lineup. They took that prog-jazz complexity and applied it to a much tighter, more focused studio environment.
Discography
Their records — most-collected first.
Related artists
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