Singer, composer, keyboardist Frank McComb was surprised he got
the call but went anyway: a late-night gig at Branford Marsalis’
private recording studio outside of New York. At the time Marsalis
was band leader on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, and after knocking
off, would head for his own studio to work on material that had
nothing to do with mainstream America. Marsalis had been looking
everywhere for a singer with a certain range and voicing and someone
had suggested McComb, whose career until then had been mainly
with Motown. McComb walked into the studio and 45 minutes later
started walking out after having cut a perfect recording.
Dumbstruck, Marsalis called out after him, “All that bread I’m
paying you, and you’re leaving after 45 minutes?” “Man, that’s
why you’re paying me all that bread!” McComb shot back. The two
men became friends that night and the music they were working
on became part of Buckshot Lefonque, Marsalis’ mid-'90s hip-hop
project. “Buckshot was just the most fantastic band. It all began
as a record project, but then it got so good, we knew we just
had to tour, and while we were touring all this fresh music just
started coming out, and we would play it on tour, and that became
the second album. The best gig of that tour was in Paris, at the
Hot Brass. We were there three nights and the atmosphere and the
audiences were just amazing. I loved that club!”
The confidence McComb displayed the night he first met Marsalis
certainly wasn’t justified by the state of his career. At that
time he had just left Motown, had just lost possession of his
house, and had a wife and two young children to support. He was
bitter about the broken promises of record companies, angry at
the treatment of management and agents, yet he never once gave
up belief in himself, or his talent. The night his mortgage was
foreclosed, he sat down and wrote a song called “Keep Pushin'
On.”
That number became the basis for what would be his first recording
with a major, “Love Stories” on Columbia. “That song is about
my love for my music. Other songs are about my love for my wife,
for my children, my friends, my love of God. I was brought up
in the church, singing gospel, just like Liz,” his cousin, gospel-queen
and Paris resident, Liz McComb. “That’s were I found my voice,
found my vocation, found my faith. And I’ve kept at it, I have
never given up and never will, because it is my life.”
A big part of that life is his Fender Rhodes. "Man, I tell you,
you prick that piano with a pin and my blood will come out, because
it is a part of me! Once a record company wanted to sign me, but
only as a singer, not on keyboards, and I said ‘no!’ They wanted
to dress me up in sexy clothes and make me a sex symbol! I said,
'Why do you say you want to sign me if you want to do that, because
that’s not me!' I sit down in front of the piano and sing my heart
out and play my ass off. That’s what I do, and I admire people
like Stevie Wonder or Billie Joel because that’s what they’ve
been doing their whole careers, and that’s who they are. The public
can never know you if you don’t know yourself first!”
