The history of popular music is full of unsung backroom figures who shied away from the limelight and quietly performed their musical alchemy behind the scenes, people like Chicago producer, arranger, composer, musician, and songwriter Charles Stepney. Decades after he passed away in 1976, Stepney is now rightly celebrated as an influential and important figure, his work characterised by rich, sumptuous and detailed symphonic arrangements, his pioneering use of electronic techniques and instruments, and a bold, ambitious approach that effortlessly blended and then surpassed jazz, soul, rock and psychedelia.
At the time of his tragically early death from a heart attack, Stepney had just taken Earth, Wind & Fire to huge commercial success, overseeing two double platinum albums in one year for the band, and there were plans to record with Michael Jackson and Barbara Streisand. But just a decade before, the classically trained musician (he played keys and vibraphone) had been scraping out an intermittent living as a jobbing jazz musician in Chicago and was considering giving up, before he received a call from Chess Records. Stepney began working as an arranger, then producer at Chess/Cadet, as well as a member of the Cadet house band, which also included Donny Hathaway and soul jazz harpist extraordinaire Dorothy Ashby, before becoming musical supervisor. His first major project was a series of extraordinary, sophisticated, complex symphonic soul/rock/jazz hybrid albums from Rotary Connection, before launching their lead singer Minnie Riperton’s solo career with her stunning debut album featuring perhaps his most famous and loved composition, Les Fleur.
Stepney’s genre-transcending was his chief innovation, but he was also a pioneer in the use of electronic techniques in the studio. He experimented with musical segueways, prologues, epilogues (way back in 1968 on The Dells’ Sweet As Funk Can Be album), and was an early adopter of synthesizers. It was this enthusiasm for new technology that drove Stepney’s work with jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis, transforming the jazz pianist’s traditional approach into a new, futuristic synth-laden sound.
With The Dells, Stepney continued and updated the Chicago soft-soul tradition, producing and arranging a series of opulent and orchestrated albums for the vocal group. He produced Marlena Shaw’s second album, a near-perfect blend of slick, urbane late ‘60s R’n’B, soul, and swinging jazz, and a soaring example of Stepney’s peerless orchestrating skills. Stepney also experimented with psychedelic blues in the late sixties with two of Blues music’s greats, Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters, produced intense, simmering soul jazz sets from Cadet house band guitarist Phil Upchurch, and provided a warm and sympathetic musical setting for the cerebral jazz/folk/soul of Terry Callier’s finest albums.
Apparently a hard taskmaster in the studio, Stepney was clearly extremely driven, and throughout this period he was also ghost producing for other artists, composing music for adverts, and constantly experimenting musically and recording at home, some of the results of which can be heard on the recent Step on Step compilation.
Now championed by digging DJs, celebrated by dancers, and heavily sampled by the likes of Jay-Z, Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, Pharrell Williams, Gorillaz, Boards of Canada, and Primal Scream, Stepney leaves us a unique and rich body of work that ranged from orthodox and traditional to radically innovative, but was always sophisticated, clever, and often very beautiful.