New CD ("A Face In The Crowd")
soon available on line
and at selected retail outlets


Jim's got the goods: great producer, great songwriter, all-around-great-guy.
I'm lucky to have had the opportunity to work with him!


 ~Chris Hillman

 Chris is a founding member of the Byrds, Flying Burrito Bros, Manassas,
the Desert Rose Band, and member of the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame

I have been lucky enough to log tens of thousands of hours working in recording studios in America, Canada, and England. I have been lucky enough to garner gold and platinum awards for albums I produced. I am lucky enough to have been successful as a songwriter. But to me, my lucky break was when my old friend Gus Duffy said “let’s do it, let’s make the Jim Mason album.” I told someone prior to starting this project that I felt like a 10-year-old and Christmas was a week away.

Thanks to Gus, I got to open my present. It contained Johnny Lee Schell and his wonderful studio, complete with the piano from “Big Pink”, along with his guitar chops. It contained some new friends, Mauricio, Paolo, and Albano, three wonderful musicians from Brazil, themselves all old friends, along with Tony who anchored the grooves we all found together. And, also in the package were other old friends, Kal David, with whom I share more than thirty years of music, Marc McClure, one of the most musically creative people I have ever known, and Henry Diltz, whose photos the world now sees to document the past forty years of music history.

Thanks everybody, this is the best present ever.
 

 


1965.  I’m sitting cross-legged on a parquet floor some eleven stories above a noisy Greenwich Village street and this guy is playing one of the happiest melodies I’ve heard in my then 28 year musical life.  I ask him “would you mind if I tried some different lyrics to that tune?”  His name is Jim Mason.  The song becomes I DIG ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC.  seven years and a few more collaborative songs later, he’s co-producing WEDDING SONG (THERE IS LOVE) and playing bass on my first solo album.  A couple of years after that he moves west to produce hits with FIREFALL and POCO.  We stay in touch and in the late 90’s Jim is in a mastering studio tweaking and transferring one of my new releases from analog to digital.  Good player, good singer, good writer, good friend...a lot of folks rightly call him multi-talented because of his complete musical savvy, but all I can say is it’s been almost 40 years now and this guy Mason still makes me smile...

~ Noel Paul Stookey
of PETER, PAUL & MARY

 


 

 

Albano at the "Big Pink" piano.
Albano, Mauricio, and Paolo
Albano, Kal, Jim, Mauricio, Gus, Paolo, and Tony
     

Kal and Johnny playin' the blues
Gus Duffy, Exec. Prod.
Tony hard at work

Singing background vocals with my old friend Marc McClure, from Spanky & Our Gang & Kashmir		  
Marty Grossman, Gus Duffy and me ..... three old friends reunited in Los Angeles, and feeling very good about ourselves.
     


Listening to this CD reminds me why I respect Jim's talent. What a collection of songs! After recording everyone else's songs for many years, and making some fine music that's been heard over and over again on the radio, it's only right that Jim has taken time to share not only his production talent, but his performance and writing ability as well.
Enjoy it!
 

~Richie Furay
 
Pastor, Calvary Chapel of Boulder,CO
Co-founder Buffalo Springfield and Poco,
Member of the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame

Click to listen to sound clips from

"A Face In The Crowd"