On Jan. 18-22, the 2021 NAMM Believe in Music Week will take place online. It’s the virtual edition of the annual Winter NAMM Show, the international music trade show that ordinarily takes place in-person at the Anaheim Convention Center in Southern California. There’s a plethora of activities, vendors, brands, and musical acts participating in the event, including special educational sessions featuring rock and roll supergroup The Immediate Family.
The Immediate Family is a venerable who’s-who of music industry legends involving Danny Kortchmar (guitar and vocals), Waddy Wachtel (guitar and vocals), Leland Sklar (bass), Russ Kunkel (drums) and Steve Postell (guitar and vocals). Having recently released a new EP, the group is doing what it can to help spread the magic of music to the masses.
Registration information for Believe in Music Week is available at this link.
Here’s information regarding the educational sessions that members of the Immediate Family will be participating in during NAMM’s Believe in Music Week:
As part of the show’s TEC Tracks series, members of The Immediate Family will be participating in four different sessions between Thursday, January 21, and Friday, January 22:
On Thursday at 2:40 p.m. EST / 11:40 PST, Leland Sklar will be interviewed by David Goggin (“Mr. Bonzai”) in a session titled “Leland Sklar Demonstrates His Famous Basses,” in which Sklar will share some of his most beloved instruments and explain how he achieves his iconic sound.
Also on Thursday, at 5 p.m. EST / 2 p.m. PST, Waddy Wachtel and Danny Kortchmar will be interviewed by Peter Asher, followed by a live Q&A. You’ll hear them tell amazing stories about the early days in the studios with Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Carole King and many other generation-defining performers—from the point of view of the producers, managers and session players who crafted the sounds. This conversation has been waiting 50 years to happen!
On Friday at 1:20 p.m. EST / 10:20 a.m. PST, Leland Sklar will be part of the panel “The Sessions and Rock ‘N’ Roll Royalty Reunite.” In this presentation, Sklar, Jim Keltner and Steve Lukather will be joined by Liberty Devitto, Dom Famularo and Paul Quin. These artists have brought you thousands of songs, and now they’ll share their 2020 projects despite recent challenges. They’ll also look at how The Beatles impacted them and how the power of music can bring hope, happiness, unity and love to humanity. The Sessions’ mission is to enrich, educate and empower artists, and these 30 minutes will do that!
Later on Friday, at 2:00 p.m. EST / 11 a.m. PST, “Russ Kunkel on Hand Percussion” will pair Kunkel with David Goggin (“Mr. Bonzai”) as Kunkel demonstrates the gentle art of hand percussion as an integral part of his work in the recording studio.
Some additional background on the Immediate Family:
The band is the evolution of a lifetime of friendship of playing music together: it began in the 1970s as a collective of studio and live musicians known as “The Section,” best known for both their work in support of some of the top selling singer/songwriters and solo singers in the history of music, as well as their own acclaimed instrumental albums. Collectively, Kortchmar, Sklar, Kunkel and Waddy Wachtel are four of the most recorded, respected & sought-after musicians in modern music and helped define the sound of a generation by supporting many of the most iconic artists of the last five decades, including James Taylor, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Keith Richards, Neil Young, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Don Henley, Phil Collins, Bonnie Raitt, Warren Zevon, Stevie Nicks, Bryan Ferry, Lyle Lovett and Jimmy Buffett – as well as producers Lou Adler and Peter Asher.
With the addition of touring/session guitarist/songwriter/producer Steve Postell (who joined in 2018), the quintet of seasoned music industry veterans has been working on an as-yet untitled studio album that, when released, will be the group’s first U.S. release after the record Honey, Don’t Leave L.A., which was released in Japan.
