Red Bull Music Academy, Day 2: Urban Legends

After a typhoon and its accompanying street curfew in Tokyo, the skies are celestially sunny - so much so that window-cleaners are to hit our skyscraper hotel. It's time to scarper back to the RBMA (Red Bull Music Academy) for our second day of hanging out among musicians, aspiring and iconic, as a media interloper. At the academy's HQ things are already falling into routine. The free meals are uber healthy, being traditionally Japanese and based around fish, tofu and various mushrooms. An anonymous American, bless him, is later spotted smuggling in some Subway tucker.

This is the man who did the string arrangements on such classics as Michael Jackson's disco-era Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough. Its signature string riff is his.

The RBMA is identified with electronic music, but the 2014 edition relates heavily to urban, the contemporary incarnation of R&B and hip hop. Urban DJ/producer Just Blaze — who has cut beats for Jay Z, most famously on The Blueprint alongside Kanye West, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar — is a "studio team leader". Another studio cat is Sa-Ra's Om'mas Keith, who was involved in Frank Ocean's illwave channel ORANGE (and, on the hush, Diddy's Making His Band reality show and Last Train To Paris electro-pop LP). But, then, there's today's first guest speaker, composer Benjamin Wright, Jr, whose music everyone knows, even if they don't recognise the name. Indeed, this is the man who did the string arrangements on such classics as Michael Jackson's disco-era Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough. Its signature string riff is his.

The RBMA lecturers talk with a prompter, making for a more conversational experience, and this works well. Wright, in his 70s, is an entertaining speaker, with quips aplenty. "I'm full of stories," he says.

Wright tells of coming up in the blues heartland of Greenville, Mississippi, then studying at Boston's Berklee College Of Music, at the time a correspondence school, and eventually the prestigious Chicago Conservatory. Wright would establish himself in Chicago, during the heyday of Chess Records, before going 'west' to Los Angeles, where he initially served as The Temptations' Music Director (and defacto producer). The arranger was approached by Quincy Jones to work on Jackson's landmark Off The Wall.

"I don't think I charged enough," he says to much mirth. Wright remembers the tragic star as being "very mild-mannered", but he could "become a beast, because he's a perfectionist." Jackson would lay down multiple vocal takes. Wright speaks of him in the present tense.

Music industry changes hurt Wright. Software notation rendered the copyist obsolete, and lavish or maximalist orchestral arrangements were recreated electronically, budgets an ever-constant preoccupation for beleaguered record labels. "My pocket noticed it first," he says.

Yet Wright has continued to work for hip hoppers. He was approached by OutKast's Andre 3000 for The Love Below. The rapper-cum-singer wanted to sound like Frank Sinatra but was nervous ("punked out") by the recording sessions, being inexperienced. By contrast, Wright is full of praise for DJ Quik's musical chops. He also big ups MJ wannabe/successor Justin Timberlake, having arranged all his LPs. Wright passes around his score of Pusher Love Girl, as performed at the Grammies. Wright talks for well over three hours. Everyone adores him. Even dapper Om'mas Keith sits in.

Concept is determined to reinvent the humble recorder. We say bring it on.

We had hoped to corner Just Blaze for an interview, yet he's not seen all day. In fact, Blaze is likely preparing for a late-night DJ set in Tokyo. But we do chat to Austrian Dorian Concept, himself a former RBMA participant, here for studio sessions. He attended the same year, in 2008, as Perth's Ta-ku. And Concept has been following the Aussie's ascendance. The Vienna resident, who toured Australia with Laneway some years back, is keen to return. Concept is known as Flying Lotus' sometime keyboardist and has collaborated with London's Cinematic Orchestra. However, he's currently promoting a solo project, Joined Ends, via Ninja Tune. Concept reveals that, aside from hankering after his own vintage Prophet 5, the first polyphonic synth demonstrated by its inventor Dave Smith at the RBMA the night prior, he is determined to reinvent the humble recorder — yeah, that daggy instrument you learnt in primary school. We say bring it on.

Now, where's that Subway?