Bob James: Avant Smooth
This kid grew up to write an iconic theme for a 1970s hit TV Sitcom with millions of viewers every week for the six-year, 118-episode run, and decades of re-runs.
Quincy Jones produced his first album in 1962.
Was a devoted husband…
Built a prolific career as a composer, arranger and jazz keyboardist…
Unintentionally became a Hip Hop legend…
…and a childhood hero.
I’m Mikael Jorgensen from the band Wilco and this is my first feature length documentary film.
My late father, Joe Jorgensen, was a well-respected recording engineer in Manhattan and began working exclusively with Bob in 1976. He exposed me to Bob’s music and the world of music production, and I’ve been hooked ever since.
In 2022, I went to see Bob perform for the first time in decades, and seeing him for five minutes after the show made me realize that there was more to say.
We shot Bob in NYC back in early 2022. He was featured at The Blue Note jazz club, performing with Talib Kweli, DMC, and had DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Large Professor and Statik Selektah chat w Bob and then a roundtable discussion about the songs “Nautilus” and “Take Me To The Mardi Gras" The gulf between Bob and Hip-Hop shrunk some more that week.
In the summer of 2023 we camped out in Bob’s living room in Traverse City, MI and held a dozen interviews over 4 days. Got the biography stuff, stories from childhood, college music adventures, Quincy Jones, playing with Sarah Vaughan, working with Creed Taylor, Joe Jorgensen, creating Tappan Zee Records, working with Paula Scher and her incredible designs, listening and talking about Bobs records, and Bob at the piano and much more…
In the summer of 2025 Union Editorial editor and lifelong Bob James fan, Daniel Luna, joins the team and cuts a trailer, a piece about “Nautilus” and recreating an edit I’d made of Bob and me talking about his synthesizer-laced 1986 recording, “Rain.”
In February of 2026, we held a screening of the Trailer, Rain, and Nautilus at the recently renovated Ojai Playhouse and received insightful feedback from an audience of friends, family, and colleagues.
At the end of June, 2026, I invited Bob and his family to join me at Solid Sound, the festival that Wilco has been hosting since 2010 at Mass MoCA. It’s the high holidays at the pop-up temple of Wilco with our exceptional, patient, curious and embracing audience.
We screened the trailer + clips to the first audience, followed by a Q+A with Bob. It was very satisfying to hear the jokes land and some of the gasps at the hip hop stats.
Bob shared his impressions about being taken aback by the style, scale and scope of Mass MoCA and the festival. We also touched on AI and IP, and its relationship to sampling.
On Saturday night at 9:15 pm, Bob and I walked out onto the main stage in “Joe’s Field,” in front of a packed house and Annie’s three camera operators rolling, and performed “Angela” from the sitcom “Taxi.” It was a full circle moment to not only play this song that I love and that Joe recorded, but with Bob, at Solid Sound.
The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Bob’s enjoying a viral moment that keeps finding people. Bob and his music are still very much beloved by many, many people. Over 425,000 as of this writing.
Jack O’Brien, Bob’s oldest and dearest friend/collaborator/raconteur/Broadway director, dropped by and gave us extraordinarily colorful recollections of their college days and subsequent creative collaborations and also revealed a secret.
At the Sunday screening, we surprised the audience with an improvised performance featuring Bob, Nels Cline and I who, in a way, paid tribute to some of Bob’s early avant-garde explorations.
Bob then shared more of his thoughts about the festival, about Wilco, how good the sound was, how welcoming the fans have been.
