Charles Stepney was born in Chicago in 1931. He played piano and vibraphone but was initially hired by Gene Barge to be a copyist at Chess, creating hand-written music parts for up-coming studio sessions and performances. Barge soon discovered that Stepney had a rich educational background in classical music, the result of studying correspondence courses at The Juilliard School in New York City. As a result, he asked Stepney to work on arrangements, production, session work, and finally composing. One of his most significant early contributions was with Richard Evans, arranging and producing Marlena Shaw’s first solo album for Cadet Records entitled “The Spice of Life”, which featured the silver-certified single “California Soul” (song co-written by Ashford and Simpson) that sold over 200,000 copies in the UK.
The album contained another single that was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, the song “Woman in The Ghetto”, co-written by Charles Stepney, Bobby Miller and Marlena Shaw herself. The song is a fusion of Jazz, Soul and Funk, performed by the best studio session musicians at Chess. Evans and Stepney were clearly totally at ease with the fusion of styles and the rich orchestration that runs through the album.
Stepney liked to explore new ideas and to challenge the artists he worked with. He was at his most effective working with artists who really understood music and didn’t settle for what was easy and obvious. Marshall Chess, Leonard’s son, was attracted to this approach and founded the experimental group Rotary Connection with Stepney in 1966. Stepney jumped at the chance to work with some outstanding musicians, exploring new ways to think about popular music.
Stepney’s innovative and creative approach can best be seen in his contributions to Rotary Connection and to Ramsey Lewis’ recording projects.
The Ramsey Lewis Trio’s album “Maiden Voyage”, released in 1968, features Stepney’s song-writing, arrangement and production skills on the entire album, which was recorded under the direction of Richard Evans. The key track on the album is “Les Fleur”, written by Stepney with background vocals from Minnie Riperton, Elsa Harris and Kitty Hayward. Stepney arranged the vocals as he would another instrument, exploring subtle variations in the voices and slowly building the rhythms of the piano, the strings and percussion to a series of climaxes. It is music with class.
Minnie Riperton later recorded the song on her solo album “Come To My Garden”, on which Ramsey Lewis played piano, accompanied by the strings section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Charles Stepney once again was responsible for arranging and producing the album. Minnie Riperton sings beautifully, with subtle changes in the arrangement highlighting the drama of her vocal delivery. Stepney is clever, and he clearly enjoyed working with a singer who offered a four-octave vocal range and a high level of musicality.
As the decade progressed, Charles Stepney became more in demand as both producer and arranger. He made a significant impact on the recording career of The Dells, from 1968 into the early 1970s. Out of their collaborations, two tracks reached number one on the Billboard Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles Chart during that period, starting with “Stay in My Corner” extracted from the studio album “There Is”. The track is six minutes of rich vocal performance, fusing the powerful vocal Soul lead of Marvin Junior with Johnny Carter’s dynamic laser-sharp falsetto, underscored by members of Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the best rhythm section at Chess. This was a completely new version compared with the Vee-Jay recording released several years earlier. Stepney’s trademark treatment of the voices as “instruments” is in evidence again.
This success was repeated in 1969 when the creative partnership of Bobby Miller as producer and Charles Stepney as arranger delivered another musical masterpiece entitled “Oh, What A Night”, with full orchestration.
As an aside, Stepney’s musical prowess was in evidence in Minneapolis in 1970, when he took the Ramsey Lewis Trio and Minnie Riperton to join the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra for a performance of “Cohesion”. This was a Classical Jazz Symphony written, produced and conducted by Stepney. He was indeed a very special talent.
Charles Stepney
In the 70s Stepney went on to work successfully with Earth, Wind & Fire, the Ramsey Lewis Trio and Deniece Williams. Sadly, he died in 1976 at the age of forty-three. Over his short career, he produced thirty albums. Not all were hits, but they were all works of meticulous quality. In his Guardian newspaper article (2nd September 2022), Alex Petridis noted Stepney’s extraordinary song-writing skills: “…. if you want to hear what a fantastic songwriter Stepney was, head first to his 1971 masterpiece ‘I Am the Black Gold of the Sun’, a confection that variously involves flamenco, acid-rock guitar, jazz piano and unbelievable harmony vocals.” Petridis also reports the words of Stepney’s daughter Charlene, who summed up just how important her father was to the development of Black music: “I think Dad saw his work as a way of uncategorising Black music. I think he wanted to be able to say: ‘We are more than this genre, we can be all of these things.’”
Thanks to the efforts of his daughters, a double album of Stepney’s work was released in 2022 by IARC, entitled “Step On Step”. It is a compilation of solo recordings that he made at home. His work can also be heard through the over 600 samples that later artists have taken from his songs.
