MARK WINKLER: L.A.’s LONG TREASURED POET LAUREATE SWINGS, SINGSAND HOLDS ON IN A WORLD WHERE THE RULES DON’T APPLY

An incredible 45 years after releasing his debut album Jazz Life, Mark Winkler is still singing and swinging like nobody’s business, an enduring, charismatic and wildly prolific force of contemporary and straight-ahead jazz nature I once accurately called “the poet laureate of the L.A. Jazz Scene.” On “The Joy of Singing,” a witty, wise and insightful (not to mention, exuberant!) track from his 2024 Top 5 JazzWeek album The Rules Don’t Apply – one of the many collections that made my year end Top Ten list in Jazziz magazine - he wrote and sang it all about the magic of recording and performing at any age: “Here’s to my friends pushin’ 50 pushin’ 60 doin’ shows – foolin’ father time/Here’s to the Joy, to the girl and the boy/The joy of singing out so fine.”

While the lyrics to the soulful, reflective title track of that wonderful album were penned by his longtime friend Lorraine Feather, they feel highly autobiographical, revealing one of the secrets of his ongoing success and impact on jazz community: “Was it far too late to do what I’d dreamed I would do/He thought for a moment, then he answered, he said, the rules don’t apply to you.”    

Aware that in this fast paced digital age dropping an album every few years is a one way ticket to jazz radio oblivion, Winkler’s been especially busy this past decade, releasing dual albums with longtime pals and collaborators Cheryl Bentyne (Eastern Standard Time) and David Benoit (Old Friends) in addition to one EP (The Mona Lisa Sessions), too many singles to count and six enthusiastically reviewed, high charting albums. Starting in 2015 with Jazz and Other Four Letter Words, Winkler has released The Company I Keep, I’m With You: Mark Winkler Sings Bobby Troup, and since 2022, three of his all-time best, most artful and personal collections of originals and cleverly re-imagined standards, Late Bloomin’ Jazzman, the aforementioned The Rules Don’t Apply and most recently, Hold On, whose infectious title track was originally written in 2024 for another jazz singer but which resonates more strongly and whose hopeful message seems even more essential now.    

“When (cellist and composer) Pablo Casals was 90,” the singer says, “someone asked him why he was still practicing. He said ‘I’m getting better.’ I don’t think I’m Cole Porter or Bobby Troup, but I’m a good Mark Winkler. Looking back on some of my early albums, I was a little inconsistent, writing some good songs and some bad ones. Now my songs are more consistent, with a lot of good and very good ones in there. Over the past few years, I feel I’ve become a better songwriter, especially when I listen now to some of the songs from The Rules Don’t Apply and to ‘Train in the Desert,” a piece inspired by a famous Georgia O’Keefe painting, on Hold On.

“People look at me and say, God, you write a lot of songs,” Winkler adds. “The truth is, it’s about as many as I’ve always written. That’s what I do. When I go into my studio in the morning, that’s my gig. I’m always coming up with and developing new ideas. Over the course of a year, I’ve got more than enough material to put out a new album. I think being a songwriting teacher for the past 22 years at UCLA Extension and The Songwriters School of Los Angeles has made me better. I use the techniques I teach my students and because of all the assignments I have given them, I know how to finish a song even if something isn’t clicking immediately.”  

Winkler, who recently celebrated his 20^th year teaching with UCLA, admits that there was a point in the early 2010s  years ago where the trends in pop music toward EDM (typified by the global success of the single “Titanium” by David Guetta featuring Sia) and songs where the groove and simple motifs dominated made him think young aspiring songwriters wouldn’t need his expertise on the art of storytelling and crafting great lyrics. Just as he was considering giving up teaching, the now legendary careers of great contemporary singer/songwriters like Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift started heating up, followed by the likes of Post Malone, Billie Eilish and numerous country crossover hits – and suddenly, as he says, “the craft of songwriting was big again!”

In 2024, Winkler put his decades of experience as a songwriter (starting with album cuts for Liza Minelli, Randy Crawford and Stephanie Mills in the 70s) into prose with The Songwriter’s Handbook, which finds him sharing the nitty gritty of how musical magic is made, finely detailing the technical tools and hard work it takes to be great. He also shares his hard-won wisdom on how to launch and navigate a meaningful and impactful career in the rough and tumble industry. Beyond sharing the many tools of the trade, he adds touches of humor and refreshing authenticity with relevant elements of his own story and a snappy “Winkler digresses” anecdote every few pages.

While Winkler has always written songs with and collaborated on stage and in the studio with various combinations of Los Angeles’ premiere jazz musicians (, he attributes his current creative Renaissance to the good fortune of “finding my Burt Bacharach” in pianist/composer Greg Gordon Smith. While he’s still writing incredible tunes with longtime collaborator Jamieson Trotter – check out the poignant “Marlena’s Memories” and the new, delightfully quirky “Cat Women on the Moon” – the singer is excited about his newly blossoming creative relationship with Smith, who has written the music for such recent gems as “Just Around the Corner,” “If These Walls Could Talk (They’d Sing),” “My Future’s Just a Memory” and “Hold On.”

“I met Gordon years ago at Genghis Cohen through one of my songwriting students, who was performing a show there,” Winkler says. “Normally after a nice initial conversation, if someone I meet gives me a CD, it’s terrible and I throw it against the wall, but his was fabulous. He can sing well, writes great lyrics himself and is a versatile pop writer and jazz pianist. He left town to teach students in the inner city of Chicago for five years, and when he returned, we struck up a friendship and partnership. Generally, I will give him a lyric, he gives me the music and I go over to his studio to manicure the song. Our general process is that if it doesn’t come quickly, we haven’t got it.”    

Winkler’s other “secret weapon” since switching from his contemporary/smooth jazz roots to becoming a bona fide straight ahead jazz singer has been his quarter century partnership with Barbara Brighton, who has now produced ten of his albums. Brighton first met Winkler at the funeral of their mutual friend Ellen Cohn, a renowned label executive who worked for the singer’s onetime label Chase Music Group. Winkler and Brighton became great friends over the next years as she launched her umbrella company BJB Jazz Ventures, whose first project was putting on a memorial concert, in association with MAMA Records, to honor Cohn at Catalina Bar & Grill, one of Winkler’s premiere show places to this day.

Even before the music market research organization Broadcast Architecture told Winkler he “wasn’t testing well” for the urban-leaning vibe smooth jazz was trying to create in the late 90s, Winkler had grown disenchanted with the genre and could envision a future in traditional jazz. Asking Brighton to produce his first album in this realm, Easy the Hard Way, was a breakthrough that continues to pay dividends to this day. She brought in a dream team of straight- ahead musicians she knew – Billy Childs, Anthony Wilson, Gregory Hutchinson and Jon Mayer (the pianist, not the famed singer/songwriter) – and the project gave birth to a beautiful, creatively fruitful collaborative spirit that has both fueled and defined Winkler’s artistry ever since.

“Let’s put it this way, Barbara is always right,” Winkler laughs. “She, our engineer Tally Sherwood and I are a great little team. They always go the extra mile for me. Barbara is the real deal in jazz, a trained pianist and true connoisseur who always brings in the best musicians – many of whom she knows from her days running the Young Jazz Artist series in the 90s. She was a big fan of my music, we got along great, and working on that first album together made perfect sense.

“For each project,” he adds, “I come up with my ideas, Barbara comes up with hers and we hash them out. She knows my strengths, always chooses the perfect musicians to execute our vision for each tune and has no problem challenging me to push myself = as with Billy Joel’s “Vienna” on the new album, a song I liked but which I considered a stretch at first. But when I studied the lyrics, I identified with it as someone who worked hard and needed a break. John Beasley did a great arrangement of it, hearing Bartok meets Bach in the middle of it!”-

While most longtime fans and Winkler-philes in L.A. know about his early career as a songwriter getting album cuts with major artists. Yet some may not know he took songwriting classes with Oscar winning composer Al Kasha (“The Morning After”) upon the recommendation of a publisher he tried to sell songs to. Many may not, however, be aware that the World of Mark Winkler (the actual title of a onetime Japanese compilation) would be very different had Donald Fagen not decided to become the lead singer of Steely Dan.

Starting out in the early 70s, Winkler was working with legendary composer and arranger Jimmie Haskell, whom he met through his aunt. Haskell told the budding singer that Fagen and Walter Becker, then signed as songwriters to the publishing division of ABC-Dunhill Records, were eager to record their own album and needed a lead singer. Winkler walked into ABC Recording Studios in LA (later changed to Lion Share by Kenny Rogers) to audition for Becker, Fagen and legendary guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter.

“Skunk really dug me and told me I sang great,” Winkler says. “At the end of the rehearsal, they gave me the three demos they recorded and told me to learn them and come back. When I returned, I sang their songs to them and Walter told me he wanted me in their group. But Donald, well, he just invited to his place to smoke some joints. Turns out he ultimately decided to be their lead singer and the rest is history. I guess I wasn’t hip and cool enough then, but I’ve learned a lot since then. This story came to mind when we were recording The Rules Don’t Apply and I chose to do a cover of Donald’s solo hit ‘I.G.Y (What A Beautiful World).’ I’m glad things worked out the way they did for all of us.

“So much about the world and the music industry has changed for all of us since then," he adds, "but the one thing that hasn’t is the essence of a good lyric – an original and compelling concept and story.”