Memorable tributes from a concert master

There aren’t a lot of people around who get an “esque” attached to their names, but when you hear “Willner-esque,” you know it means a gathering of interesting, diverse artists doing songs associated with a particular composer or performer.

Record producer and concert organizer Hal Willner pretty much invented the tribute-album genre, starting in 1981 with “Amarcord Nino Rota,” a salute to Fellini’s film composer. But when everybody else started doing it, he stopped.

“I remember Harry Smith going, ‘That’s what happens when you’re the first one to do something. People go, ‘Oh, this guy did it, we know how to do it where people will like it,’ ” says Willner, recalling a conversation with the late filmmaker and folklorist whose “Anthology of American Folk Music” was the bible of the U.S. folk scene. “It was a little strange watching it become a whole industry.”

Besides, times have changed since the 1980s, when Willner could get the backing for albums such as “That’s the Way I Feel Now,” a Thelonious Monk homage with a cast ranging from Donald Fagen to Shockabilly.

“Going to record companies right now, it’s just an energy that, I don’t know -- I was gonna do an Edith Piaf one, they went, ‘You’ve got to have Madonna, and Annie Lennox.’ Well, that’s not what this is about. So that’s when we started doing some live things.”

Willner, 47, is a reserved, self-deprecating man, and he makes “doing some live things” sound like going to the store for a quart of milk. But the concert presentations he and co-producer Janine Nichols have concentrated on in the last few years, such as the two-night Harry Smith extravaganza at UCLA’s Royce Hall in 2001 and his annual Halloween shows, have been among the most memorable mixes of performers and music to enter the pop annals.

Right now, Willner and Nichols are focused on an event that figures to rank right up there: “Shock and Awe: The Songs of Randy Newman,” which will unfold Saturday at Royce Hall, courtesy of Willner’s term as this season’s artist in residence for UCLA Live, the university’s performing arts organization.

Newman himself plays Royce on Friday, and Willner hopes the singer-songwriter will be watching from the wings the next night as performers such as Rip Torn, Jimmy Fallon, Taj Mahal, Vic Chesnutt, Victoria Williams, Van Dyke Parks and more tackle his touching, trenchant songbook. That would make it the first time a Willner honoree has actually witnessed the tribute.

“I’m sure there’s gonna be some versions he’s gonna be horrified with,” says the producer, sitting in the living room of his small Venice bungalow. “Hopefully there’ll be enough that he loves. Because of the short time you have to put these shows together and the kind of people you put in the same room, you get these moments that are amazing, moments that you wouldn’t get if it was rehearsed.”

That sense of risk and unpredictability is one of the things people like about Willner productions, but for him it goes only so far.

“If I was king of the world,” he adds, “I’d rehearse these things for two weeks and give up a few of those moments.”

Willner is at least the King of Eclectic, the result of his immersion in the free-form FM radio of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in his native Philadelphia. He later moved to New York City to attend NYU and became a gofer for record producer Joel Dorn (Roberta Flack, Peter Allen, Don McLean), with the goal of becoming a staff producer at a record company.

When mainstream rock went stale during the late-’70s disco era, he turned to jazz and drove a cab, and decided to make his own records. The “Nino Rota” was first, and it got wide notice because of connections cultivated through his new job, sketch music coordinator for “Saturday Night Live” -- Blondie’s Deborah Harry and Chris Stein signed on after meeting Willner when they hosted the show.

Willner has also worked on films, for Wim Wenders, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese. He released an album of his own music, and has filled the more traditional record-producer function for Marianne Faithfull, Lou Reed and other musicians, as well as poets Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso. He’s just produced an album for jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, who was an unknown when Willner hired him to do a track on the “Nino Rota” collection.

“That was a big thing for me,” says Frisell, who will be part of Saturday’s Newman concert. “He gave me this amazing chance. I met him and he just had an instinct or feeling about me. That’s one of the things that he has, this incredible instinct. He sees way beneath the surface in people. Different musicians are known for certain things and he’ll sort of see something else going on and then see how it connects with somebody else.”

“He’s genuinely modest,” says UCLA Live head David Sefton, who hopes to bring the Leonard Cohen program Willner staged in Brooklyn last summer to campus next year. “He’s very good at giving people the space but gently steering things. You’d think you’d need somebody to be much more forceful to do what he does, but he does it exactly the other way, by gentle suggestion, subtle persuasion.”

Willner’s next UCLA Live event will be an April 1 staging of pieces from the albums of the Los Angeles surreal/psychedelic comedy troupe the Firesign Theatre, executed by John Goodman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chloe Webb, David Thomas and other actors and musicians.

For Willner, who is wrapping up long-delayed work on a boxed set of unreleased Lenny Bruce material, “comedy was part of the whole thing too.... The theory was the Firesign Theatre records were like music records. They were reviewed in Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone next to anything else.... And then the radio stations would play them too.

“I’ll look at anything like a meal. OK, here’s your main entree, here’s the vegetable you don’t want to eat but it’s good for you, and here’s your easy ice cream.”

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‘Shock and Awe’

What: “Shock and Awe: The Songs of Randy Newman”

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood

When: Saturday, 8 p.m.

Price: $35 to $50; $20 students

Contact: (310) 825-2101