Musical Collaborations

Across five decades, Gary Marks has recorded with musicians who went on to become major names in jazz, film scoring, and record production, and his own songs have been recorded by artists far outside his usual circles. Explore each collaboration below.

From the 1970s Sessions

John Scofield made his recording debut on Gathering (1974) before becoming one of jazz's most influential guitarists. Scofield also played on Marks’s third album, Thoughts of Why. Scofield went on to record and perform with Miles Davis, Billy Cobham, Gary Burton, Charles Mingus, Herbie Hancock, and Pat Metheny, among many others.

David Samuels made his own debut on that same session, later spending over a decade as a member of the Grammy award-winning band Spyro Gyra. Samuels also played on Marks’s third album, Thoughts of Why. Over his career, Samuels also recorded and performed with Frank Zappa, Carla Bley, Pat Metheny, David Friedman, and Gary Burton.

Michael Cochrane played piano and keyboards on Gathering. Cochrane became Marks’s first piano teacher in September of 1973, and altered Marks’s perception of music theory and jazz. Cochrane went on to record ten of his own albums as a leader, while also joining with Sonny Fortune, and Jack Walrath on recordings from 1976 to 1990.

Art Lande is considered one of the premier improvisational jazz pianists today. He has carved out his own singular path throughout his career. In 1974 he recorded his now-classic Red Lanta, a duet album with Jan Garbarek. He was teaching Gary Marks during this period. Red Lanta was followed by two ECM albums with his band, Rubisa Patrol. Art Lande and the Rubisa Patrol band played on Marks’s second and third albums, Upon Oanda’s Wing and Thoughts of Why.

By the mid-1970s, Lande started his own jazz school, which Marks took part in. At the time Lande joked that Marks forced him to create a separate school just for him, which Lande called "The School for Genius Illiterates," since Marks couldn’t read music notation.

Mark Isham joined Art Lande in 1976 to form Rubisa Patrol. Isham played trumpet on Thoughts of Why (1978). Isham went on to appear on five records with Van Morrison and released a series of highly regarded albums on Windham Hill, beginning with Vapor Drawings in 1983. He won a Grammy for his 1990 album, Mark Isham, and earned an Academy Award nomination for his score to A River Runs Through It. Isham won an Emmy for the television series EZ Streets. Isham, Mark.

Marks also collaborated with the brilliant oboist and reed player Paul McCandless on Marks's Thoughts of Why album, and again on The Real World in 1988. McCandless also performed with Carla Bley, who co-founded JCOA, which earlier had distributed Marks's first album, Gathering.

In the late 1970s, Marks introduced McCandless to Art Lande and David Samuels. Those three joined together to create an album for ECM called Skylight. McCandless also played on Eberhard Weber's album Later That Evening on ECM. But Paul McCandless’s greatest ongoing achievement was his work over multiple years with the band he co-founded with Ralph Towner—the world-renowned jazz group Oregon.

The Rock Years

Guitarist Stef Burns played on The Real World (1988) and A Whisper Can Change the World (2007) before joining the Alice Cooper Band and, since 1995, touring with Italian singer-songwriter Vasco Rossi.

Jim Scott mixed the majority of A Whisper Can Change the World the same year he was working with Tom Petty and before that, the Dixie Chicks, Sting, the Rolling Stones, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Mark Needham picked up the remaining tracks in between working with Fleetwood Mac, The Killers, and Chris Isaak. Mark also mixed all the songs from Gary’s next album, From Here.

Gary Marks Songs Recorded by Other Artists

Cris Williamson and Teresa Trull covered three Gary Marks songs from Marks’s The Real World album—"For Molly's Sky," "The Love We Take," and "Soulful Days"—on their 1989 duo album Country Blessed. Williamson and Trull are both considered pioneers of the women's music movement.

"Soulful Days" was also chosen by Cris Williamson for a career-spanning “best-of” collection of her recorded work, The Essential Cris Williamson (2005).

Teresa Trull recorded one of Gary Marks's signature songs, "Only Time Can Tell," on her 1986 album A Step Away (Redwood Records). Marks also co-wrote the title track to that album. Trull contributed backing vocals on a number of Marks's recordings.

More recently, Sony rap artist Reuben Aziz co-wrote “IDOLS” with Marks for his 2024 breakout project how did we end up here?, introducing Marks's name to a new audience five decades after his career began.

One Thread, Five Decades

These collaborations map a single through-line across Gary Marks's entire career: releasing Gathering in 1974, sharing a 1976 show with Art Lande at the Santa Barbara Opera House, having four songs covered by two trailblazers of the women's music movement in the 1980s, working in a mixing studio in L.A. in 2007 with Jim Scott, co-writing with a Sony rap artist in 2024, and being honored with a Record Store Day selection of Crossroads in 2026 on the Lantern Heights label — all from the same catalog, just different points in a remarkable timeline.