Phillip, What's Your Latest Project?: CHRONICLES OF THE PAST

I can't believe that's it's already been over a decade since I was called to contract the vocals for the Walt Disney Film 'Dinosaur'. This film was released on May 19, 2000 and at the time it was a first for Disney. First, in what sense? All of the scenes that you see in the film, the sky, the trees, the mountains, everything in the background is real. But the Dinosaurs, all of the animals and everything else is computer graphic animation.

So leave it to Disney to create something at the time that had not been done before. James Newton Howard scored the film and he called me to put a group of singers together for the vocals. James Newton Howard and I had worked together on various records in the past and his career was going in the direction of film scoring and we had also worked on a few films together so it was nice to be together again on another project.

I had to put together a group of 12 singers and in the Los Angeles area that's really not a hard task because you have a big pool to pull from. The only challenge was getting the schedules together. We originally had set up a Friday to do the vocals, but then I got a call from James Newton Howard saying that Disney also wanted Lebo M to work with the vocalists on this film. Lebo M is the singer you first hear on The Lion King and he did a lot of vocal arrangements from that film as well. Lebo was only going to be in town on Saturday because he was flying into London to help with the stage production of Lion King.

Well here's where the challenge came, I had to move 11 singers, 12 with myself, to Saturday morning to fit Lebo M's schedule. Some didn't think they would be able to make it, and I had a small window to make this happen. Many adjusted their schedules and it finally came together.

Lebo gave all of the singers some challenges with the African Rhythms and pronunciations, but we made it work. All of us teased each other because one of the pronunciations that Lebo gave us sounded like 'bite off my leg' in English, but of course that's not what we were saying. We were saying something in the African Language that phonetically sounded like 'bite off my leg'. Needless to say we had a lot of fun on that session.

Even though this movie was a first at the time it didn't become a big Disney Box Office hit, but it still did quite well. When you get a chance to watch the film, check out the scene(s) where the monkey's are jumping between the trees, you'll here what sounds like 'bite off my leg'.