Los Angeles - If you think you know record production styles fairly well and can't, for the life of you, think of what the 'Henry Lewy sound' is, don't fret. That's exactly the way this genial, unassuming, recording giant would want it. Henry Lewy isn't interested in putting his distinctive stamp on every record he makes. Rather, he likes to think of himself as primarily a conduit - one who facilitates the recording process for artists who already have a vision of what they're after in the studio.

"There are artists who'll say to a producer. 'Do me. Because I don't know what I want and I liked this other record you did," Lewy says over dinner at a Beverly Hills Chinese restaurant. "For those people, a PRODUCER is a must - someone who will really take control in the studio, work hard to get the sound from all the players and shape the entire project a certain way. I don't like to work that way so much, and most of the artists I've worked with already know what they want because they are artists with their own vision. They're individualistic and to try to change or shape them to fit my preconceived notions would be to take away the heart of the issue - their creativity."

Lewy knows a thing or two about working with creative musicians, too - he has worked on every Joni Mitchell record since her second LP, acting as a combination engineer/producer/listener, as well as on projects with singer-songwriters ranging from Leonard Cohen to Van Morrison to Stephen Bishop in recent years. He also has a long, colourful history in the Los Angeles studio scene working on classical projects by the Mamas and the Papas, Crosby Stills & Nash, and a slew of others. He is one of those rare music industry veterans whom everybody loves, and with good reason - he seems completely ego-less (in stark contrast to most producers), he understands the artists he works with better than just about anyone else, and he doesn't seem to have an impatient or mean streak in his make-up. No wonder he has made a career of working with the idiosyncratic, the eccentric and the volatile. "I've just sort of sat back and fate has thrown people my way," he says with a characteristic warm smile.

The German-born Lewy, began his career in the music business in the early fifties, working as a combination disc jockey and engineer at stations in San Diego, Las Vegas and LA. "That was fun," he says, "but after a while it got a little old, so I went south to South America and got involved with this think called The Dancing Waters, which was this big German invention I think was last seen with Liberace. It was crazy - it had sixteen centrifugal pumps, coloured lights, quite a spectacle, and it was very popular there. Unfortunately, it took fifteen hours to set up and eight hours to tear down so it was exhausting." During this period the freewheeling Lewy also joined a circus.

When he returned to Los Angeles in 1959, he found the radio scene to be stagnant for the most part so he looked to the music world for inspiration. In the very early sixties, he says, "There was a huge gap between artists and engineers. It was like a war. There didn't seem to be any cooperation at all. There was one good guy, though, named Bones Howe. He was just getting started and he was my idol." (Howe remained active through the years; he was recently involved in the Grammy and Oscar nominated 'One from the Heart' soundtrack.)

Lewy attempted to bring a little humanity into the recording process after landing his first gig at a small studio called Electrovox. From there, he worked a three year stint at Liberty Records' studio on La Brea, where he helped engineer the original Chipmunks sessions on the studio's four-track. As a freelancer working out of Gold Star studios and others, he worked on early demos by such legends-to-be as Jackie DeShannon and Leon Russell, "who seemed to be a very special talent, even then," he says, but it wasn't until he took a job at United & Western studio that he really blossomed into an engineer.

"That's when I came into my own. I was a second engineer behind Bones on the legendary Mamas and Papas albums and all those classic records by Johnny Rivers. It was fantastic working with Bones; I learned so much. He was very relaxed and he made everyone else feel comfortable and relaxed. He operated the way I like to operate - making the artist feel at home in the studio, letting the artist dictate the session and then, if it's not right, becoming more active."

In the late 60s, a series of friendships led him to a demo project with David Crosby and Stephen Stills - those sessions eventually snowballed to become the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album. It was Crosby who introduced Lewy to his most important client: Joni Mitchell. "David told me he had just split up with Joni and he was looking for someone who would help her make her second album. She didn't need a producer per se, but more a third ear, a catalyst between her and her material." The first Lewy-Mitchell collaboration was 'Clouds,' and since those innocent first days, the two have worked on eleven other albums that have taken each of them through innumerable changes in musical styles from folk-rock through Mitchell's abstract jazz explorations. Lewy's role, like Mitchell's music has changed over the years.

"I was a teacher and listener at first," he says. "When we first got together, she didn't really know anything about the studio, really. When we'd overdub vocals, for instance, she was so insecure that she had to hold a guitar, and that sort of thing. As the years went on, she picked up the engineering aspect more and more and today she knows what a studio can do for her and she knows how to get what she wants. She had a producer on her first album who lasted three or four days," he laughs, and then turning serious, adds, "Joni has to be free to try things out. That's how she makes records. She'll come into the studio with a song one way and it'll end up being completely different when the record comes out. In between there are all the different ideas she tries out. Some of them are good, some of them aren't. She has the intelligence to know when something is or isn't working out."

Lewy, who was nearing completion of Mitchell's 'Wild Things Run Fast' LP last autumn when we first spoke, explained in some detail the process Mitchell typically uses in recording her albums: "She comes up with the arrangements she does from listening carefully to her own piano or guitar parts. She has a very interesting style - she's essentially self-taught and actually invents her own chords frequently - and she can hear in her own parts the components of the fuller arrangement. When Joni gets musicians in the studio, the first three or four takes are usually just for listening. She doesn't want to think too much about them - she just wants to play, and frequently you get some real magic happening in those takes."

Lewy says he likes to use just guitar-bass-drums or even guitar-drums when the song is new because "if there are too many players, she ahs a tendency to lose the intricacies of her guitar playing and she'll play with them instead of them playing with her. And since her guitar is the heart of the arrangements you lose something when that happens."

In the case of 'Wild Things Run Fast,' "when she came into the studio, she really didn't know what direction she wanted so we ended up doing every song a few times using different musicians. This is what we did with 'Mingus' also, until it all clicked into place. All of a sudden she'd say, 'This is how I wanted it to be.'" Indeed there were even some radical changes in arrangements between the time Lewy played my early mixes of Mitchell's new material and when the record came out, including the replacement of Don Henley's vocal on "Dream Flat Tyres" with a more soulful outing by Lionel Ritchie.

In the overdubbing stage, Mitchell looks for colours to add to her already developed sketch rather than dominating textures. Comments Lewy, "She's essentially a painter [painting has long been her biggest passion; as a look at any of her recent album covers shows] and she thinks of her music in painterly terms. She'll talk about adding a colour here or there, or having a skeleton and fleshing it out with more tones." It is not surprising, then, that the musicians she chooses for her records and tours are frequently individualistic players who lend her music a very specific hue, be it bassist Jaco Pastorius, whose distinctive sound has certain horn-like sonorities [or her current bassist and new husband Larry Klein] or guitarist Pat Metheny's bright, almost choral sound, and on down the line. There is a musician perfect for the sound in her head and she usually finds the player every time. And of course much of Lewy's studio work is with Mitchell alone, helping her to double and triple her voice and guitar, helping her achieve the clean but layered effect she has favoured traditionally.

"What I love about Joni," he says brightly, "is that she never sits still for a second. She's always moving forward. She grows with every album, which is, ironically, one of things that turns some fans off. They get used to her doing one thing and then she changes. She soaks in things constantly. She has a real appetite for new ideas." Certainly a larger one than either radio or the majority of the record-buying public, who have not embraced her various forays into jazzier styles in quite the same way they did for her folk albums. As a result, albums like 'Mingus' and her shockingly underrated masterpiece, 'Don Juan's Reckless Daughter' (which Lewy agrees is easily among her best), went largely unheard. "Of course we were very disappointed that those records did not find a larger audience," Lewy says, "but it's not part of Joni's personality to sit down and say, 'I'm going to make this sound commercial.'" If she had, the world would never have heard the largely inaccessible 'Chair in the Sky,' much less the side-long opus from 'Don Juan,' 'Paprika Plains,' which remains perhaps her most fully realised - and least discovered - work.

Henry Lewy isn't looking for the next gold record for his wall, though obviously he hopes every project he works on will be successful. He knew, for example, that when he travelled to France to record Van Morrison's contemplative 'Common One' LP he wasn't going to top the charts. "That's not why I ever take a project," he says sternly. "He is quite probably a genius and it was a thrill to work with him. We had some truly magical evenings in the studio - that's why you do it. Van is a man of very strong convictions. He is the way he is. Some people say, 'he should try to sell his record more, do interviews,' and that sort of thing. But that's not him. His music is him and I was hired to help him make his music sound the way he wanted."

Of late, Lewy has been most involved developing a few younger artists (as well as working with Leonard Cohen on a spiritual music project), most notably LA singer/songwriter Jude Johnstone who he feels "is an enormous talent, a very emotional songwriter." Lewy says, "I like young artists because you see so much enthusiasm and so many fresh ideas. Sometimes the sessions are less than perfect, but what you sell with a first time artist is emotion. You don't want an album by a young artist to sound mechanical and that is the danger."

He laments that "there is no development of artists by record companies anymore. They want to make records that sell only. How do you do that? There's no guarantee. So what has happened is they've inhibited people's natural creativity so artists look at what's already successful to help them decide what to do. What does that do to the artist?"

That is why Lewy works with several young artists on spec and continued to work with Mitchell. Leonard Cohen and others who refuse to compromise their art. "It is an art," he says wistfully. "I can't look at this as just a business." And that explains why Henry Lewy has no shortage of admiring clients - and friends.