Stevie Wonder's music is fascinating in many ways. The aspect that I'm concerned with today is the process with which he layers rhythms one on top of the other during the recording process. The best place to hear it is "Superstition", from Talking Book (1972), where he overdubbed clavinet and Moog bass parts over his original drum track. (In fact, he played everything on it but the trumpet and saxophone parts, which he wrote.) His drumming on the track, while clearly the work of a great musician (the groove is massive), is also clearly not the work of a professional drummer, in the sense that it is utterly free of memorized patterns and/or vocabulary that a studio musician relies on. The end result is one of the greatest recordings in r&b history (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8HlHpACXyw&feature=related), and one of the most influential, because it was at this point that the music began to be centered around producers and arrangers as opposed to bands and their leaders. It's somewhat ironic, because Wonder learned much of his craft from a band - the brilliant Motown hit-makers that called themselves the Funk Brothers. But that's for another day.