Michael Franks bought his first guitar at fourteen: a Japanese instrument branded Marco Polo, $29.95, with six private lessons included in the price. Those six lessons are the only formal music training he has ever had. Everything else in his catalog rests on that fact, because it explains why he became the kind of jazz artist who writes rather than the kind who plays.

His education went in a different direction entirely. He took a BA in comparative literature from UCLA in 1966 and an MA from the University of Oregon in 1968, held a teaching assistantship in American literature at the University of Montreal, and returned to UCLA to teach part-time. In 1968 he wrote an antiwar musical, Anthems in E-Flat Calliope, which starred a young Mark Hamill. In 1974 he scored two films: Cockfighter, starring Warren Oates, and Zandy's Bride, with Liv Ullmann and Gene Hackman. A first album under his own name appeared on Brut Records in 1973, closer to folk rock than to anything he would make later.

The record that defined him came in 1975. The Art of Tea, cut at Capitol Studios in Hollywood between May 22 and June 9 and produced by Tommy LiPuma, put Joe Sample on keyboards, Wilton Felder on bass and Larry Carlton on guitar behind a part-time English lecturer singing his own songs about eggplants, monkeys and cold feet. John Guerin played drums, Larry Bunker vibes, and Nick DeCaro wrote the string charts. The album reached No. 131 on the Billboard 200, and its single, "Popsicle Toes," went to No. 43 on the Hot 100 in 1976. Five decades and eighteen studio albums later, that single remains his only Hot 100 entry.

Sleeping Gypsy followed in 1977, and it carries the deepest personnel list of his early run. Claus Ogerman arranged and conducted; Michael Brecker, David Sanborn, Sample, Carlton and Felder all played. Most of it was recorded at Capitol between August and November 1976, but "B'wana-He No Home" and "Down in Brazil" were cut in Rio de Janeiro, where Franks wrote them. Its best-known song, "Antonio's Song (The Rainbow)," is dedicated to Antonio Carlos Jobim, one of three songs Franks has written for him.

Burchfield Nines (1978) moved the sessions to New York and handed the orchestrations to Eumir Deodato, with Steve Gadd on drums, Ralph MacDonald on percussion, Will Lee on bass, John Tropea on guitar, Leon Pendarvis on keyboards and Bud Shank and Ernie Watts on reeds. It reached No. 90, his best placing to that point, and took its title and cover art from the American painter Charles Burchfield. During those sessions the percussionist Ray Armando handed Franks a cabasa, and he has held one on stage ever since.

The Warner Bros. run continued through the 1980s: Tiger in the Rain (1979, No. 68), produced and arranged by John Simon with David Liebman on flute and a Henri Rousseau painting on the sleeve; One Bad Habit (1980, No. 83), LiPuma's last production for him for a decade; Objects of Desire (1982), which reached No. 45 and remains his highest-charting album; Passionfruit (1983); Skin Dive (1985), whose "Your Secret's Safe with Me" reached No. 4 on the US Adult Contemporary chart; and The Camera Never Lies (1987). Rob Mounsey produced the last two, and the New York session players who filled them out include Marcus Miller, Ron Carter, Steve Gadd, Michael Brecker, David Sanborn, Hiram Bullock and Hugh McCracken.

LiPuma returned for Blue Pacific (1990) alongside Jeff Lorber and Steely Dan's Walter Becker. Dragonfly Summer (1993) brought in Ben Sidran, Gil Goldstein and the Yellowjackets, and Abandoned Garden (1995) kept Goldstein with Jimmy Haslip and Russell Ferrante. He moved to Windham Hill Jazz for Barefoot on the Beach (1999), produced by Chuck Loeb and Haslip, with Bob James at the piano and Bob Mintzer on saxophone, then to Koch for the Christmas record Watching the Snow (2003) and Rendezvous in Rio (2006), which picked the Brazilian thread back up thirty years after Sleeping Gypsy. Shanachie released Time Together in 2011 and The Music in My Head in 2018, forty-five years after his debut.

The clearest measure of his standing is not his own chart record but the number of other people who have recorded his songs. Shirley Bassey, the Carpenters, Kurt Elling, Diana Krall, Patti LaBelle, Lyle Lovett, the Manhattan Transfer, Carmen McRae, Ringo Starr, Peggy Lee, Natalie Cole and Astrud Gilberto have all cut Franks material, and four separate albums have been built entirely from his songbook: Veronica Nunn's The Art of Michael Franks (2010), Noël Akchoté's The Lady Wants To Know (2016), Leo Sidran's Cool School (2018) and A Brazilian Tribute To Michael Franks (2022). Discogs credits him on 714 releases in total. He is 81 and still recording.

Franks is a songwriter who sings rather than a singer who writes, and the distinction runs through everything about his records. His voice is light, close-miked and deliberately unforced, with no vibrato to speak of and no interest in the belting a pop vocal of the same era would have demanded. What carries the songs is the writing: literate, wry, frequently comic lyrics set against melody-first material with pop, R&B and Brazilian bossa rhythms underneath rather than strict swing.

That combination is what places him in crossover jazz rather than smooth jazz. He is not a jazz instrumentalist who simplified his playing for radio; he had no instrumental career to simplify. Instead he wrote accessible material and hired working jazz musicians to play it without asking them to stop improvising, which is why records as commercially aimed as The Art of Tea and Skin Dive carry solos by Larry Carlton, Michael Brecker and David Sanborn. The improvising never left; it stopped being the point of the song.

The Brazilian influence is the most persistent thread in his writing, running from "Antonio's Song (The Rainbow)" and "Down in Brazil" on Sleeping Gypsy in 1977 through Rendezvous in Rio in 2006, and it connects directly to Antonio Carlos Jobim, to whom he has dedicated three songs. His arrangers form the other throughline: Claus Ogerman, who wrote for Frank Sinatra and Jobim, and Eumir Deodato both shaped his late-1970s sound, and Tommy LiPuma produced six of his albums across three decades.