"Admit it - if it were your record company, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis would have produced your solo album, too." - Musician magazine
Ya damn right they would have. I might even get my label's current star to sing on a couple of tracks and have a few big late-career hits. But I'd probably use that formula for the whole album. That's not the case here as Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis bring their immediately recognizable Minneapolis sound to only 4 of the 10 tracks on the album. The remainder of the tracks are typical '80s Alpert fare, written and produced by Alpert himself or guests such as Albert Hammond and Roy Bittan (I count a total of 7 producer credits on the album). So the album is incredibly uneven moving from new jack swing to instrumental pop and back again, but somehow the variety makes for a pleasurable listen and a musical time capsule direct from 1987. Good, not great, but certainly worth the $1.99 I paid for it.
Reviews/ratings:
- Billboard: "an altogether commercial package"
- CashBox: "Amid all the technological razzmatazz, strains of the old TJB brass sound seap [sic] through."
- Musician: "there's never anything condescending about the music here"
- The Rolling Stone Jazz & Blues Album Guide (1999): ★★
- US Billboard 200: #18
- Billboard Contemporary Jazz: #16
- Billboard R&B: #5
- Billboard CD: #29
- CashBox: #16
- Rolling Stone: #29
Tracks: I think the best tune here is the title track (#46 pop, #3 R&B, #3 dance). The bigger hits, though, were Diamonds (#5 pop, #1 R&B, #1 dance) and Making Love In The Rain (#35 pop, #7 R&B, #21 AC); both featuring lead and background vocals by Janet Jackson and Lisa Keith. The other Jam/Lewis tune is titled Pillow and features a vocal duet between Alpert and his wife, Lani Hall. Of the remaining six tracks, my picks are Our Song and Rocket To The Moon.
Personal Memory Associated with this CD: I had given up on new Alpert releases in the early part of the decade and had moved on to albums by other trumpeters, so I didn't purchase this album in 1987. After all, I was a 'serious musician' by that time. What a knucklehead. I would have enjoyed the heck out of this thing back then.
Previously revisited for the blog:
| A Portrait In Music (1997) | Beyond (1980) |
| Passion Dance (1997) | Rise (1979) |
| Classics, Volume 1 (1987) | What Now My Love (1966) |
| Magic Man (1981) |
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