Genre
R&B, soul, jazz-pop, and dance. A deliberate pivot toward contemporary urban radio, the album deploys Nile Rodgers's state-of-the-art funk production as a vehicle for Jarreau's acrobatic voice across a programme of ten songs drawn from an international roster of writers, combining dance-floor energy with Jarreau's characteristic vocal ingenuity.
Release
Released on September 8, 1986, by Warner Bros. Records. It was Jarreau's eighth studio album. A significant anecdote explains its commercial underperformance: Jarreau and Rodgers decided against including the Moonlighting television theme - then becoming a massive hit - on the grounds that it was not "cool enough" for the album's aesthetic. Nile Rodgers later called it "the best thing I ever made that didn't sell."
Production
Produced by Nile Rodgers, co-founder of Chic and architect of a string of landmark early 1980s productions including David Bowie's Let's Dance and Madonna's Like a Virgin. Recorded and mixed digitally by James Farber at Skyline Studios, New York City; digitally edited at Atlantic Studios, New York; mastered by Bob Ludwig at Masterdisk, New York. The ensemble included Hiram Bullock, Robert Arron, Mac Gollehon, Peter Scherer, Philippe Saisse, Steve Ferrone, and Jimmy Bralower.
Reception
The album peaked at No. 30 on the Billboard Top Soul Albums chart, No. 9 on the Traditional Jazz Albums chart, and No. 17 on the Contemporary Jazz Albums chart. Record-facts described it as "a perhaps surprisingly scintillating collaboration," praising Rodgers for taking advantage of Jarreau's rhythmic capabilities on "material too deliciously complicated for any old R&B soulster to pull off."
Al Jarreau
Alwin Lopez Jarreau (March 12, 1940, Milwaukee, Wisconsin – February 12, 2017, Los Angeles, California) was an American singer who sang with acrobatic versatility and inventiveness, ranging from tenor crooning to scatting, with influences spanning jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and gospel. The son of a Seventh-day Adventist minister, he earned a degree in psychology and a Master's in Vocational Rehabilitation before pursuing music professionally in San Francisco. His breakthrough came with Breakin' Away (1981), which spent two years on the Billboard 200. He was the first vocalist to win Grammy Awards in the Jazz, Pop, and R&B categories, accumulating seven Grammy Awards in total across a fifty-year career. He also sang the iconic theme of the television series Moonlighting and participated in "We Are the World" (1985).
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