8/1/2023 0 Comments Patrice rushen remind meMany of Remind Me’s tracks are familiar from being sampled in later songs by artists ranging from Shabba Ranks and Junior M.A.F.I.A. But sandcastles of sound emerge from the foundation, almost mythically: the snap of timbales, Rushen’s own Rhodes piano and the most glitter-packed guitar this side of Prince’s “Tambourine.” Yet the song doesn’t mind disappearing when the next wave arrives or letting go when a hip-hop producer enters stage right to take freely from its components. This 12-inch version of the track comes across as casual-mostly mid-tempo bass line and catchy vocal repetition. Check out “Feels So Real (Won’t Let Go),” which shot all the way to number two on the US R&B charts in 1984. Yet Remind Me reminds us that Rushen never played up her musical talents or attempted to come off as a musical genius: the songs seem effortless, as if they formed and grew to adulthood directly on the dance floor. To call her a polymath would be a major understatement. All of this training paid off magnificently during her Elektra years, when she would play multiple instruments (piano, synth, drums, clavinet, bass and guitar, among others), provide both lead and backing vocals, produce, arrange, conduct and write the bulk of each LP. By high school, she was composing original tunes and arranging James Brown songs for her marching band. From a young age, she learned to identify and arrange various sounds as a listener, a pianist and eventually a flautist. Rushen ended up in the music world at three, when she landed in a University of Southern California program that focused on early musical education. Across these tracks, we see an artist that developed her sound by breezily breaking genre and cultural boundaries. The collection consists of 15 highlights from the five studio albums (and companion 12-inch versions) released on Elektra during these seven years: Patrice (1978), Pizzazz (1980), Posh (1980), Straight from the Heart (1982) and Now (1984). Remind Me: The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978-1984, recently released on vinyl and CD by Strut Records, helps complicate surface understandings of Patrice Rushen’s music by accentuating her virtuosic composition process and community-centered lyrics. We can say the same about Earth, Wind & Fire, Teddy Pendergrass and Chic, for example, all artists that produced a kind of polyphonic, polished funk that often gestured back to jazz and Motown and forward to disco and club/pop music. It’s music that finds a late-night, danceable groove and lingers there by packing in layers of horn and string sections, percussion and keys. At first glance, the jazz-funk R&B of Patrice Rushen sounds a lot like the music that other black artists were producing in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
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