Pop music’s history & future
After giving other artists hits for decades, Jam & Lewis are bringing ‘newstalgia’ sound to their first album
The writing and production duo of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have been using live instruments and stateof-the art studio wizardry to produce music strong enough to snatch a body and render it a Gyratron for almost 40 years: “Just Be Good to Me” by the S.O.S. Band; “Saturday Love” by Cherrelle and Alexander O’Neal; “Human” by the Human League; “Monkey” by George Michael; “If It Isn’t Love” by New Edition; “Romantic” by Karyn White; and “U Remind Me” by Usher.
Toni Braxton said her gateway Jimmy and Terry was Janet Jackson’s anthem, “Let’s Wait Awhile.” Last year, Mariah Carey released a rarities collection that included a live version of “Just Be Good to Me.” And, in an email, Jackson mentioned the S.O.S. Band, “Human” and the duo’s collaboration with O’Neal as being part “of this really incredible body of work.”
Jam & Lewis have made music for and seemingly with everybody, but Jackson is the artist with whom they’re most automatically associated. Over about a half-dozen albums, beginning with “Control” in 1986, the three merged into a trinity of megaselling, genre-melting popular musicianship, releasing work that defined and redefined then defined again who Jackson is and how she can sound. Jam & Lewis have been up for 11 producer of the year Grammys, and the bulk of the accolades has included their work with Jackson.
But after decades of below-the-title collaboration (often in matching suits, ties, fedoras and shades), Jam and Lewis have decided to put themselves first. Sort of. “Jam & Lewis Volume One,” now available, is the first album released under their own names. They co-wrote, play on and produced its 10 songs. The singing, however, has been left to professionals: Carey and Braxton; Mary J. Blige, Boyz II Men, Heather Headley, Sounds of Blackness and Charlie Wilson.
They have been working on this album for at least three years.
“There was an elegance and an effortlessness to the way that the album sounds,” Jam said on a recent call with Lewis. “When I listen back, it doesn’t sound like we’re chasing anything, it just feels like it’s just it is what
it is, and the songs are timeless in a way.”
“Volume One” isn’t out to burnish Jam & Lewis’ standing or defend their legacy. It’s more fascinating than that. Each song renders its singer just as Jam implies: as their most quintessential self.
On “He Don’t Know Nothin’ Bout It,” Babyface sounds as smooth and certain as he did decades ago. Jam remembered that when the producer and singer heard the finished track, he couldn’t believe how classically himself he sounded.
Jam calls this conflation of old-school and contemporary sounds “newstalgia.” “It’s that feeling that you get when you hear something that’s new,” he said, “that’s exciting, but it takes you back to a place that’s very comfortable and very reassuring. And we wanted all the songs on the record to have that feeling.”
James Harris III met Terry Lewis as a middleschooler in the summer of 1973 on the campus of the University of Minnesota as part of a six-week Upward Bound program. Jam
recalled catching Lewis seated on a bed, playing Kool & the Gang on a bass guitar and thinking, “That dude needs to be in my life.” Lewis remembered Jam playing piano that summer; he saw an opportunity to fill a hole in his band.
Jam grew up loving Chicago before it was a Top 40 powerhouse in the 1980s. “I’m self-taught,” Jam said. Chicago, and its keyboardist Robert Lamm, are the reasons “I learned the black keys on a keyboard.”
As a teenager, Lewis was out playing bass with the R&B barnburners Sam & Dave, learning “how to maintain the pocket,” he said. “They told me what not to do, which was don’t go over the A string. You could play the E and the A string — but no plucking and no picking.”
It was Lewis who helped ensorcell Jam with stronger grooves. “I was saying to him, man, the new Chicago record’s getting ready to come out, and he looked at me and he was like, ‘Chicago record?’,” Jam recalled. “What about Earth, Wind & Fire, man?” His soul-music diet swelled to include, for starters, New Birth and Tower of Power. “That was so memorable, just our meeting that summer,” Jam said.
The roots of that “&” in their arrangement are strong. “We shook hands back in ’82, I guess it was,” Jam said as Lewis nodded. “And we said 50/50. So, it doesn’t matter whose idea it is, there’s no ego to it, it’s just the best idea wins, and so it eliminates 99% of anything that you would ever disagree with.”
Both Lewis and Jam are proud of the fruits of their friendship. Flyte Tyme, their studio in Agoura Hills, California, near Los Angeles, is practically a museum of both their success (framed platinum discs on nearly every wall) and their inability to purge (if I saw one keytar on my 2019 visit, maybe I saw a dozen).
Some of the premium instruments were once in a storage space across the street. Jam says they considered paring down. But a few things happened to change their minds. They were working with singer-songwriter Robyn, who “was the one that actually sparked that idea” to move, Jam said. So now a visitor can walk around and “see the piano that ‘Tender Love’ was done on, or you see the drum machine that ‘Saturday Love’ was done on.”
They also found a note Michael Jackson left asking if they wouldn’t mind importing some sounds he liked on Janet’s “Nasty” to a project they were working on with him. “I wasn’t there so he had taped it to the keyboard,” Jam said. “So, literally, it was the note with a piece of tape still on it from Michael Jackson. And Terry and I kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Well, we got to move all these boxes, we can’t just toss’ ” them.
Two years ago, Jam mentioned that someone from the Smithsonian had come out to look into displaying some items for posterity. He reported that their equipment and accouterments have also drawn the interest of the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, and the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, where one of Jam’s fedoras already lives.
Robyn, Lewis said in 2019 visit, would be on “Volume Two.” So might Janet Jackson.
I asked when that might be.
Lewis’ eyebrows arched over his shades, then he grinned.
“After ‘Volume One.’ ”