Sounds

Love you just one week

This was a much more of a pop endeavor, and paired me up with Michelle Pan. She's got this great sultry voice. Michelle was a huge star at the time, and I had no idea what I was getting involved with. I just went with the flow.

Actually, I'd had enough of the craziness of eight months of constant promotion in Chinese, and went to San Francisco to lick my wounds. No way I was going back to that chaos. That is until the record company boss called and told me (his actual words), "We lost so much money on your first album that we need you to come back and do another." I was just getting ready to apply to some good law school, and get on with my life when he dropped the big carrot. "And we'll let you produce half of it. Just bring back something that will sell." They wired me some money, and that was it. I got my first real shot at writing, arranging, and producing. Plus I got to play my own sax, a gorgeous 1927 Buescher set up like Arthur Blythe. I loved Arthur's huge crying sound, and I also loved the pop R&B sound that was coming up pre-Kenny G, when Kenny was doing his Jeff Lorber stint, and I just played around finding what I liked. Iko Iko was always a fave of mine, as was the Bo Diddley bass line we put on it, and I wrote a few tunes like "MTV" (which is about those illegal laser disk places in Taipei where you could watch classic movies in big screen private rooms, and make out like in high school), "Definitely Not Jazz" is for my boss who told me, "Whatever you do, don't do any jazz!" So I wrote this funky Ornette/Herbie acid jazz tune and called it "Definitely Not Jazz." There's this wacky Miles Davis "You're under arrest" tribute where the cops are screaming at me through the bullhorn, "Hey, you there with the horn. This is the jazz police! You are under arrest…Come out with your horn up!" Hehehe… "Disappear" is a nice moody acoustic tune written live in the studio during a late night session. We even brought some girls to the studio to show off and be cool, and I realized I was definitely into the music once again.

Credits

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