![]() ![]() Wise to Elektra’s ways, Patrice and co-producer Charles Mims, Jr. “It used to be that you had to sell a certain number of records to get support so you could go on tour.” “They didn’t make an effort on the marketing side to enhance the possibilities of this crossover that they wanted,” Rushen says. The following year, Rushen delivered what she thought they wanted: A stomping, string-drenched disco single called “ Haven’t You Heard?” But Elektra failed to push it. These early records did well on Black radio-“You have to remember here in the States, radio was very segregated,” she stresses-and Elektra saw crossover potential in the young musician, and snapped her up in 1978. They’d signed her at 19 as “a pianist who wrote a little bit” and, over the course of three albums, she mixed traditional jazz with more contemporary styles, with the increasing influence of funk and disco as the ‘70s progressed. “They were really good about giving me complete creative freedom,” she says. “Why wouldn’t you wanna be very good? But I understood later that what he was saying was that there were gonna be some additional hurdles in my journey that were gonna be based on gender bias, racism, and the possibility of just being told what I can’t do.”įortunately, her first record deal with jazz label Prestige in 1974 had none of those hurdles. ![]() “I thought that was the most odd thing to say,” Rushen remembers. ![]() “Well you’re gonna have to be very, very good,” he replied. “What do you want to do?,” asked Jones, after hearing Rushen’s arrangement of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man.” “Oh sir, I wanna write,” she told him. In her teens, Rushen joined Msingi Workshop, a collective of young jazz musicians who caught the ear of legendary composers like Oliver Nelson, Tom Scott, and, most notably, Quincy Jones. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track “Playing in an orchestra, or band-even if it’s a marching band-gave me a new respect for ensemble playing, and the colors which exist different instruments together. “Music took on a different perspective for me, because now I’m part of an ensemble,” she recalls, telling the story as if it’s happening in real time. In junior high, she took up the flute, and began playing in groups. at the turn of the ‘60s, Rushen devoured her parents’s jazz, R&B, and pop collection-“they bought records incessantly,” she recalls-as well as the gospel and salsa that was popular in her community. ![]() Growing up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in South Central L.A. from the south, and were given opportunities to go to school, and they wanted us, my sister and I, to be really happy because we were good at something.” So we took it into our own hands to get it to the radio.”īeing proactive came naturally to Rushen, who started learning piano at the age of 5. “You can be all sad,” she says, “or you can take action. The album was a radio-friendly set of dancefloor soul for the post-disco era and it opened with the electric boogie of lead single “Forget Me Nots.” The album seemed like a surefire hit-until her label bluntly informed her, “We don’t like anything on here.” Looking back on the incident now, Rushen is unphased. In 1982, Patrice Rushen was a decade deep into a respected recording career when she delivered her seventh studio album Straight From The Heart to her A&R at Elektra Records. ![]()
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