Skip to main content

The Producer Series: Narada Michael Walden

He was a jazz-fusion drummer with the Mahavishnu Orchestra before he produced "I Wanna Dance with Somebody." Twenty-five tracks of Narada Michael Walden's improbable career.

From Mahavishnu to Whitney

Michael Walden — given the name Narada by the spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy — began as a drummer of formidable technical ability. He joined John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra in the 1970s, one of the most demanding gigs in jazz fusion, and played with Jeff Beck and Weather Report.

Then he became a pop producer, and one of the most commercially dominant of the 1980s. His touch was a specific thing: enormous gated drums, bright synth textures, a chorus that hits hard, and an ability to get a career-defining vocal out of a singer.

He produced Whitney Houston's biggest uptempo records, launched Mariah Carey with "Vision of Love," and won Producer of the Year at the Grammys. It is a genuinely odd trajectory and one very few musicians have managed.

What to listen for

Whitney Houston dominates and deserves to. "How Will I Know" and "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" are two of the most joyful pop records ever made, and "All The Man That I Need" and "One Moment in Time" show the ballad craft.

Mariah Carey's "Vision of Love" is the most consequential record here. It introduced a vocal approach — the melismatic runs, the whistle register — that reshaped how a generation of singers approached a song, for better and worse.

Aretha Franklin's "Jimmy Lee" is the one to play for anyone who thinks he only made gloss. It is a hard, funky record and Aretha sounds delighted.

Lisa Fischer's "How Can I Ease the Pain" won a Grammy and is one of the great vocal performances of the decade — Fischer is best known as a backing singer for the Rolling Stones and was the subject of the documentary 20 Feet from Stardom.

Shanice's "I Love Your Smile" and Jermaine Stewart's "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off" are the pure pop moments, and Stacy Lattisaw's "Let Me Be Your Angel" the earliest.

Al Jarreau's "If I Break" and George Benson's "Kisses in the Moonlight" are where the jazz background shows.

Go deeper

Mahavishnu Orchestra's Apocalypse and Jeff Beck's Wired feature his drumming, and hearing that alongside "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" is one of the stranger experiences available in pop.

Whitney Houston's Whitney (1987) is where his production is most concentrated.

And Lisa Fischer deserves following — So Intense is her only solo album, and it is very good.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more