JAN
HAMMERJAN
HAMMERSo begins the sleeve liner notes to Universal Playback’s European DVD release of the pilot episode of this groundbreaking show, unbelievably first broadcast in America back on September 18, 1984. Has it really been 18 years since Miami Vice first hit the small screen? And there’s the rub: by emulating big screen production values with a budget to suit – around $1.2 million per episode, then-upcoming Hollywood director Michael Mann’s baby ultimately took the world by storm, running for 114 episodes over five seasons! As those retrospective liner notes astutely observe: “One of the recurring arguments against Miami Vice was that it was a triumph of style over content, but when one looks at the quality and richness of this style, that argument hardly matters. [Don] Johnson [who played principal protagonist Sonny Crockett] provoked a craze amongst grown men to stop wearing socks, wear T-shirts under their jackets and to sport at least a day’s stubble. George Michael must have been an avid watcher as he subsequently based a whole career on the look.”
But another vital component of the Miami Vice ‘magic box’ was undoubtedly its music content. While the contributions of primetime recording artists of the day should not be overlooked – and who could forget the spellbinding spectacle of Crockett and future partner Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) speeding through a menacing Miami night in the former’s black Ferrari to the resounding accompaniment of Phil Collins’ seminal solo offering ‘In The Air Tonight’? – debatably even more musically intrinsic were those of Czech-born synth whiz Jan Hammer, whose equally enthralling underscore went on to enjoy well earned global success in its own right with 42 commercially released tracks, including two worldwide hit singles, ‘Crockett’s Theme’ and ‘Miami Vice Theme’. Indeed, the latter remains the only original instrumental theme written for a television show to reach number one on the American Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart, going on to land its composer two statuettes at the 1986 Grammy Awards – namely, Best Pop Instrumental Performance and Best Instrumental Composition. The first namesake Miami Vice soundtrack album also hit that coveted number one spot on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart, where it remained for 12 weeks, subsequently shifting over four million copies Stateside and over seven million worldwide.
All in all, not a bad showing for the one-time childhood musical prodigy who’d escaped from behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ in pursuit of the American dream. And Miami Vice, a global phenomenon in more ways than one, surely represented that dream becoming reality, if more actively portraying its downside onscreen.
Jan Hammer was born on April 17, 1948, in Prague, where his mother, a well-known Czech singer, and his father, a doctor who worked his way through school playing vibes and double bass, provided an encouraging musical environment. Young Hammer began playing piano aged four with formal instruction starting two years later. Having formed a jazz trio in high school, performing and recording throughout Eastern Europe from the age of 14, he later entered the prestigious Prague Academy Of Music Arts. When the Soviet Union’s invasion of his homeland cut short those studies in 1968, Hammer headed Stateside, receiving a scholarship to the world-famous Berklee School Of Music in Boston.
Thereafter, fame was quick to find Hammer. Having moved into a loft in the artistic haven of lower Manhattan in New York City, by 1971 Hammer had joined the original line-up of Mahavishu Orchestra alongside guitarist John McLaughlin, violinist Jerry Goodman, bassist Rick Laird, and drummer Billy Cobham. To say their unique rock/jazz fusion was successful is something of an understatement: in their two-year/three-album lifespan they sold over two million records, performing around 530 shows before disbanding (on December 30, 1973)!
Having ploughed his not inconsiderable earnings into building Red Gate Studio, his own recording facility in the idyllic grounds of his upstate New York farmhouse – an admittedly unusual move for the time, by 1975, Hammer’s solo career was in full swing; that year’s The First Seven Days long-playing offering remains notable for its claim that “there is no guitar on this album.” While one’s ears might still argue otherwise, Hammer was clearly pushing the music-making envelope, such was – and is – his outstanding dexterity on the keys. Surrounding himself with an arsenal of (then-state-of-the-art) analogue synthesizers and recording equipment – including “an antique” one-inch Sculley eight-track professional tape machine from Atlantic Studios which, in its heyday, had the likes of Aretha Franklin’s distinctive vocal talent passing across its distinguished record heads – Hammer subsequently performed and recorded with some the era’s leading musicians in the disparate circles of rock and jazz, including guitarists Jeff Beck, Al DiMeola and Journey’s Neal Schon, to name but a few.
On the back of his Miami Vice success – Hammer’s 1987 album Escape From Television, featuring 10 tracks culled from his scoring of all 69 episodes of the show then in existence, sold in excess of one million copies worldwide, being certified Gold in Germany and the UK – Hammer continued to innovate: 1993’s computer-animated ‘virtual reality’ extravaganza, Beyond The Mind’s Eye, featuring a custom Hammer underscore, went on to become one of the year’s best-selling music videos in the USA.
Never one for looking back, July 2002 witnessed a strange turn of events with the North American release of Miami Vice: The Complete Collection, a two-CD set featuring all 20 of Hammer’s compositions previously featured on five MCA releases (Miami Vice, Miami Vice II, Miami Vice III, Escape From Television and Snapshots) on one disc – including ‘Rico’s Blues’, about which Hammer is on record as stating, “If there was a theme for Tubbs, and how he gets through things, this is it” – and 22 tracks never released or heard anywhere but on the TV show itself – tracks like ‘Boat Party’ from Cool Runnin’, the third episode of the first season: “This was when I realised that I could have a lot of fun with the show. Being a recording artist I was always expected to do a certain kind of music and was sometimes chastised for straying. Now I could do a reggae tune, for example, and be appreciated for it.” With so much musical water having since passed under Hammer’s metaphorical bridge, what makes this unexpected album even stranger is that it was created in direct response to the thousands of requests submitted by fans to his official Website (www.janhammer.com). Talk about standing the test of time!
Hammer himself began our conversation by explaining how it was that he came to comply with his fans’ insatiable urge for more music from a TV show that was now nigh on two decades old: “That avalanche of email requests was sort of like a tipping point that just pushed me over. It’s not that I was looking backwards, but, over the years, I felt that there was still some unfinished [Miami Vice] business. There were some things that were not fully exploited and really ripe for release – stuff that was still fresh after all these years; a combination of things that I remembered and things that were pointed out to me by people who were writing in.
“So it sounded like such a great idea to combine the initial [Miami Vice] releases that were already scattered all over different records on the first CD, then put all the new stuff on the second CD. It was something that had been brewing in the back of my mind for years, and I knew I would have to do it one day. Those people [fans] helped tip me over the edge, as it were!”
To
what do you attribute the longevity of
Miami Vice?When Miami Vice was first being put together by [Executive Producer] Michael Mann, the original statement of purpose was that it shouldn’t look or sound like anything on TV at the time. He really succeeded in that because it still doesn’t look or sound like anything that’s on TV – even now. A lot of that has to do with the production values, of course, because it was shot with a very cinematic – as in a motion picture production – approach, and also the quality of the performances; I think Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas really gave fantastic performances – they were at their peak. Last, but not least, I have to admit that the role that the music played in the show also had a lot to do with it – and I would have to include the songs there, as well. Ultimately, the score was not like a dull carpet on which the characters simply walked; it really stood up as an extra character that had a life of its own, and that was such an unusual thing that had never been seen on television before. I think that really helped to keep it all so fresh and riveting.
I met Michael [Mann] through a mutual friend in Los Angeles. He knew of my music, and me, obviously – I’ve been around for a while! He just wanted to talk and sound me out about whether I would be able to help carry out his plan, because it was quite a task. Just from talking, we completely understood what each other wanted to do, and I just said, “By the way, I have this cassette of some music I’ve been working on; why don’t you listen to this?” It was probably a little bit more of an electronic version of the final theme.
To answer your question about what changed, it was really very minor things: I added a little bit more of a rock feel to it – more of an electric guitar feel – than it had originally when its structure was more experimental, with overlapping rhythms. That was really the starting point; that was the most compelling thing that he [Michael Mann] heard on the original tape.
With
all due respect to the guys in the band [Tangerine Dream], lots of people were
working on similar sorts of parallel tracks, working with synthesizers and sequencers.
By the time I came to work on Miami Vice I’d been
doing that for 10 years! Believe it or not, I actually never saw Thief.
Another thing that’s very interesting is that in the four years that I worked
on the show [Miami Vice] – from the first meeting
to the very end, Michael Mann never once mentioned Tangerine Dream. I think
what really made my [Miami Vice] music work was
not just the electronic part, but the variety that eventually evolved over the
22 episodes each year – some of the themes were more classical in design, some
jazzy, or very Latin. Some of those pieces were almost totally Latin percussion-based.
So to just narrow it [my Miami Vice music] down
to electronic, sequenced music is not really giving it justice.
The schedule was pretty hairy – there were some sleepless nights, cold sweats! Somehow I was able to always work with my instincts, because, given the speed at which it all had to be done, I had no other choice. At the same time, that was a blessing, because I didn’t have to second-guess myself, and nobody else did, either. I guess I got into a kind of zone where the music was just sort of happening, and I surfed the waves, as they say here.
I would respond to the visuals and emotion in each episode; I got a videocassette of a rough-cut, with the songs already placed. So I would just watch the show and never even read the script – that was another thing that really helped me a lot, because I got kicked in the head by the sheer drama and suspense; then I could respond on a very visceral level, and start writing from that point. Again, depending on the locale, or the main protagonist, and so on, the picture pointed me in a certain direction, and I would just run with it to maximise its impact. So there were lots of different themes over the years, but it was wonderful.
It was fun, but you cannot do it for very long!
By original tapes I mean videotapes; I watched the shows, then had to go back and recreate the themes, because all I had were very sketchy versions of cues for the underscore – creating actual standalone tunes for a CD, that’s a whole different project. I got together my dusty old equipment from the Eighties, and it took the better part of a year to finish the work.
Yes.
Yes. Disc One was assembled from already existing masters – all I had to do was remaster and compile it onto one CD, but the second disc is all new recordings.
What exactly did
this remastering process entail? The remastering for the first disc was done using Pro Tools – I have all these plug-ins from this company called Waves, so I used all their wonderful mastering tools – just to touch up things and restore some bottom end that we weren’t able to originally put on vinyl, and really make it sound big and contemporary, even though the actual recording was still done in the Eighties. And on the second disc, it was all done from scratch, so I played all the sounds from the Fairlight, and all the sequencers, directly into Pro Tools, using Pro Tools as a multitrack – I don’t know how many tracks at a time, but it’s basically unlimited. Again, the tools from Waves were used to make the sound come alive, for want of a better word; to make the sounds stand in front of the speakers – in-yer-face-style!
Fortunately not. If I had to recreate something from the Seventies, when everything was analogue and manual, with no memory storage for sounds, it would be a nightmare, involving much more trial and error! But, in this case, I had a lot of the original, specific sounds still in the Fairlight CMI. During the first year of the show I was using a Series II, then, in about the second year in, I got the Series III, and I transferred all the sounds into the Series III; that’s what I still have here today. That formed the basic building blocks of the Miami Vice music; I did a lot of the sequencing in the actual Fairlight sequencer itself, because that was the most advanced machine of its day.
Other sounds that you hear on the new CD come from the MemoryMoog, one of the most huge-sounding analogue synths around at that time. So a lot of the signature sounds of the show – especially in the first year – came from the MemoryMoog, which had a sound that just swallowed you whole!
It was just another giant leap forward in the way that sounds could be made to change in real-time – for performers. For the first few years that I was using synthesizers, if I was playing a solo or a melody, they tended to sound static. But what happened with FM was that it enabled subtle changes in real-time, so it was incredibly expressive! It could make sounds that sounded more like a string being plucked; this was something that I’d always loved very much, and it enabled me to start creating more faithful sounds that sounded like a guitar, but, at the same time, you knew that it wasn’t a guitar, because a guitar cannot play notes in that order, because, in this case, the sound was obviously being played from a keyboard. It was this hybrid thing that always fascinated me, and the DX7 really came at the right time for me to further explore that.
Speaking of which,
your trademark, searing, pseudo-electric guitar sound dominates several tracks
on the album – ‘New York Theme’, for example. Can
you reveal a little more about this aspect of your diverse sound palette? Well, it’s hard to refer to it as one sound, because, over the years, it was done on just about every instrument you can imagine, initially starting before I even used a synthesizer! I used to play a Fender Rhodes electric piano through an amp and a Bode Frequency Shifter, which was an esoteric electronic processing device that could alter a sound’s pitch by splitting it into two components, and by using a dial – actually, I used a pedal – I was able to mangle the sound so that the pitch itself would actually bend. It was hard to control; it was a bit unpredictable, but it was a start! This was back in the days of Mahavishu Orchestra – you can hear it a lot on the first album [The Inner Mounting Flame, 1971].
Eventually, I got into synthesizers, starting with the MiniMoog with its pitch bend wheel, playing that through an amp – just like you would with a guitar; next was the MemoryMoog, then the DX7, which really was sort of like the peak of that approach. Then with the Fairlight I was able to sample the guitar, multisampling different strings every three keys, or whatever. That was also very early on, again played through an amp with some kind of processing like distortion and chorus – the same effects you might use with a guitar.
Absolutely. But when I play I don’t really think about it; you have to create a channel to guitar-like playing – that’s something you cannot really explain. You just sort of learn it by listening and experimenting until bending pitches eventually becomes a fluid component of the melody line.
Eventually the
Fairlight became more of a sample playback machine. Before there were sequencers
available for the Mac, I actually had to use a PC running Roger Powell’s Texture
programme. That was the first personal computer sequencer that worked wonderfully
– a great thing in its time. Eventually, once Opcode started making things happen
on the Mac with visual editing, I soon left the PC behind. I was always a Mac
person, so I was glad to be back!
The Oberheim Xpander was another instrument that was always with me; it was also one of the sources for the guitar sound-thing, because you could sync one oscillator to another, so you’d get this growling, harmonic component running through the sound – sort of like a super wah-wah. I still have the Xpander here [at Red Gate Studio] today, and it still gets used.
On the Fairlight I had lots of my own drum samples spread across the keyboard, but during the [Miami Vice] production run I got a LinnDrum as well, and we made up custom chips where I actually burned my own sounds onto EPROM chips and inserted them into the LinnDrum – it’s a funny way of working, but it worked great! So, yes, there’s also lots of Linn throughout the show [Miami Vice].
I would go as far as saying that I was ecstatic! Everything was changing from week to week, and month to month – there were always new toys coming out, and I would always try to be on the bleeding edge! Everything worked in the studio, but what was frustrating was trying to play live using all this state-of-the-art technology, because things always seemed to be put together at the last minute, and were therefore destined to fail on the road. So I had lots of hairy moments on stage with that latest, up-to-date gear, but in the studio I didn’t care; everything was fine!”
It’s funny, because that’s the same question that we’ve been hearing for – I don’t know – 30 years, or something: ‘Are you worried that computers are going to take over the world?’ Obviously, it’s up to the individual musician. My own sampling has never gone to such great depths, so I don’t really have a need for anything that humungous. The samples that I would use are a little bit shorter, I guess, in terms of memory demands. It’s wonderful that this new technology exists, but if I need new sounds, Pro Tools basically enables me to do it all. Then again, a lot of the sounds that I now use are sampled onboard the instruments themselves, then I play with them as a starting point, because those things have improved so much!
I’ve kept all the good stuff from the past, but most of the newer stuff tends to come from Korg – the Triton, Z1, and Trinity. For me, it’s a combination of sound – not just the design of the instrument, but also the sound designers themselves. Given the complexity of today’s instruments, you really have to rely on people who know them inside out, so, ultimately, you can use them to their fullest potential. I think Korg is probably the best company at creating sounds now, so I’ve basically been using them as the anchor of what I do.
If you have something interesting to say that’s inspired, and you can play – and by play I mean you are actually the source of the music, as opposed to people nowadays who just play records, then I’m not worried – whatever enables me to do whatever it is I can do; that’s what technology is there for. I’m from the old school, where you actually had to create the music from scratch!
I have no idea! I have sketches of things that I’ve been working on that turn through 180-degrees, covering everything! It depends on the state of the music industry, because it’s not all that conducive [to originality] right now. Of course, you can create anything you want, but nobody will hear it. That’s just the way things are now. The business is just concentrating on maximising one thing at a time now, and that’s it. It’s totally blind to anything else.
I really don’t want to go there, because the answer to your question would be yes!
www.janhammer.com
Maliny Maliny (MPS, 1968)
Like Children (Nemperor/Sony, 1974)
The First Seven Days (Nemperor/Sony, 1975)
Oh Yeah (Nemperor/Sony, 1976)
Melodies (Nemperor/Sony, 1977)
Black Sheep (Elektra/Asylum, 1978)
Hammer (Elektra/Asylum, 1979)
The Early Years (Nemperor/Sony, 1986)
Escape From Television (MCA, 1987)
Snapshots (MCA, 1989)
Beyond The Mind’s Eye (Miramar, 1992)
Drive (Miramar, 1994)
Snapshots 1.2 (One Way, 2000)
Miami Vice: The Complete Collection (One Way, 2002)