I have always had a tough time explaining to many of my friends, those who know my preoccupation with jazz, how on earth I liked Michael Jackson. Everybody thought he was a freak, more a purveyor of muzak than music. I disagreed. There has to be something of a freak in any good musician, I would respond. KISS looked pretty freaky to me, so did Alice Cooper. Well, they said, he was a pretty lousy babysitter. I responded that my association was limited to the man’s music and I assured them if they cared to go deep inside many of the lives of
famous people we adore for their art, we’d be able to find many reasons to dislike them for the kind of people they were but that did not detract from their work.
I first heard Michael Jackson when I was in high school. On the radio. The year was 1979. We didn’t have a television in our house till 1986, when we got a 14-inch black and white portable only to watch World Cup football so I missed being part of the MTV generation. But 1979, was a good year for music. I was not yet into jazz. I sacrilegiously exchanged my father’s Duke Ellington’s Anatomy of a Murder for Bee Gees’ Spirits Having Flown which came out that year. My father, he didn’t understand most of the things I listened to, especially the Bee Gees. It got worse when Pink Floyd released The Wall that year; Fleetwood Mac made Tusk and Police, Regetta De Blanc. That was when Michael Jackson went adult and Off The Wall began to seep through the radio where I keenly listened to the charts. It had a smooth Motownish sound I loved. Those days the radio was full of Styx (Babe), KC and the Sunshine Band (Please Don’t Go), After the Love Has Gone by that wonderful group Earth Wind and Fire. There were two Rod Temperton songs in Michael Jackson’s album Rock With You and title track and Wing’s song Girlfriend that I was repeatedly drawn to when Michael Jackson did it. The album was smooth and I thought, sexy, too. It was only much later that I made the connection with the producer of the album, Quincy Jones, who I like very much, and the musicians in the album George Duke, Bobby Watson, bass, John Robinson on drums, both the last two associated with Quincy, Phil Upchurch (who played rhythm guitar in George Benson’s Breezin’), Larry Carlton, the guitarist who was associated with the fantastic Steely Dan (Aja, Gaucho), and the percussionist was Paulinho Da Costa, all of which explains why the stylish album grooves so much.
Thriller came out when I was in college, in 1982. But by that time I had stopped listening to the radio; one of my uncles had been kind enough to give me a tape recorder in which I listened to blues, rock and mainly jazz, although I do
remember Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing (from Midnight Love, 1982) and Donald Fagen’s first solo outing, Nightfly also that year. But pop was not my main thing then. It was not until I heard Stanley Jordan’s Magic Touch sometime in 1985 that his interpretation of The Lady in My Life drew me back to Michael Jackson. It was a beautiful tune. I was transfixed. That year Miles Davis covered Michael Jackson’s Human
Nature in his You Are Under Arrest album. Both these songs were from Thriller, an album I had not heard till then. Miles Davis had pared the song down to its melodic bone and he played it with a mute. Instrumental versions brings the melody to the fore, and lets you deal with the emotions minus the lyrics. (If you like Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven you have to hear Joshua Redman’s searing tenor rendition in his album Wish and you’ll know what I mean). Anyway, it was then that I got hold of a copy of Thriller. I was not disappointed. Michael Jackson’s The Lady in My Life was truly exquisite as was Human Nature. Thriller was produced by — who else? — Mr Quincy Jones.
By 1987, when Bad (Jimmy Smith’s name is in the lengthy credits) came out I was pretty much steeped in jazz. I still didn’t have a colour TV so I missed out on Michael’s stunning dance moves. I saw some of it much later but when I saw the video of Remember the Time (Dangerous) I don’t know why it
reminded me so much of Earth Wind and Fire’s September. I know there’s not much of a connection, but it reminded me so much of that bygone era of music. You Are Not Alone was a fine ballad that chased me for days. It became so bad that whenever that song Bheege Hot Tere (from Murder) came I began to feel Michael Jackson’s You Are Not Alone haunting that song. It happened again whenever I heard A R Rahman’s Unthan Desathin Kural. To me it seemed, Michael Jackson was suddenly everywhere, omnipresent, like some magical virus. There is no escaping him. I know he will haunt me even if I were alone in a desert island.
—sudarshan@epmltd.com