Artists
Jazz bassist Richard Bona was born and raised in the West African nation of Cameroon, going on to session dates with Joe Zawinul, Regina Carter, and Bob James as well as a two-year stint as musical director for the great Harry Belafonte.
One of the acid jazz movement's most prominent guitarists, London-born Ronny Jordan was widely credited with returning the instrument to its rightful place as a major force in modern-day jazz.
The movie Car Wash and the soundtrack were big hits, and they also propelled the Los Angeles-based group, now known as Rose Royce, into national recognition.
Once one of the most visible and winning jazz vibraphonists of the 1960s, then an R&B bandleader in the 1970s and '80s, Roy Ayers' reputation is now that of one of the prophets of acid jazz, a man decades ahead of his time. A tune like 1972's Move to Groove by the Roy Ayers Ubiquity has a crackling backbeat that serves as the prototype for the shuffling hip-hop groove that became, shall we say, ubiquitous on acid jazz records.
With his bold tone, swaggering solos, and deep grasp of the jazz tradition, trumpeter Roy Hargrove emerged as one of the most influential and immediately recognizable jazz musicians of his generation.
Fred Lanier, aka Ruben Steiner is one of the new millennium's electro-jazz wizards. Hailing from France, Steiner has been wowing European audiences with his eclectic mix of dance, jazz and electronic music since the late 1990s. His debut album, Lo-Fi Nu Jazz, Vol. 2 was released to critical acclaim in 2000.
RumbaJazz is a professional Afro-Cuban orchestra from Saint Petersburg, Russia, leaded by percussionist and trumpeter Dmitry Pshenichnykh.
When singer Sade and her band of the same name were establishing themselves, their record company, Epic, made a point of printing "Pronounced Shar-day" on the record labels of their releases. Soon enough, the music had no problem with the correct pronunciation. With the breakthrough Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten single Smooth Operator propelling the debut Sade album, Diamond Life, to the same spot on the Billboard 200 chart in 1985, the band fast came to epitomize soulful, adult-oriented, sophisti-pop.