“I heard a Sam Smith record, I think, which could have come straight out of Alexander O’Neal’s Hearsay album, which we made in 1987,” says James Harris III, the more talkative half of Minneapolis production duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. “Before that, it was Britney Spears. You stay around long enough, you get to hear that.”
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have certainly stuck around long enough to hear their influence infiltrate later eras of pop music. But, considering that they’ve had more Billboard No 1 hits than any other production and songwriting team, their work doesn’t register that strongly on the public consciousness. Even those who do know them associate them with the early to mid 1980s, at which time – pre-rave, pre-hip-hop, pre-techno – their productions were the biggest thing on the dancefloor.
Their clout, however, is colossal. A two-man soul machine, they were forerunners to the rich, electric, urban weave of late 80s new jack swing and laid down the template for producer-superstars such as Timbaland and Pharrell. They co-created the very fabric of the modern R&B landscape, across which Beyoncé rolled triumphantly in her Super Bowl performance last month, echoing Jam & Lewis’s work with Janet Jackson more than 25 years earlier.
It’s not just that so much contemporary pop bears their stamp, however; even their earliest work is futureproof and sounds monstrous compared to the output of their 21st-century successors. Change’s Change Of Heart (1984) still splashes down with meteorite impact, while A Broken Heart Can Mend (1985), which they produced for Minneapolis soul singer O’Neal, comes off like a haunting, neo-strain of house music, a genre uninvented when the record was made. Then there’s Just Be Good To Me, the single they cut in 1983 with the SOS Band. It was a moonlighting job they took during a tour in which their band, the Time, were supporting Prince, the man they describe as their “biggest influence”. In interviews, Terry Lewis can often be quite the silent partner, like Teller to Jam’s Penn. But on this topic he’s suddenly animated. “[Prince] taught us perfection is in spontaneity. You just do it, and whatever it is, it’s perfect! Create, and don’t ponder what you created.”
In the end, Jam & Lewis missed their flight to rejoin the purple one, who promptly fired them. But they haven’t looked back since. Just Be Good To Me was a dancefloor behemoth, a mixture of synths, drum machines and feathery vocals. If it sounds like a living, pulsating thing, that’s because it’s a mix of on-the-fly live playing bolstered by modern electronics, a subtle difference between their best work and today’s more compressed, programmed pop. “These days, everything is looped, everything sounds the same and I don’t like that,” says Jam. The duo have a mixed relationship with the technology that’s at the heart of their production tactics. (“We would always add live percussion to make it more ‘human’,” says Jam). They credit Prince for showing them that a synthesizer didn’t need to be a cold, spindly “simplersizer”, to use their phrase; that as a simulator of acoustic instruments, it could generate immense warmth.
The Jam & Lewis sound, a durable fabric involving the synthetic and the soulful, is at once recognisable and yet adaptable and evolving. You can hear this style across a range of artists they’ve produced, including Cherrelle, Force MDs, Usher, Chaka Khan, George Michael and the Human League.
The one artist to whom they have always returned, though, is Janet Jackson. She had already made a few pleasantly nondescript albums – and eloped with, then split from, singer James DeBarge – when she teamed up with Jam & Lewis for 1986’s Control.
Jam & Lewis had seen her as a kid on mid-70s variety TV show The Jacksons, a feisty foil to her dippier brother Michael.
“One of the things we always saw was that she had a lot of attitude, and we wanted to make tracks that matched that,” says Jam. “Also, she was young, and she hadn’t been tested. She was willing to try anything. Those early records were good but it wasn’t her voice. It was her singing voice, not reflecting the things she wanted to say. With Control, we had long conversations; we talked about things that were pertinent to her life, and we put those into song. The Control story was that of many women who were striking out in their lives for their own time. It resonated.”
For Control, Jam & Lewis forged a sinewy, minimal version of their sound, against which Jackson could effect her funk-feminist self-reinvention. For Rhythm Nation 1814, released in 1989, they created an enhanced set of galvanised steel sonics as backup to her vague but furiously felt social militancy, gripped by Public Enemy fever. And so the relationship has continued, as much a narrative as a career, up until the present day – in 2015 they produced Janet’s comeback album, Unbreakable.
However, the 90s saw Jam & Lewis’s style of supersweet mega-funk eclipsed by hip-hop, whose more brutal imperatives felt at odds with the lush, velvet spirit of their productions. Whereas in Minneapolis Jam & Lewis had blended east and west coast sounds, with hip-hop the divide became, at worst, a point of murderous pride. Did Jam & Lewis feel the world was moving away from them at that point?
“I love hip-hop, but I’m not of hip-hop. I was born with the R&B spoon in my mouth,” says Jam. “Terry was born with the P-Funk spoon in his mouth. There are a certain things we can do well and certain things we can’t, which we stay away from.”
Today, however, the circle is complete, with acts such as Solange Knowles producer Blood Orange, as well as Swedish pop star Robyn and UK indie-dance artist Kindness (the latter two of whom have collaborated with Jam & Lewis on a still-to-surface EP). These artists’ work has a bittersweet, shamelessly luxuriant quality to it, rekindling Jam & Lewis’s electric soul flame.
“Robyn’s cool, been a huge fan for a long time,” says Jam, with a surge of enthusiasm.
With the blurring of hip-hop and R&B, an increased emphasis on the creative role of production, and growing numbers of artists rediscovering Jam & Lewis’s legacy, the duo are finally receiving due acknowledgment. And that’s not just as commercial heavyweights but as two of the key architects of modern pop. In truth, Jam & Lewis were never has-beens but always-should-bes.
Janet Jackson’s upcoming UK tour has been postponed; she plans to reschedule later in the year; the album Unbreakable is out now
