"Muzik"(France) - Eyewitness Remembered

        In 2015, as part of his Rediscovery reviews series by, allaboutjazz.com's senior writer John Kelman wrote an incredible review of the "EYEWITNESS" album from 1981. The review points out how this recording has informed and influenced all of Steve's work right up to the present. As news of the review reverberated through Facebook and the Internet, I received news via Frédèric Goaty, one of France's premier Jazz journalists, that Peter Cato had just written an article for Muziq Magazine which prominently features all three Eyewitness albums as part of a notion that links other music to the music of The Police.
    This flurry of activity around albums that were recorded between 1981-83 is nothing short of miraculous. When Anthony Jackson, Steve Jordan, Manolo Badrena and I gathered together to begin a new music project, we had no idea what we were going to play, nor just where that music might be headed. As it turned out, we had recorded all three of our albums together before the first one was ever released in our own country. I shopped the albums everywhere, to every record label that you could imagine, and, NO ONE wanted them! NO ONE!!! Had it now been for a very small label in Japan wanting to release the music in its proper time frame, I don't know what I would have done. So, why such a fuss now?
    Between 1982 and 1983, as we began to create the new pieces of music that would eventually become "CASA LOCO," we were working with, what I came to call, extended song forms. As the pieces began to take shape, I felt that, at times, there were sections that just were not melodically strong enough, and that they needed something else. It was during those moments of doubt that the great voice of Manolo Badrena came to the fore. None of us really knew that Manolo could sing, or that he could become the lyricist for the group's music, but, he did! He is an immensely talented and creative person, and we found ways to best focus those talents within the songs. He created chants, vocalese, and lyrics in Spanish. To these ears, Manolo always sounded like himself, but, to those listening for the first time, many people seemed to think that Manolo sounded a bit like Sting. If that was someone's perception, that's fine - but, this was, in no way, by design. It was just another cosmic accident.
    When the first reviews of these recordings began to come in, one writers described the music as:

"......wild, free, and very strange Latin music."

But, another writer perceived the music in this way:

"If The Police could play Jazz, this is what it would sound like!!!"

I have always enjoyed both of those perceptions.

    A couple of generations of musicians and listeners have arrived since then, and if someone has never heard these recordings: "EYEWITNESS"(1981); "MODERN TIMES"(1982); and "CASA LOCO"(1983), now might be a wonderful time to investigate them.