I don’t think I’ve ever been able to look at a Jan Hammer record without unconsciously thinking “Miami Vice”. The series ran a total of 5 seasons during which I went from age 9 to 14, prime TV viewing time in my life. The thing that excited me most about “Miami Vice” was the incredible number of celebrities that appeared as guest actors on the show, especially popular musicians. The same thrill of (insert Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme) seeing a celebrity you recognize in a show where they don’t normally appear seems to be the same lazy casting device that’s kept “Saturday Night Live” on TV the past decade: “Oh my god that’s Matt Damon! And he’s pretending to be that guy from the news! I know him from other stuff, not THIS show!” Over the course of just Season Two, “Miami Vice” featured Frank Zappa playing a drug dealer named “Mario Fuentes”, Gene Simmons as a drug dealer named “Newton Blade”, Ted Nugent as a drug dealer named “Charlie Basset”, Phil Collins as a game show host named “Phil Mayhew”, Leonard Cohen as an Interpol agent named “Francoise Zolan” and my favorite: Miles Davis as a pimp named “Ivory Jones”. (Season Four even featured Capital Punishment drummer Ben Stiller as a scam artist with the very cool name “Fast Eddie Felcher.”) After all these years the only guest appearance that’s really stuck with me was The Fat Boys who appeared as (pretty much) themselves, but drug dealers (naturally), rapping on a street corner as Crockett and Tubbs pull up in a convertible. Darren Robinson AKA “The Human Beat Box” performs for the duo before offering to sell them a pre-rolled Marijuana cigarette. When Tubbs presents his police badge, Robinson promptly eats and swallows the joint and the satisfied detectives drive away. I loved the Fat Boys and the thrill of unexpectedly seeing them play criminals in a police drama made me an even bigger fan (figuratively). The other thing that stuck with me from this particular episode was a drug dealer named “Phrosty The Snowman” who had a personalized license plate that read “PHROSTY”. It might have been the first time in my life I realized that if you had money you could choose what your license plate read. Last year my wife and I bought our first car and when the subject of possibly getting a personalized plate came up the first thing I searched for in the NY DMV personalized plate database was “PHROSTY” (note: still available!)
The Fat Boys scene being the only really clear memory of a Miami Vice episode doesn’t explain why the name Jan Hammer became synonymous with the show in my mind, and vice versa. Before writing and performing the show’s theme song and score, the Czech-American Hammer was already a very well known jazz/fusion keyboardist and a founding member of John McLaughlin’s groundbreaking Mahavishnu Orchestra. He had graduated from Berklee School of Music in Boston in 1970 and immediately became touring keyboardist in Sarah Vaughn’s band. Later, his own band, the Jan Hammer Group teamed up with Jeff Beck to record the platinum-selling “Wired”. Looking back, it’s safe to say that as impressive of a resume this is, none of it would have been on my radar as a 13 year old.
I think the point of reference that made me remember Hammer’s name the most was when I learned his work was a favorite of the late James Dewitt Yancey AKA Jay Dee AKA J Dilla. I first became aware of Dilla when he was “the guy who was not Prince Paul” that produced “Stakes Is High”, the lead single off De La Soul’s 4th studio album (whose video featured Maury Povich..ANOTHER guy I recognize who was in a thing he’s not normally in!) Slum Village took me a minute to get into, but Dilla’s production is what eventually drew me in. I remember someone pointing out a few samples he’d used from ECM records that featured Hammer, which fascinated me as I was never a fan of the label in general (an old record store boss used to call ECM’s sound “ice jazz”). “Welcome 2 Detroit” and the self-produced “Fuck the Police” off his first solo album are what made me a concrete fan. From that point on I paid a lot more attention to his work up until his unfortunate death at age of 32. There are dozens of records I learned about specifically because they had been sampled by Dilla, and Jan Hammer Group’s “Melodies” is by far my favorite. Listening to it, I wouldn’t guess this is the guy who wrote the “Miami Vice” theme. A track like “Peaceful Sundown” would sound more at home on a Blackbyrds LP than the ” Miami Vice” soundtrack which drew more on the same sort of synthesized “new wave” muzak as Brian DePalma’s “Scarface”. Hammer might be best known to myself and plenty of others for the Italo-Disco of “Crockett’s Theme” but if you dig a little deeper you’ll find much more of the soulful, funky jazz-rock featured on albums like “Melodies” and “Oh Yeah?”.
Knowing Dilla had mined Hammer’s work several times over the years I couldn’t help but look up if he had sampled anything from “Miami Vice”. Doesn’t look like he did, but I did find a few Fat Boys samples he’s flipped including one in the excellent “My Old Label” by Phat Kat from 2007. I don’t think I would’ve been able to find this out if not for https://www.whosampled.com/ a site that debuted just a few years after Dilla’s death. For someone with such a unique catalog of sample sources that he masterfully translated into what is undeniably a signature sound (something very few hip-hop producers in history have been able to achieve), I wonder what Dilla would have thought of the site and its blowing up of spots of thousands of producers and their sources. I think it’s safe to say that, just like he did in the 90’s, by the time anyone knew what had happened, he’d have moved on and left his competition in the dust.
A few months ago I was at a record show in Queens, NY and I pulled a copy of “Melodies” out of a box. The dealer pulled the sausage sub he was eating out of his mouth and wordlessly pointed at the record in my hand, swallowed and said, “Hey, you know this guy? He..” and I said, “Yeah, I know. I really like..” and he interrupted and said, “Yeah, he made the theme from ‘Miami Vice’!” You can’t get knowledge like that from a website.
