As soon as Rushen entered highschool at Locke beneath the tutelage of Andrews, a rookie instructor with an experimental bent, exploration and growth turned simply as necessary as technical brilliance, as she advised the St. Louis Dispatch in 1984: “For me, music is natural. It’s a response primarily based upon my scenario, my creativeness, and, hopefully, my creativity.” By the discharge of Rushen’s seventh studio album and main breakout, Straight From the Coronary heart, in 1982, it felt like a fruits of her prodigious upbringing. Displaying her easy mastery of the piano throughout R&B, disco, and jazz—genres she picked up naturally alongside the way in which in her profession—Rushen merged technicality with improvisation in a means that she’d been toying with since her teenage years.
Rushen’s 1974 debut, Prelusion, landed prefer it was destined to be a Blue Notice classics reissue, laced tight with strictly jazz compositions. She anchored an eight-piece outfit (which included Joe Henderson enjoying tenor sax, Leon Ndugu Chancler on drums, and Oscar Brashear on trumpet), romping by jams on her piano and electrical keyboard with blistering vitality, whereas the band’s esteemed members calmly stepped out and in of the highlight. The follow-up, Earlier than the Daybreak, allowed her to dip her toe a bit additional into fusion. She shelved the guardrails of jazz requirements, largely enjoying electrical piano, synthesizer, and clavinet.
Equally, the classes had been suffering from heavy hitters, together with Hubert Legal guidelines on flute and Lee Ritenour on guitar. Rushen’s tendency for ambling by totally different types feels instinctual; she bounds between genres earlier than selecting a sound for too lengthy—take the way in which that the titular observe patiently crawls as she lumbers within the decrease octaves whereas the band flutters with cosmic echoes and results, earlier than main into the nearer “Razzia,” which evolves right into a sprawling funk-rock breakdown, entropy rising with every strummed notice.
Whereas her skilled solo profession was starting, Rushen pulled double responsibility and labored as a studio musician for the titans of ’70s jazz fusion—partly out of necessity, because of the muted industrial success of Prelusion and Earlier than the Daybreak, however principally to fulfill her style for distinctive types of musical expression. Additionally proficient on flute, guitar, bass, and drums, she turned a Swiss military knife as a session participant and arranger. Rushen shortly turned a favourite keyboardist of Jean-Luc Ponty and Ritenour, and was usually discovered within the credit of jazz artists like Stanley Turrentine, Donald Byrd, and Legal guidelines, incomes trailblazer standing as a Black girl session musician. Explaining to the St. Louis Dispatch the urge to work within the background, Rushen discovered that contributing to different geniuses’ compositions and instructions provided its personal type of inventive freedom. “My whole upbringing was about not being restricted,” she mentioned, “changing into a studio musician appeared to be a means out. As a studio musician, you by no means know what sort of music you’ll be enjoying on any given day.”
Rushen first appeared as a vocalist on her third and remaining report with Status, 1976’s Shout It Out, an album that started her gradual flip towards hitmaking R&B (a technique that will have earned her the criticism of “promoting out” from jazz purists, as famous in her 1982 profile with Blues & Soul). At the same time as Rushen switched to Elektra in 1978, celebrating the transfer together with her album Patrice, the elevated radio publicity appeared like a symptom of her inventive output, fairly than a driving drive. Her willpower to observe her curiosity buoyed the brilliance of 1979’s Pizzazz and 1980’s Posh by any stretches of overproduction.
