Miami Vice – A View From The Middle (Class)

It’s “jazz-fusion Tuesday,” and today we’ll go beyond the man’s work with The Mahavishnu Orchestra and look to the years prior to his popular music for the hit TV show “Miami Vice” to look at some hard-to-find music from Jan Hammer.

The Czech-born Hammer has such a unique sound, touch, tone, style — whatever you want to try and put your finger on — that you can easily pinpoint who it is that’s playing keys whenever you hear him on a stereo that’s playing Mahavishnu or Stanley Clarke or Neal Schon or Jeff Beck, or if it’s a radio station playing the smash hit “Miami Vice” theme song.

Outside of those areas, he had his own Jan Hammer Group, featuring great players like bassist Fernando Saunders, drummer Tony Smith, and violinist Steve Kindler.

That’s my focus today — the relatively unheard joy that comes from listening to the Jan Hammer Group, in all its various forms of underrated and vastly under-heard glory.