A brilliant player on both acoustic and electric basses, Stanley Clarke has spent much of his career outside of jazz, although he has the ability to play jazz with the very best. He played accordion as a youth, switching to violin and cello before settling on bass. He worked with R&B and rock bands in high school, but after moving to New York he worked with Pharoah Sanders in the early '70s.
Rainer Trüby, Christian Prommer, and Roland Appel are Trüby Trio, a group of German producers that doubles as diverse fusionists of all things worldly and jazzy. It didn't take long for their name to catch fire in the dance community; aside from receiving a bevy of remixing work on the strength of their initial reworkings, the threesome has released a number of their own productions on Compost, including the Carajillo / A Go-Go 12", which featured a remix by labelmates and jazz-house heavies Jazzanova.
When singer Sade and her band of the same name were establishing themselves, their record company, Epic, made a point of printing "Pronounced Shar-day" on the record labels of their releases. Soon enough, the music had no problem with the correct pronunciation. With the breakthrough Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten single Smooth Operator propelling the debut Sade album, Diamond Life, to the same spot on the Billboard 200 chart in 1985, the band fast came to epitomize soulful, adult-oriented, sophisti-pop.
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