Hot out the gate is the anthemic 'Rain Dance/Wanna Fly,' which was sampled by Lil' Kim on her hit, 'Crush on You.' Lorber and company lay down a 21st Century mid-tempo groove as good as the original, with Irene B's lithe, uplifting vocals, Brecker's ebullient flugelhorn tones and Lorber's in-the-pocket acoustic piano solo. Now is the Time, whose title riffs off of the famous Charlie Parker tune, features a new Jeff Lorber Fusion lineup, with members including bassist Jimmy Haslip, vocalist Irene B, trumpeter Randy Brecker and saxophonist Eric Marienthal. So we have rappers to thank for this dancing and delightful disc that features dynamic do-overs from Lorber's catalogspecifically from his critically-acclaimed The Jeff Lorber Fusion (Inner City, 1977), Soft Space (Inner City, 1978) and Water Sign (Arista, 1979), along with some new offerings. His group, The Jeff Lorber Fusion, was a mainstay on urban black radio, and his compositions, arrangements and solos swung in the commercial contexts of the day, so much so that decades later rap artists would resurrect his songs in the hip-hop generation of the nineties. But even back in the dayspecifically the seventiesthis wasn't true across the board, as evidenced by the undeniable chops of Ramsey Lewis, Grover Washington Jr., Joe Sample, and Philly-born keyboardist Jeff Lorber. An accepted kernel of jazz historiography states that cats who play what has ultimately become smooth jazz play it because they can't play the real music.

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