Imagine a small New York nightclub in 1983. The room is dark. The stage is small. A young woman is singing with her mother, and in the audience sits a man who has spent his life listening for something he cannot quite describe. He has heard thousands of singers. He has built a record label … Read more
Close your eyes and imagine a Sunday morning in Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1970s. The church is full. The organ is playing. The choir is singing, and somewhere in the middle of those voices is a little girl, barely tall enough to see over the pews, singing with a clarity that makes the … Read more
Do you remember the sound of a radio countdown on a Saturday morning in the late 1980s? The presenter would count down the ten biggest songs in America, and week after week, as the numbers got smaller and the tension grew, one voice kept appearing at the top. It was not a surprise anymore. It … Read more
Before Michael Jackson, a music video was a simple thing. A singer stood in front of a camera, sang the song, and the camera recorded it. Sometimes there was a stage. Sometimes there were lights. That was enough, because the video was only an advertisement for the record. Then Jackson came along, and within two … Read more
Every great artist has a moment when the right partner walks into the room. For Michael Jackson, that moment came in 1978, on the set of a film called The Wiz, a retelling of The Wizard of Oz with an all-Black cast. Jackson was playing the Scarecrow. Quincy Jones, a jazz musician, arranger, and producer … Read more
Long before the moonwalk, before Thriller, before the white glove and the red jacket, there was a small house in Gary, Indiana, and five brothers who sang like they had been doing it all their lives. The youngest of them, Michael, was barely out of childhood when the world first heard his voice. Within a … Read more