"You have to do a continual workshop on yourself. Discover what's unique about you, perform it, and be outrageous."
Al Jarreau in Billboard Magazine,  September 1980

Some albums define a trend and influence its evolution. Al Jarreau’s This Time was released at a time when radio and record companies had started to court adult listeners with a diverse group of artists who added jazzy overtones to pop, rock and R&B material. The emerging sound was called everything from soft rock to progressive adult contemporary - a term that rockers considered a total oxymoron but eventually became the name of one of the radio format charts.  Folk-rockers like James Taylor, Kenny Loggins and Carly Simon were working with people like Bob James and David Sanborn. Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers shape-shifted and other rock bands followed their lead. On the other side of the fence, George Benson, Spyro Gyra, Bob James, and Manhattan Transfer were crossing over and leading their new fans deeper into jazz. Although he had been labeled a jazz vocalist, Al Jarreau had actually been expanding on the best of all these worlds. He could scat and phrase like a jazz singer, interpret like a seasoned pop singer, write and sing over stripped down arrangements like a singer-songwriter and mix it all into something entirely original. His 1980 release, This Time, distilled everything intriguing about this new adult-oriented music into nine perfect songs.

This Time was released at a time when getting lost in music was something we did. If I told somebody then that I stopped breathing when I heard the opening chords of “Alonzo” they would have nodded in agreement. Now they would just roll their eyes, but it’s hard to not be affected that way by the atmosphere he and the band create. This song is a prayer. The invocation is one gorgeous broken chord on Tom Canning’s Fender Rhodes warmed by Greg Mathieson’s string synth arrangement as Jarreau slips from voice-as-instrument into the melody that will later hold the lyric that is the essence of the song:  “Warm your heart, so warm the sun, warm your soul.”  As the song builds, Jarreau’s voice ebbs and soars while he sings the story, but he’s left open spaces in the plot that you have to fill with your heart. The arrangement, the voice, and the lyrics are transcendent.

Jarreau’s reworking of Chick Corea’s “Spain” has become one of his trademark songs. The imagery in the opening lines brilliantly fleshes out the end of a love affair. Every word is nuanced with clarity and longing. Then it shifts abruptly into the most recognizable part of the song, with him vocally matching a staccato fusion keyboard run. This is the song that showcases his vocal skills: he’s speed-singing with perfect control over a driving Latin rhythm track that sounds like much more than keyboard, bass, and drums. “Distracted” was the perfect song to follow the intense “Spain.” It’s loose, playful, and funky, spiced up by Jerry Hey’s horn section and an infectious hook that has Jarreau singing over his own voice multi-tracked into a background chorus.  Over the years Jarreau has brought a fascinating perspective to writing love songs. “Gimmie What You Got,” “Love Is Real,” and “Your Sweet Love, “ all written by him and keyboardist Tom Canning, are spiritedly romantic and impressively devoid of cliché and sentimentality. They all have irresistible melodies and a “come out and play” spirit of fun and freshness with plenty of room for equally playful vocal acrobatics.  The title song, “(A Rhyme) This Time” has Jarreau again adding lyrics to an instrumental by another artist. This time his vocal is expressive and unembellished, accompanied by Klugh’s understated and equally eloquent acoustic guitar.

This Time was the first of a series of albums Jarreau would record with producer Jay Graydon. They brought in some of the most influential musicians in contemporary jazz, most of whom would spend the early 80s refining and expanding this sound with artists like Manhattan Transfer, George Benson, Patti Austin, Randy Crawford, and David Sanborn. Larry Williams, whose group Seawind had become a staple on the new contemporary jazz radio shows, provided a lot of the beautiful keyboard arrangements and is currently musical director for Jarreau’s tours. Greg Mathieson and Tom Canning - names that were on the liner notes of almost every significant album in the genre at the time - were also on keyboards, as was an up-and-coming artist/producer/arranger named David Foster. Steve Gadd and Carlos Vega were the drummers, Abraham Laboriel played bass and the horn section was Jerry Hey, Chuck Findley and Bill Reichenbach.

Listening to This Time 25 years later it is amazing how well it holds up. They managed to avoid overusing the effects that would end up making a lot of CJazz albums from that era sound dated. There are places like the synth line in “Never Givin’ Up” that have that early-80s sound, but they are so few and far between that it sounds interestingly retro like some of the current songs that feature Fender Rhodes. They kept it simple and kept the voice front and center. The multiple keyboards, so beautifully layered and arranged, are what keeps me coming back to this one. It was a completely original, quirky and brilliant piece of work that expanded on what he had been doing and previewed where he was going. The follow-up, Breakin’ Away, would bring radio hits and turn him into a superstar. That was another part of the charm and mystique of This Time. He was still a cult figure, the cult was growing fast but these songs weren’t fed into the pop culture machine and thrown back at us. That has kept them from being bound to an era or tied to memories from it. Back then this was a haven. You could put it on the turntable and leave the real world on the other side of the headphones for a while. Now, in these busier, noisier, adrenaline-fueled times, it still has the same effect.

- Shannon West