Patrice Rushen

A skilled keyboardist with an appealing vocal style, Patrice Rushen shifted markedly from respected acoustic jazz recordings to strong showings on club and R&B charts. She stepped forward as a bandleader at age twenty with the accomplished Prestige album Prelusion (1974). Within a short time she amassed prominent session work alongside buoyant post-disco successes, reaching her commercial high point with the Grammy-nominated Top 40 pop single “Forget Me Nots,” which lifted Straight from the Heart (1982) to her strongest-selling Elektra release. Although she maintained ties to jazz even while scoring for film and television, Rushen later returned fully to the idiom, highlighted by the Grammy-nominated Signature (1997) and appearances with Stanley Clarke, Lenny White, and Wallace Roney between 2001 and 2016. She has served as musical director for Janet Jackson and broke gender barriers by conducting the first of several Grammy broadcasts. An educator as well, Rushen chairs the popular music program at USC, the same institution she attended in her youth, and acts as Ambassador for Artistry in Education at Berklee College of Music.

Raised in Los Angeles after her birth there, Patrice Rushen entered music classes at USC at the age of three. In 1972, her final year at Locke High School, she made her recorded debut on the release of her senior farewell concert with the Msingi Workshop, where she appeared as soloist, arranger, and composer. That year she also claimed first place in a solo competition at the Monterey Jazz Festival and soon signed with Prestige. For the label she produced the largely self-written sets Prelusion (1974), Before the Dawn (1975), and Shout It Out (1977), while simultaneously contributing to forward-looking sessions such as Jean-Luc Ponty’s Upon the Wings of Music, Donald Byrd’s Caricatures, and Eddie Henderson’s Heritage. As her own vocal approach fused jazz, soul, and funk in an engaging manner, Rushen broadened her reach with Patrice (1977), Pizzazz (1979), Posh (1980), Straight from the Heart (1982), and Now (1984). Most of these albums registered on both the jazz and R&B Billboard charts, and several tracks found favor in clubs and on radio. Chief among them were the Top Ten R&B and club hits “Haven’t You Heard” and “Forget Me Nots.” The latter, a number 23 pop entry nominated for a Grammy in the Best R&B Performance category, later supplied samples for George Michael’s “Fastlove” (1996) and Will Smith’s “Men in Black” (1997); the former supplied the foundation for Kirk Franklin’s 2005 gospel crossover “Looking for You.”

From the mid-1980s onward Rushen issued solo recordings only intermittently while focusing on education, film and television scoring, and musical direction for events and artists including the Emmy Awards, the NAACP Image Awards, and Janet Jackson’s Janet. world tour. After single-album arrangements with Arista and Sin-Drome plus two projects recorded with the Meeting, she reemerged as a solo artist on Discovery with the Grammy-nominated Signature (1997) in the Best Contemporary Jazz Performance category. In 2004 she became the first woman to serve as musical director for the Grammy Awards and continued in that role for the 2005 and 2006 ceremonies. She maintained an active schedule of sessions and compositions, appearing on releases by Lee Ritenour, Stanley Clarke, Lenny White, Wallace Roney, and Carmen Lundy while creating numerous symphonic works. Her longstanding association with USC endures as chair of the Thornton School of Music’s Popular Music Program, and she mentors students at Berklee College of Music in her capacity as Ambassador for Artistry in Education. Late in the 2010s the Strut label began an extensive reissue campaign covering Rushen’s Elektra catalog, resulting in the anthology Remind Me: The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978-1984 (2019) and the boxed set Feel So Real: The Complete Elektra Recordings 1978-1984 (2022).