The Formative Years – Jan Hammer
Long before underground culture sucked me in, there was an American neo-noir crime-drama TV show being broadcast long past my bedtime on Saturday evenings, the weekly forty-eight minutes of which fascinated me immensely.
While the scripts and stories were shite or non-existent at best – I doubt there has ever been a concept beyond the brainstorming memo “MTV cops” - the fact that the show was stylized beyond belief, drawing on 1980s new wave culture, and integrating contemporary music captured me and had me transfixed in front of the screen on a weekly basis.
Clearly, the focus was firmly set on evoking emotions and delivering eye feasts galore rather than engaging plot lines, with the producers going as far as excluding certain colour schemes and going at great lengths to bend scripts to instead find suitable props and settings.
Apart from the incorporation of countless hits from the 1980s, the synthesized soundtrack fascinated me, which was created by Jan Hammer who was tasked to exclusively score the show with his instrumental pieces.
Needless to say, I had to get the original soundtrack on tape, so I could listen to it on my Walkman while trying to channel my inner Sonny Crockett in the best way possible, given that I was a prepuscendent lacking both the means and knowledge on how to acquire the necessary wardrobe nor having the ability to sport a designer stubble.
At least I owned quite a bit of official merchandise in shades of pink, peach, fuchsia and other pastel colours along with posters of Sonny Crockett’s vehicles, i.e. Ferrari Daytona and Testarossa, and the sailboat he lived on.
Jan Hammer was the one-man band that contributed the integral wall-to-wall sonic component to the show with his swaggering Fairlight CMI synth arrangements that drove the narrative and covered at least thirty minutes of each episode. In other words, the man created pretty much an album per episode, which could have not come at a better time as Miami Vice was the first TV show that was presented in stereo in a cinematic way that was very movie-like.
It was the first time that I perceived TV music to be more than a utility and a facet that took on a life of its own.
