Artists

Pieces of a Dream

Celebrating their silver anniversary in the music business, Pieces of a Dream debuts on Heads Up International with what is surely their best album, Acquainted with the Night. The 12 new tracks prove that the once highly touted teen prodigies James Lloyd and Curtis Harmon have matured from smooth jazz pioneers to solid visionaries of 21st century contemporary jazz.

"You feel our pain, and our sweat and blood on this album,” says James Lloyd, the loquacious 36 year-old keyboardist and one of the spokesmen for the group. “We have never put our total heart and soul, not to mention the number of hours, into any record like we did with Acquainted with the Night.”

Lloyd said the extra effort gave them little time to look back on the fact that it was 25 years ago when they began making music as a unit. Upon reflection, it was only Buffalo- based Spyro Gyra (now labelmates), that he could count among the groups that were functioning back then and are still around today.

“Ronny Jordan said something to me that put our career in perspective,” Lloyd says of the British acid-jazz guitarist who plays on two tracks on Acquainted with the Night. “He said that we were models for him when he was young and that Pieces of a Dream was playing smooth jazz before there was a name for it.”

Also from Buffalo was the late Grover Washington Jr., the sax man who made Philadelphia his home, and helped Pieces of a Dream become the internationally known stars they are today.

Back in 1976, the once immensely popular jazz-fusion genre was dying a slow death as the country celebrated its bicentennial year, and the term smooth jazz was still a gleam in some radio programmer’s mind. Yet in various urban pockets, most notably in the Atlantic Northeast and the Pacific Northwest, there were a number of musicians paving the road between what contemporary jazz was a quarter century ago and what it is today. In Philadelphia, it was Pieces of a Dream.

“We didn’t realize that fusion was dying back then,” Lloyd says. “We were just getting into George Duke, Herbie and Chick. We didn’t have our own sound before we recorded. We did jazz standards and then maybe bust out into some Cameo or Earth, Wind and Fire. If we did invent smooth jazz, we were just playing music we liked.”

With Lloyd on keys, Harmon on drums and Cedric Napoleon on bass, the group barely had a name when Washington saw them. Harmon’s mother helped name them after a lengthy round when no one could come up with a better name. She based the name on Pieces of Dreams, a cover tune by Stanley Turrentine that the group performed.“We were called Classic Touch, but there was a group called that already. At first we disliked our new name, but soon we realized how original and classy it truly was.”

After quickly becoming popular around Philadelphia, the trio landed as the house band for a local television show called City Lights. Their experience widened as they played backup on the broadcasts to a wide variety of artists, and that’s where Washington first heard them.“Then one day, we were playing at the Bijou, where Grover had recorded his Live at the Bijou album,” Lloyd says, picking up the story. “And he sat in with us to play Mr. Magic, and it was too much. Here we were teenagers, playing Mr. Magic, with Grover at the Bijou.

It was right after that, that he announced he was starting a production company and we would be his first act. I was a senior in high school when our first record came out.”

That was 1980 when Pieces of a Dream began their recording career with three seminal records on Elektra that defined the musical essence of the smooth jazz radio explosion later that decade. Tracks from their 1981 self-title debut, 1982’s We Are One, and Imagine This, the following year, were all staples of regular rotation at those stations and at urban contemporary radio, with the biggest successes undoubtedly being the classics Warm Weather and Mt. Airy Groove.

Between the last Pieces of a Dream release on Elektra, Joyride, and the first of seven for EMI/Blue Note four years later, the group experienced an epiphany that is a goal of every working jazz musician. “It was like who needs a record,” laughs Lloyd. “From 1984 through 1986, we didn’t have a record or a record deal. Yet we had to be the most successful touring band without a contract during that time.” “But having a record does help,” chimes in Harmon, who obviously saves his talking for the drum kit.

Lloyd, who seems to have the exact opposite personality of his verbal economist partner, teases him saying “he always looks forward to his next syllable,” but insists that they are musical soul mates and the longevity proves it. Both of them also agree that the parting of their long time friend from the group, Cedric Napoleon, was quite amicable.

The group from the beginning was managed solely by Harmon’s father, Dan Harmon, and later his Uncle Bill also joined the team. They have been part of the steady hand that has guided Pieces of a Dream to a long, stable career and affords them the reputation it takes to be courted by an innovative contemporary jazz company like Heads Up International.

“Heads Up had a lot to offer, but above all, they really wanted us, and there’s nothing like feeling wanted by a record company,” Lloyd mentions. “If you feel wanted, then when you’re signed, you know you’re going to be a priority. Dave Love has gone above and beyond the call of a record company president.”

By delivering Acquainted with the Night, Pieces of a Dream has definitely given Love and Heads Up something to work with. It’s an album that’s a musical culmination of the first half of a great career.

“It would not be a stretch at all for Pieces of a Dream to have a 50th anniversary,” Lloyd concludes.