Outside In
This is a weird story: old memories, cassette tapes, jazz bands “gone funk”, track names, the limits of web search, and epic failure modes of AI.
Many decades ago, when I was about 13, I bought a cassette tape with a bright blue jacket (is that even the right term for cassettes?) titled Greatest Jazz Tunes, from some shop in Secunderabad, India, where my grandparents lived. Today, my son, 13, plays saxophone, and is switching from alto sax to tenor. Over dinner one day, we were talking about the baritone sax and I recalled a tune from this specific tape. I thought it was Black & Tan Fantasy. But the very first tune on this cassette, on side A, was, in my view, a Banger. I wanted to listen to it again.
So off I went looking for it. Needless to say, I no longer have the cassette with me. But I’d looked for this tune online before and had successfully found it. And I thought I had also discovered that it was an all-black band. I was reasonably sure that the track was called Outside In. No problem, just go find it again, right?
I started off with search terms like “Outside In jazz track”, and obtained all sorts of other results. A style of jazz soloing, a whole bunch of other tracks with the same name… Outside In, it turns out, is a terrible track name from an SEO perspective, but unfortunately these blokes from the 1980s hadn’t quite thought that through. So I typed into Google’s search bar:
Find me an ancient cassette tape from the 1980s? (mis)titled Greatest Jazz Tunes that started with Outside In and has Black & Tan Fantasy. I want the list of songs on both sides of that release.
and “AI Mode” took over and confidently led me through a wild goose chase that led all sorts of places except the track I was looking for.
The 1980s release you are searching for is Blue Note 50th Anniversary Collection Volume 4… the second track on Side A is actually Black Fire by Andrew Hill, which you likely recalled as Duke Ellington’s classic Black & Tan Fantasy.
Garbage. Nonsense. It got me nowhere near the tune I sought. And of course the AI spewed absolute crap with absolute confidence. The confident tone with which it would state things that it couldn’t possibly know to be true… incensed me. After a bunch of back and forth trying to nudge it in the right direction, I realized I was getting nowhere.
By this point, I was getting irritated. I had listened to this track dozens of times. There were four solos and I knew them all by heart, but only to hum along. How do you search for a tune if all you can do is hum a relatively un-hummable solo? I reached out to my parents and sister. They responded that they had absolutely no memory of such a tape. My father helpfully suggested that perhaps I’d bought it when I was in college. I’d begun to doubt that I had the right name for the tune, so all I could tell them was the title of the compilation and the color of the cover.
This “jazz tune” wasn’t a common or garden jazz tune though. It had a lead guitar and keyboards and a plucked electric bass and a drummer who clearly wasn’t messing around with brushes and ride cymbal. I remembered this crazy sus4 texture lingering in the background while the distortion guitar and keyboard belted out these riff patterns that would progressively descend a half-step each time through. Yeah, Outside In, get it? I couldn’t take it any more. Walked over to the piano and tried to play aural fragments from memory. One pattern against that lingering sus4 chord went like this:
I didn’t know what scale it was in, so I played it in F blues scale. It was too fast for me and I had to work out the last part of the first bar from whatever I could dredge up from 35 years ago. But it clicked eventually and I understood what the band was trying to say. In the meanwhile, more red herrings were being flung at me.
The complete tracklist for both sides of the 1987 Island Records cassette release is:
Side A
A1: Outside In (18:56)
A2: Solid AirSide B
B1: “Make No Mistake”
B2: “Bless the Weather”
B3: “The Man in The Station”
B4: “I’d Rather Be The Devil”
More band names came shooting my way: Stuff, Mandré, Oneness of Juju, Catalyst, Twennynine, The Blackbyrds. All wrong.
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By this time I was desperate: well over an hour had gone by with this AI madness. I was overcome by that helpless feeling you get when you’re close to remembering something and you can’t and it just won’t let you be. I thought I had to somehow remember one more track name from the tape to help with the search. Somehow, I recalled Sister Cheryl. This was the first breakthrough. It led me to Blue Note ’86: A New Generation of Jazz. This release, in fact, does have a lot of the tunes from the cassette tape I had! And some of them are really nice renditions!
- Stanley Jordan: Round Midnight
- Tony Williams: Sister Cheryl
- OTB: Output
And the “baritone” sax piece I was remembering was not baritone sax at all, it was tenor: Bennie Wallace’s Twilight Time. But still no Outside In! So the tape I bought in India had some or all of this Blue Note release, plus a couple of extra tracks from God knows where. Inside Out? Was that the name of the tune? Surely not! I remembered this in your face flat-nine note held at the end of a chromatic run. Gah where’s that tune!
In exasperation, I took all I had so far: the distortion guitar, keyboards, all-black band, the rest of the track names I’d cobbled together, and started afresh with ChatGPT this time. My desperate query ended with:
But then my tape had some others. The first track on side A was (I think) called Outside In. Drums, distortion guitar, keyboard, plucked electric bass. Pentatonic blues scale but with a lot of chromatic lines. I cannot find this song now. I found it a couple of years ago, and at the time I seem to remember it was an all-black band, but not sure. What was that track?
Et voilà—right off the bat!
I think I found it. Your memory of the title, instrumentation, era, and even the all-Black-band detail line up unusually well.
The track is almost certainly “Outside In” by Pieces of a Dream, from their 1986 album Joyride. Apple Music lists it as a 1986 track, and the album track listing puts it at about 5 minutes.
The personnel are strikingly close to your description:
James Lloyd — keyboards
Cedric Napoleon — electric bass
Curtis Harmon — drums
Marlon McClain — guitar and guitar solo
Paulinho da Costa — percussion
Rhett Lawrence — synthesizer programmingThe track was arranged by James Lloyd and Maurice White and produced by Maurice White.
Here you go. I think it’s a banger. Pieces of a Dream is not a jazz band, they’re smooth jazz, apparently, or quiet storm (what the heck is that?), and the genre misidentification was allegedly the reason I wasted an hour on the “AI Mode” goose chase.
Also, my notes above need transposing: I wrote in F. The song is in E-flat (ish: plenty cents sharp on the YouTube recording, and maybe all the others too).
Interestingly, I found the rest of that album, Joyride, unremarkable. It even includes a version of Careless Whisper. It’s as if the band just wanted one track where they could let loose. Those repeating phrases descending by a half step: overdone? Just right, I think. I just love the 80s vibe turned up to eleven, the blues riffs, the funk, the over-the-top keyboards, and that lingering sus4 texture. Delicious!
p. s.: when I sent my family links to these tracks, they recognized every one of them and recalled them fondly, nostalgically.
