The release this Friday of Jam & Lewis: Volume One is one of the longest-aborning albums in pop history. The producer team of Jimmy "Jam" Harris and Terry Lewis have been promising an album under their own names since 1984.

In that December's issue of Musician magazine, Jimmy Jam said, "Our own stuff is top secret. It'll be more off the wall than what we're doing with other people, but it'll still be commercial, 'cause hearing records on the radio is what it's all about. We've been slowly laying down tracks over the past few years." Soon afterward, in February 1985, Billboard noted that Jam & Lewis, who'd just signed a new deal with the CBS-distributed Tabu label, would soon debut their own act, the Secret: "a 'Chic-type concept' that will also include Flyte Tyme staff writer and ex-Time keyboardist Monte Moir" — along with the news that "Harris and Lewis recently purchased a single-story office complex, from where they will operate their company."

Other names came up over the next couple of years, in particular Lisa Keith, the stalwart session singer and a key element of the prime Jam & Lewis sound. "Everyone we've ever worked with has called and said they'd love to come by and do stuff," Jam told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. "So I guess it'll be a cross between an actual band and a Quincy Jones album."

Volume One features only one of the many stars mooted for the Secret: Morris Day (who guests with fellow ex-Time man Jerome Benton and the Roots on the finale, "Babylove"). The bulk of the other guests — Sounds of Blackness, Mary J. Blige, Boyz II Men, Mariah Carey, The-Dream, Babyface, Toni Braxton, and Usher — began their professional associations with Jam & Lewis during or after the 1990s.

No kidding. By December 1992, only a decade into Jam & Lewis's partnership, Billboard reported that Flyte Tyme Studios, the duo's Edina headquarters, had on its walls "a Grammy for Producer of the Year, Soul Train Music Awards, American Music Awards, five ASCAP R&B Songwriter of the Year awards, two ASCAP pop Songwriter of the Year awards, an NAACP Image Award, an IAAAM Diamond Award for Excellence, eight platinum albums, 18 gold albums and 14 gold single awards. They were named the top R&B-charted producers by Billboard for 1991. In addition, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is about to unveil a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in honor of Jam & Lewis."

The best place to discover just how little time they had back then will cost you $150, minimum, on Discogs. In 1995, EMI Music Publishing issued Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis: The Hit Songs, a four-CD, 78-song box set only available promotionally, never for sale, that diligently covers a decade-plus of the duo's work as writers, not just producers — hence, Robert Palmer's cover of Cherrelle's "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On" (produced by Chic's Bernard Edwards) makes it on, but not Janet Jackson's "The Pleasure Principle" (written by Monte Moir). There are other quibbles — a few songs are chopped very short — but The Hit Songs is one of the greatest box sets of all time; an aboveboard issue would be a capital-e Event. "It's been used for charity auctions," Jam told Peter S. Scholtes of City Pages in 2003. "We just made one a couple of years ago for the Tiger Woods Foundation, and we auctioned off two of them for $2,500 apiece." Used copies of the box can be purchased for $150 on Discogs.

Even more enticingly — particularly considering there seems to be no evidence of its physical existence — Jam told Scholtes about a second box, covering 1995 to 2002, that was being prepared: "EMI's idea is to add another four CDs and make it an eight-CD, 20-year compilation," he said. "We've got it down to 60-something songs. It's just not available to the public." He's not kidding: That second box, as far as I can find, was never manufactured. It's as enticing a would-be artifact as the Secret album.

Something beyond idle mythology ties these un-projects together — they're the sort of thing you'd expect from a couple of guys who got famous by refusing to get famous, who became showbiz legends while refusing the spotlight. Who else could use the exact same press photograph for decades — the silver-tint black-and-white of Jam, left, and Lewis, right, decked out in suits, shades, and fedoras, gazing in opposite directions while clearly in perfect synch — and never have it age? "As producers, we are not the stars," Jam told the NME in 1986, "and therefore it doesn't feel right that we should have photos taken of us."

Jam & Lewis's trajectory over that decade remains remarkable for its swiftness. It helped that they had a tailwind. The Time had been R&B-radio favorites and a draw unto themselves on Prince's 1999 tour. It was an easy enough bet that two of its members might have some of that same magic dust at their disposal.

In fact, many of Prince's musical ideas were shared among his peers. Jam told a Swedish radio interviewer (in a particularly revealing interview) that although Prince's 1978 debut, For You, "was the first time that synthesizers had been used as a lead instrument, to basically emulate horn sounds … It was something that wasn't necessarily unique to Prince. Terry had the same vision, that there should be two keyboard players … Prince did it first, and he did it great, and he basically validated everybody else's beliefs that you could have a band based around keyboards, and that synthesizers were for more than just sound effects and solos."

Their origin story is famous by now: Jam, a keyboardist who started out as a drummer (his father is the longtime Minneapolis pianist and singer Cornbread Harris), and Lewis, a jock who played bass, met over the summer of 1973 while attending the Upward Bound program at the University of Minnesota. Both wanted to teach math. "He would always be blasting music out of his dorm room and stuff and I would come by and listen to it," Jam said in 2018. Soon, he became a member of Lewis's band, Flyte Tyme.

"Until I met Terry when I was 13, I wasn't familiar with Black music," Jam said in 1992. "I was familiar with pop music because that what you heard on the radio. Terry was always up on the latest Black records because of relatives in Memphis and Chicago. My early influences were Chicago and groups like that. Terry introduced me to Tower of Power and New Birth. He had all the Kool & the Gang albums. I wasn't familiar with that, and it affected my musical influences."

Jam made waves with his post-Flyte Tyme band, Mind & Matter, but hit his limits there early on, he told the Swedish radio interviewer: "I was about 16 years old, and most of the guys in the band were 24-25, and very much into drugs — not heavy drugs, but marijuana. I was very straight — I never drank or smoked or got high; I just didn't do it. But I was very much into music and very serious about it, and I think I got very discouraged by the fact that these guys weren't as much into it as I was … 'If you guys aren't serious about music now, then you'll never be.' I thought, 'What would be the next best thing to do?' And DJing was it."

The records Jam lists as perennials in his DJ sets are fascinating for the light they shed on the work he'd do with Lewis. Top of the list ("By far the biggest record of my DJing career") is MFSB's "Dance with me Tonight," a strutting instrumental with gurgling synthesizers tensing against a curtain of strings — a virtual blueprint for what Jam & Lewis would spend their early years perfecting.

But first came the Time, originally built around Morris Day on the drums, and then, after singer Alexander O'Neal's departure, on vocals. Jimmy and Terry and the rest of the band were drilled to perfection by their producer and main songwriter, Prince. "He would work you past what you thought were your capabilities," Lewis told Jon Bream. "He would show you that it's nothing but hard work that makes successful people … Tyrant? No. Genius? Yes." Jam added: "There's no pretense. You know that going in."

Jam & Lewis began writing and producing songs for other artists beginning in 1982, and in 1983, while the Time were on tour with Prince, they missed a flight to a gig after snowfall stalled the planes in Atlanta. Their day of hooky went unpunished at first, and a massive food fight during the tour would help break the tension. But Prince strained things again after the tour's end by letting Jam & Lewis go, usurping Day's nominal leadership of the Time. "The choice was theirs," Day fibbed to Billboard of Jam & Lewis's firing, but Jimmy and Terry were already referring to the occasion of their ousting as "the hatchet meeting."

One thing Jam & Lewis brought from the Time was a penchant for humorous between-song skits — cf. the intra-song bit, voiced by Vanity, from "The Walk," on What Time Is It?, is an obvious inspiration for Hearsay's spoken introductions (e.g. "Intro to 'Hearsay'": "I'm not the gossipy type …"). That's one thing that kept Jam & Lewis's work au courant with hip-hop. Another is the rhythms — brick-dense, unapologetically swinging, utterly modern.

It's a chicken-or-egg question to ask whether Jam & Lewis are better songwriters or better producers, because what makes them pivotal was the way they made those processes inextricable. Their mid-80s rise marks the point in pop when "producing" and "songwriting" permanently merged. "Rhythm is important," Jam said in 1984, "but lots of the records out these days wouldn't be much if you took away all the drum effects. I may be old-fashioned but I like a melody you can hum."

As Jimmy has explained their division of labor, Lewis writes more lyrics and acts as more of a day-to-day businessman, with Jam taking care of most of the musical ideas. Jam "does more of the track mixing," Lewis told BET's Donnie Simpson in the mid-80s, while Terry did "more of the vocal mixing." There's a great moment in that BET interview, which takes place at the mixing desk of the duo's original Flyte Tyme Studio on Nicollet Avenue, when they demonstrate how to mix a track, instrument by instrument; as Jam brings in Lewis's electric bass line, then doubles it with his own keyboard bass, Lewis explains to the host that his own part is played on the "bass good-tar — G-O-O-D-tar."

Particularly as the 1980s wore on, Jam & Lewis began utilizing samples as well as programming and live playing as building blocks for their sound. In that BET clip, Jam refers to their engineer Steve Hodge as "the polish on the shoe." An L.A. studio veteran, Hodge moved to the Twin Cities to work full-time at Flyte Tyme from 1986 to 2003. "Most of Jimmy's and Terry's records — most records since then, really — are a combination of a solid, dense bottom over which a melodic top rides," Hodge told Sound on Sound. "With Jimmy playing a very dense, funky bass line and a vocalist like Janet Jackson singing a very airy-voiced melody on top of that, the contrast was spectacular."

That contrast resonated beyond the speakers, as Mark Sinker wrote in The Wire in 1992 (emphasis mine): "Production meaning music as the whole thing — not just writing the tunes, not just playing them, not just letting the rhythm develop between you as players, not just honing the all-round sound until all anyone needs to hear is a single downbeat to know who this is, not just working off and for the crowd, but orchestrating the whole community, and being part of their response."

Hodge wasn't Jam & Lewis's only key consigliere. A key early mentor was Clarence Avant, founder of Tabu Records and a Black-music power player nonpareil (see The Black Godfather, Reginald Hudlin's absorbing 2019 documentary about Avant's life and career). "He's always given us total freedom and trust," Jam recalled in 1985. "We met him when we produced the track 'High Hopes' for the S.O.S. Band in 1983. After it was out, he called us in and said, 'Well, it really didn't do much sales-wise. What would you have done differently?' We told him we would have made the track a little looser. And that's the way we've worked since then."

Avant's patronage wasn't just musical. "I remember taking one of those [early] publishing contracts to Clarence Avant to look at, and he threatened to kill us if we signed it," Jam would recall. "People will lie to you, but mathematics never lie." Avant's patronage is also reflected in how Jam & Lewis grew as businessmen as well as craftsmen. Jam is a longtime board member of ASCAP and the Recording Academy (he was elected to the trustees' board of the latter in 2005) and prominent composers' advocate: "I'm trying to spread the word about the importance of songwriters' rights, artists' rights," he said in 1998.

By the 1990s, the producer-as-auteur had long been standard operating procedure in R&B, but the producers increasingly became stars unto themselves in the Jam & Lewis manner: P. Diddy and Teddy Riley were the most obvious examples. But something more fundamental had changed as well: Beginning with Tina Turner's Private Dancer and Chaka Khan's I Feel for You, both in 1984, big albums were often helmed by multiple production teams, rather than a single one per album.

A big reason the Janet Jackson corpus endures is that the albums express a consistent musical vision. "In urban music today, people usually get Puffy to do three songs, Babyface to do two, Trackmasters, Jermaine Dupri, and Jam & Lewis to do some, [and] you end up with a lot of identities," Jam told Billboard in 1998. "It's good business to hedge your bets and use everyone who makes hits, but there's something to be said about the cohesive way an album stands together, and the best way to achieve that is to have one producer produce the work."

On another occasion, in 1987, Jam described his job this way: "A record producer brings the product home. We end up being the psychiatrist and the counselor." The classic example, of course, is Janet Jackson's Control (1986), where they constructed a synth-funk masterwork about her literal coming of age to announce her artistic maturation.

For this listener, Jam & Lewis's non-Janet zenith is Alexander O'Neal's Hearsay (1987). This was where they went all the way into a concept, with stunning results — an album of songs about thwarted relationships of all sorts, with the hammering "Fake" one of the sharpest grooves ever cut, by anybody, and ballads that are first-time direct and full of instrumental and vocal touches that never stop revealing themselves. Talk about a full package: The cover shot alone is a neo-noir masterpiece, O'Neal looking downward, in full brood, his handsome face highlighted in purple, offsetting his bright red, collared shirt, under a black leather jacket and dark overcoat — bruise colors for an album full of emotional (and rhythmic) body blows.

When Herb Alpert, the president of A&M, Janet Jackson's record company, flew to Minneapolis to record the hit "Diamonds," he recalled, "Jimmy and Terry asked me, 'Do you feel like recording or would you like to play some Ping-Pong or get some barbecued chicken?'" Alpert opted for the chicken. "That's how they set up the environment," he said. "Their attitude is 'Let's wait for the moment to strike.'"

Michaelangelo Matos is the author of Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year (Hachette) and lives in St. Paul.

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