Country and Eastern Music

Jerry Goodman (acoustic violin, electric violin, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, acoustic mandolin, electric mandolin, viola, vocals) and Jan Hammer (piano, electric piano, synthesizer, Moog synthesizer, electric bass, drums). From the album Like Children (1974).

Jan Hammer is a Czech American keyboardist, composer and record producer whose career is based on classical music, jazz, rock, electronic music, television and cinema. He has collaborated with jazz and rock musicians such as Carlos Santana, Elvin Jones, Steve Lukather and Tommy Bolin among many others, and published 25 albums as a leader. He has also composed the soundtrack for fourteen films and music for 90 episodes of the 1980s television show Miami Vice and 20 for the 1990s English series Chancer. He has also written the music for Beyond the Mind’s Eye, one of the most successful music videos in Billboard history, and has won several Grammy awards.

Born in Prague, his mother was a well-known Czechoslovakian jazz singer and his father played vibraphone and double bass. Hammer started playing piano at age four and by age fourteen was already touring throughout Eastern Europe and recording with his own jazz trio. At the Academy of Musical Arts in Prague he studied counterpoint, harmony, classical composition and music history. In 1968 he composed the soundtrack for the movie The Incredibly Sad Princess, and when that same year the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia, Hammer left the country. He then performed at the The Domicile club in Munich (Germany) with American electric bassist George Mraz and German drummer Cees See playing soul jazz and hard bop. This was collected in his first album Maliny Maliny released the following year by the German MPS label.

He then emigrated to the United States, where he received a scholarship to study at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston and became a U.S. citizen. When he finished his studies he toured with Sarah Vaughan for a year. In 1970 he participated in Energy by the jazz flutist Jeremy Steig playing electric piano and in 1971 he joined the original line-up of the guitarist John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra along with Jerry Goodman on violin, Rick Laird on electric bass and Billy Cobham on drums. He was one of the first keyboardists to use the Moog synthesizer and appeared in the legendary albums of the jazz fusion group The Inner Mounting Flame (1971) and Birds of Fire (1973), and in Between Nothingness & Eternity (1973) with a concert in New York.