Narell studied music at the University of California, Berkeley, and played piano with the University of California Jazz Ensembles under the direction of Dr. David W. Tucker. He was graduated in 1973. He has performed with the Caribbean Jazz Project, Montreux, Sakesho, and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. He additionally composed and arranged music for Trinidad's national steelband competition Panorama. Narell also performed in South Africa in 1999 in front of a crowd of 80,000 people.

Piers Lane brings all his pianistic panache to this splendidly eclectic recital of works from the 1700s to 2019, in a programme exploring very different aspects of the dance.

Fusion/new age keyboard player Keiko Matsui grew up in Tokyo and took her first piano lesson at the age of five. Influenced by Stevie Wonder and Rachmaninov as well as early fusion masters Maurice Jarre and Chick Corea, Matsui began composing while in junior high but studied children's culture at the Japan Women's University (Nihon Joshidaigaku). She moved to the Yamaha Music Foundation in Tokyo after graduation and formed Cosmos, recording four albums with the new age group.

Shadow Prophets was a marked improvement over The Heat of Heat, but it was obvious that GRP was trying desperately to find a niche for Kevin Eubanks. Despite a distinctive guitar style and an endless stream of ideas, Eubanks was again being molded in the same style as George Benson (the pop version). The inclusion of Mark Ledford also indicates an effort to ride the Pat Metheny wave that was so popular on contemporary radio stations at this time.

For their first album on MCA, Oingo Boingo dispensed with the aggressive high energy of their previous albums and created a more traditional Alternative Rock album with Dead Man's Party. The first taste came with yet another soundtrack song, 'Weird Science'. The danceable electro-pop song charted in the mid-40's on the Billboard singles chart, which would be their highest charting single release. Continuing to increase their exposure, the band appeared in the 1986 movie Back To School performing the 'Dead Man's Party' title track, while 'No One Lives Forever' was included in the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Two other single releases 'Just Another Day' and 'Stay' both have a more radio friendly style than previous single releases.