However, Def Jam never released the album, although at least three of its songs, "Damn", "War", and "Housewife", turned up on Def Jam promotional mixtapes. He is best known as a member of the successful R&B group Dru Hill, serving as second lead singer for the group.ĭuring Dru Hill's 1999 - 2002 hiatus, Jazz recorded a traditional R&B solo album. on Apin Baltimore, Maryland) is an African-American R&B singer. That was a humbling moment for me.Jazz (born Larry Eugene Anthony, Jr. We recorded the album in 20, so that was a big thing for me to be able to go in there and not be Nokio, and sit back and be humble-Knowing that Trey was the star, and doing that with no problem. That was 2006, and that was the first time I did anything R&B for real since we did Dru World Order, and that was five years later. They said they wanted me to come in on the album. I got a call a week later from Kevin Liles, Tre, and his manager. I said, “Man, I just been in the house.” He said, “It’s time to come out the house.” When I met Trey, they were shooting a video. I’m going to introduce you to Trey.” I went to the shoot, and saw Troy Taylor, who I’ve wanted to work with since Enter the Dru, so he asked me what I was doing. One day, when he came to my house, he said, “We are going to a Trey Songz video shoot. I would pick him and we made music but it wasn’t about music, it was about real life stuff. He pretty much said, “I want you to be his big brother." Chris came to my house almost every day. Chris Brown was one of my best friends at the time. Honestly, Trey Day, because that was me in the house and I had many problems with doing music. They realized that we could do it internally and we didn’t really need anybody. We took hip hop beats and we put Stevie Wonder on top of it, and that was the stuff that made them realize, that not only did they have something that was way more special, and they understood. Honestly, it wasn’t really until, me and Woody went to make All Alone and April Showers, that everybody we were signed to at the time, they were like, “Oh, my God.” Before, everything that he wrote sounded like Jodeci, and if you’re looking for that immediate compassionate, which is something that most people do when they first listen to music, but it was always standout because Jodeci was once that great. You got these young guys with old voices and they write, produce, and "we really don’t want people to have that much control." Nobody knew what to do with us. Nobody knew what to do with us because it was so much to deal with. Honestly, that was the problem for us before Tell Me came out. You had the person that was mysterious and you had the guy who could sing regardless of anything. We had the quiet person, and you had the person that sing wild. It wasn’t just focusing on singing or whatever else there was literally a person for all these different types of mindsets and people. I think because, we all came with somebody for everybody. I’ve had conversations, “What are you supposed to do if that was the only thing on the table at the time that made sense?" My thing is, always believe in you. Who knows? That really just comes down to how much you believe in yourself. If that was the greatest thing that I got at that point, and it came from a progression, then I might’ve jumped the gun for the progression and I could’ve gotten more. It’s not until you get older that you realize, that maybe there was a whole bunch of points before that, when people offered stuff to you. It’s hard when you’re coming from the hood and you just want to get out and somebody presents you with the opportunity that seems like, at the time, everything you ever dreamed of doing. If we had gotten to the point that somebody was willing to offer us that, then maybe if we worked a little bit harder, somebody would’ve offered us more opposed to putting us in a situation of signing away everything that we had before we knew what it was worth. Many of the problems that we had came from signing a deal. If you believe in yourself for real, don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t have more.
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