Body and Soul

After the studio-built Night and Day, Jackson wanted to get back to a well-rehearsed band playing together in one room. In January 1984 he took an eight-piece group into the Masonic Hall in Manhattan, with the control room set up next door in Vanguard Studios, a converted office wired through to the hall. A matched pair of Neumann M50 microphones caught the room's natural reverberation while the instruments were also close-miked, and everything went to a 3M 32-track digital recorder: it was his first fully digital album. Three weeks of tracking and a week of mixing at Atlantic Studios was quick by the standards of the day, and Kershenbaum saw it as a step back from earlier excess.

The band added horns, the guitarist Vinnie Zummo (the first of six Jackson albums he played on) and the drummer Gary Burke to Maby and Ed Roynesdal, with Ellen Foley and Elaine Caswell singing backing parts. The title comes from Coleman Hawkins's 1939 recording of Body and Soul, and the cover copies the design of Blue Note's Sonny Rollins, Vol. 2. Jazz runs all through it, from the Ellington-style horn charts to the instrumental Loisaida, named for the Lower East Side.

It reached fourteen in Britain, twenty in America and two in the Netherlands, where it went gold. Rolling Stone gave it four stars and placed Jackson alongside Paul Simon and Randy Newman, while The Absolute Sound found the sound a disappointment. The tour ran from April to August 1984 across Europe, North America, Australia and Japan, and left Jackson, by his own account, burned out.