Bledsoe: Jeffrey Osborne's music still has wings

Jeffrey Osborne says his next project may be a standards album with friend and producer George Duke.

Jeffrey Osborne says his next project may be a standards album with friend and producer George Duke.

Singer Jeffrey Osborne is proud to be old school. Osborne is the voice behind the 1970s L.T.D. hits "(Every Time I Turn Around) Back in Love Again," "Concentrate On You," "Love Ballad" and "Holding On (When Love Is Gone)," as well as a long string of solo hits, which include "On the Wings of Love," "I Really Don't Need No Light," "Stay With Me Tonight," "She's On the Left" and "You Should Be Mine (The Woo Woo Song)."

"I'm glad I came along when I did, because it means a lot to see it done the right way," says Osborne. "I came up when everybody had horns in the group. L.T.D. had horns. Earth, Wind and Fire had horns, the Commodores. You got to see live music played well. It's quite different today. Now you might see one person playing to tracks. There's no character there. You can't do much with nothing but tracks. You can't break it down. You can't talk with people. It can be boring. It's nice to come from a time when there were so many people on stage that there was magic happening. Everybody was responding to each other's playing."

Osborne grew up in Providence, R.I., the youngest of 12 siblings. He began his musical adventure as a trumpeter by default.

"My father was an incredible trumpeter. Since I was the youngest and nobody else wanted to play it I ended up having to play the trumpet."

While his father, Clarence Osborne, gave up performing music full time because he couldn't support a large family as a musician, he still played his trumpet. Hearing him play had a profound effect on Jeffrey.

"He was a great trumpeter," says Osborne.

The entire family was musical. Osborne's older siblings had bands and sometimes enlisted the prodigiously talented Jeffrey to teach musical parts to much older band members when Jeffrey was barely in elementary school. By the time he was in high school Jeffrey was singing, playing trumpet and playing drums. When he left Providence to perform in L.T.D., it was initially as a drummer, but his talent as a vocalist soon put Osborne out front.

Osborne says he was influenced by many jazz and R&B vocalists, but particularly by Sarah Vaughan and Gloria Lynn.

"I was also influenced by guitar players," he says. "Wes Montgomery's solos were so lyrical. I can sing his solos. Earl Klugh, he's another one. ... In pop music I think the person who inspired me most was Burt Bacharach. He always had a lead trumpet player playing the melody. No one else did that."

"Osborne left L.T.D. to go solo in 1980. He says that was his hardest year in the business.

"Nobody knew my name. They knew my voice, but my name had never been out front."

Osborne's last Top 10 R&B hit was 1991's "If My Brother's in Trouble," but he has continued to record and perform. He released "Greatest Hits Live" in July, but he says the music world is very different than it used to be.

"The (record company) didn't even want to release a physical copy - just as a download," says Osborne.

He says he hopes to record a standards album in the near future with George Duke producing, and he has no intention of retiring.

"As long as they keep paying me I'm going to keep doing it. Sometimes I still can't believe that what I normally do in the shower, people will pay me for it!"

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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