Once Rushen entered high school at Locke under the tutelage of Andrews, a rookie teacher with an experimental bent, exploration and expansion became just as important as technical brilliance, as she told the St. Louis Dispatch in 1984: “For me, music is organic. It’s a reaction based upon my situation, my imagination, and, hopefully, my creativity.” By the release of Rushen’s seventh studio album and major breakout, Straight From the Heart, in 1982, it felt like a culmination of her prodigious upbringing. Displaying her effortless mastery of the piano across R&B, disco, and jazz—genres she picked up naturally along the way in her career—Rushen merged technicality with improvisation in a way that she’d been toying with since her teenage years.
Rushen’s 1974 debut, Prelusion, landed like it was destined to be a Blue Note classics reissue, laced tight with strictly jazz compositions. She anchored an eight-piece outfit (which included Joe Henderson playing tenor sax, Leon Ndugu Chancler on drums, and Oscar Brashear on trumpet), romping through jams on her piano and electric keyboard with blistering energy, while the band’s esteemed members calmly stepped in and out of the spotlight. The follow-up, Before the Dawn, allowed her to dip her toe a little further into fusion. She shelved the guardrails of jazz standards, largely playing electric piano, synthesizer, and clavinet.
Similarly, the sessions were littered with heavy hitters, including Hubert Laws on flute and Lee Ritenour on guitar. Rushen’s tendency for ambling through different styles feels instinctual; she bounds between genres before settling on a sound for too long—take the way that the titular track patiently crawls as she lumbers in the lower octaves while the band flutters with cosmic echoes and effects, before leading into the closer “Razzia,” which evolves into a sprawling funk-rock breakdown, entropy increasing with each strummed note.
While her professional solo career was beginning, Rushen pulled double duty and worked as a studio musician for the titans of ’70s jazz fusion—partly out of necessity, due to the muted commercial success of Prelusion and Before the Dawn, but mostly to satisfy her taste for unique forms of musical expression. Also proficient on flute, guitar, bass, and drums, she became a Swiss army knife as a session player and arranger. Rushen quickly became a favorite keyboardist of Jean-Luc Ponty and Ritenour, and was often found in the credits of jazz artists like Stanley Turrentine, Donald Byrd, and Laws, earning trailblazer status as a Black woman session musician. Explaining to the St. Louis Dispatch the urge to work in the background, Rushen found that contributing to other geniuses’ compositions and directions offered its own form of creative freedom. “My entire upbringing was about not being limited,” she said, “becoming a studio musician seemed to be a way out. As a studio musician, you never know what kind of music you’ll be playing on any given day.”
Rushen first appeared as a vocalist on her third and final record with Prestige, 1976’s Shout It Out, an album that began her gradual turn toward hitmaking R&B (a strategy that would have earned her the criticism of “selling out” from jazz purists, as noted in her 1982 profile with Blues & Soul). Even as Rushen switched to Elektra in 1978, celebrating the move with her album Patrice, the increased radio exposure seemed like a symptom of her creative output, rather than a driving force. Her determination to follow her curiosity buoyed the brilliance of 1979’s Pizzazz and 1980’s Posh through any stretches of overproduction.
