Before Jan Hammer, the synthesizer in jazz fusion was mostly textural — a color you added to the background. Hammer treated it like a lead instrument, bending notes with the pitch wheel in real time so it sang and screamed the way a guitar or a trumpet would. When he joined the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the early 1970s, that approach collided with John McLaughlin's hypercharged guitar playing in a way that genuinely surprised people. These weren't two instruments politely taking turns. They were fighting each other, chasing each other, finishing each other's sentences at tempo.

His keyboard setup in that band was physically aggressive — he played standing up, attacking the keys, using the modulation controls like a wind player uses breath. A lot of synthesizer playing from that era sounds dated now, tied to specific timbres that scream "1974." Hammer's playing holds up better than most because the ideas behind it were coming from a jazz and blues vocabulary, not a novelty-tech one. He'd studied piano seriously in Prague, worked with Miroslav Vitouš in the early days, and had internalized bebop before he ever touched a Moog.

After the Mahavishnu years, he led his own group and collaborated with Jeff Beck on a series of records that gave Beck some of the most interesting backing he ever had. Those albums — particularly Wired (1976) — showed that Hammer could hold his own compositional ideas together without McLaughlin as the center of gravity. The music on those records is aggressive and rhythmically restless, not easy listening by any stretch, but there's a clarity to the structures that keeps it from becoming self-indulgent.

Then came the Miami Vice theme in 1984, which went to number one and introduced his name to an audience that had never heard of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and didn't particularly want to. Some jazz listeners found the TV work embarrassing in retrospect, but that's a bit unfair. The production techniques Hammer used for that soundtrack — sequenced synths, electronic drums, a kind of propulsive tension — were legitimately inventive for the time. He wasn't slumming. He was doing what he'd always done, which was finding out what the technology in front of him could actually do.

What makes Hammer worth spending time with is that he always sounded like himself regardless of context. The McCoy Tyner influence you can hear in his piano playing never fully disappeared even under layers of synthesis. His Czech musical training gave him a slightly different harmonic angle than the American players he ran with. Put on The First Seven Days (1975) if you want to hear what he could do on his own terms — it's a concept album, a little strange, but it shows a musician with genuine compositional ambition who hadn't yet been pulled toward the commercial mainstream.