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SCMP Reporter

Thank you all, said pianist Jim Brickman at a performance at the Jazz Club last week, 'for wearing your clothes tonight'.

  Not, of course, that 'Piano's answer to Kenny G' (a term he liked so much I wondered for a moment whether he had coined it) endorses a clothing-optional lifestyle.

  But the songs this ex-jingle-maker writes are music that Americans love to make love to and, according to his manager David Pringle, he gets e-mail messages and letters 'the whole time' talking about babies conceived, or romances consummated, to the tinkling of Brickman's ivories.

  One has to admire Brickman for his marketing flair. He flew into Hong Kong from Los Angeles for a 36-hour promotional visit involving almost a dozen interviews and one rather intimate concert.

  Record company BMG confirmed the interview at least six times beforehand, building up a sense that this was an important star even if - and Brickman candidly admitted this - most people outside the US had never heard of him.

  Brickman has, when speaking, a voice that sounds remarkably good for crooning. But this does not appear on his recordings, which are mostly instrumental, and where there is an occasional voice it is not Brickman's.

  The all-instrumental road is an unusual choice for someone so keen to break into the pop market but Brickman has already seen a certain success. His third and latest album, Picture This, is number one on Billboard Magazine's New Age Music chart.

  'It's also been number three on the adult contemporary music charts, and about number 50 on the country charts, which maybe shows how hard it is to label,' said Brickman.

  'But it doesn't really matter what bin you're in in the music store,' he said, adding that his records are usually in the New Age categories.

  'They don't have an area called contemporary instrumental music. I always think of New Age as waves crashing and birds singing, but this is more melodic and pop music without the singing,' said Brickman, adding that he thought of his music as 'simplicity, romance, emotion, de-stressing'.

  'I should have been writing songs for the Carpenters 20 years ago, but that's the way it goes.'   One of the downsides of the soft, mainstream romantic style, surely, would be hearing it in a supermarket, lift, or on phone-waiting music, I ventured. Many musicians would hate this, and its associations of musical blandness, but Brickman just smiled, and said it had already happened.

  'I hear my stuff in elevators sometimes. I don't have a problem with that: the more people hear you, the more you can do what you want to do.'   Like have fan mail.

  'People write to me and say I helped them remember a time in their life, or a person, who was important. Because it's personal, just me and a piano rather than a whole band, people sometimes feel they know me more than they really do.

  'So they write to me about all their personal stuff. I'm always getting how they imagine I'm over at their place, playing for them while they eat dinner or whatever . . .'   Brickman started piano at the age of four, pushing his parents to give him lessons. He fondly tells the story about a grubby piece of green felt he used to play like a keyboard.

  As a teenager he did some work with the Muppets and Sesame Street - 'I had to write some music for D,' he said - before moving to the most commercial side of the music business: advertising.

  'I did all kinds: kiddy litter, toilet bowl cleaner, soda, bread,' Brickman said, saying his personal favourites were 'Always Coca-cola', and 'GE, we bring good things to life'.

  'It was fun, a great way to learn how to imitate styles.

  'One day you had to do a song about bug spray to rock and roll beat, and then the next day it's air freshener to country music.'   The client would say they wanted the song to sound like Nine Inch Nails, or Garth Brooks, 'so you become an expert at imitation and writing really catchy melodies that people can whistle'.

  'Making things sound familiar but not stolen is a very subtle thing. You've heard it before somewhere but you really haven't heard it before.'   This is where, Brickman said, he developed a tough skin and a degree of objectivity to his own work:   'You have these executives sitting in suits in a board-room and you go in singing something bright like 'Don't treat your puppy like a dog, dog, dog, give him puppy-chow. . .',' Brickman sang in an overtly jolly way.

  'And they say, 'it's not as happy as we'd like it to be, could it be livelier' or something ridiculous like that,' he added,laughing.

  He found, after a while, he hated the limits to creativity of jingle-writing, and booked some studio time to record his own songs - which later became the foundation for No Words - his first album.

  'And it all went from there.'   For a man who sells romance in sugar-sweet musical packages, his own romantic life must be interesting, I wondered.

  But no, Brickman said. Instead, his love life has been sacrificed for the new career, and for a promotional tour of 100 cities round the US and several in Asia.

  'My romantic life used to be great until I started to go on tour. I was involved with a girl in Los Angeles, but there was so much tension and so much travel . . . she wanted a life too.

  'What I've traded it for, and that's OK, is the welcoming of people around the country who represent my career life. It's important that I like doing it, otherwise it would be painful. I believe that it's worth it.' 



'Kenny G' of the keyboard