Meeting Of The Minds

In this romantic comedy-drama, a couple learns that the relationship between the mind and the body can take many different forms. Rose Morgan (Barbra Streisand) is a plain and pudgy middle-aged college English professor who shares a house with her mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall). Rose got the brains in her family, but her sister Claire (Mimi Rogers) got the good looks, and as Claire prepares for her wedding to Alex (Pierce Brosnon), Rose can't help but despair over the blank page that is her love life, especially since she's long had a crush on Alex. Gregory Larkin (Jeff Bridges) teaches mathematics at the same school as Rose, and he has come to the conclusion that sex serves no purpose but to complicate relationships between men and women; after a series of disastrous romantic affairs, Gregory is looking for an intellectual relationship with a woman – and nothing more.

This meeting of the minds and bands of Afro-funk creator Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and American vibist and R&B/jazz innovator Roy Ayers is a collaboration that shouldn't work on the surface. Fela's music was raw, in your face politically and socially, and musically driven by the same spirit as James Brown's JBs. At the time of this recording in 1979, Ayers had moved out of jazz entirely and become an R&B superstar firmly entrenched in the disco world. Ayers' social concerns – on record – were primarily cosmological in nature. So how did these guys pull off one of the most badass jam gigs of all time, with one track led by each man and each taking a full side of a vinyl album? On hand were Fela's 14-piece orchestra and an outrageous chorus made up of seven of his wives and five male voices.