Jan Hammer’s “Miami Vice Theme” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on 9 November 1985. In February 1986, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, it won him two Grammy awards, for Best Pop Instrumental Performance and Best Instrumental Composition.
Hammer made it almost entirely on synthesizers, working alone in his home studio, and no other instrumental topped the Hot 100 until Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” in 2013.
Before Vice, the Prague-born keyboardist was best known for his work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the early 1970s and for his records with guitarists Jeff Beck and Neal Schon.
Written on a Fairlight before the show existed
Hammer told Sound On Sound in January 1988 that the theme came first. “I actually wrote the original theme before I was hired to do the show,” he said. “It was worked out on Page R of my original Fairlight.”
Page R was the real-time sequencer page of the Fairlight CMI. Hammer sampled bass sounds from his Memorymoog into the Fairlight, arranged three bass tracks on that page, and played the result to the producers at their first meeting.
The Fairlight was a serious investment, launched in 1979 at $25,000. Hammer told Electronics & Music Maker in 1986 that the price was “prohibitive” when he first saw one, “but the movie soundtracks raised the money and it soon paid for itself”.
He used it for the drums as well. “A lot of the sounds came from my own studio drum kit that were sampled into the Fairlight and then processed using heavy compression and gated Lexicon reverb,” he told Sound On Sound in 2004.
Asked by Rolling Stone in 2014 which synths he used for the show, he answered: “The most important machine that I was using would be the Fairlight CMI.”
From a 60-second cue to No. 1
Miami Vice started on NBC in September 1984. The pilot had no theme of its own, so once the series was picked up Hammer cut a 60-second version, and early episodes aired without the synth-guitar lead he added later.
The weekly workload was heavy. “One week I may have to produce 15 minutes of music but the next episode may require 35 minutes,” he told Sound On Sound in 1988.
The single followed in 1985 with a music video that cast Hammer as a fugitive chased by Crockett and Tubbs, cut together with close-ups of Fairlight screens, including the Page R sequencer where the theme was written.
The soundtrack album, which paired the theme with Glenn Frey’s “You Belong to the City”, spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the US album chart and sold more than four million copies in the US. In the UK the single peaked at No. 5.
Hammer’s other famous cue had a different engine. “I did use the Jupiter 8 for the rolling bass line on ‘Crockett’s Theme’,” he told Sound On Sound in the same 1988 interview, archived by muzines.
He also came round to the Yamaha DX7. Electronics & Music Maker reported in February 1986 that, after some initial resistance, he had made it “a firm favourite” in the studio.
The show’s look is as tied to the decade as its music, and its Ferrari Testarossa features in our list of cars that defined the synthwave era.
For the records that grew out of this sound, read the story of Miami Nights 1984’s “Sunset Cruise” or browse our Soundtracks & Cinema section.
Hammer scored the series until 1988, and his theme stayed on air until Miami Vice ended its five-season run in 1989. For the 2002 set Miami Vice: The Complete Collection, he re-recorded original parts on his old Memorymoog and an antique Fairlight, Sound On Sound reported.
Lead photo: Carl Lender / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0