Change (IT)

About

Change pulled off something genuinely unusual: a group with Italian roots making music that felt unmistakably American. Founded in Bologna in 1979 by producer Jacques Fred Petrus and songwriter Mauro Malavasi, the group worked as a studio project, recording tracks in Italy and shipping them to New York for American vocalists to complete. Their debut album The Glow of Love landed in 1980 and featured a then unknown Luther Vandross on "Searching" and the title track. Those songs helped launch Vandross into his own solo stardom, and the three singles from that album spent a combined nine weeks at number one on Billboard's Club Play Singles chart. Through the early 1980s Change kept evolving, moving from post disco into R&B and funk territory. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis came aboard to rescue the project after a commercial dip, delivering Change of Heart in 1984 and returning the group to the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. After one more album in 1985, things wound down, and the death of Petrus in 1987 brought the original run to a close. Vocalist Deborah Cooper later turned up as a key voice for C+C Music Factory, one of several threads that connect Change to a much broader story in Black American dance music.