Toto Tambu 1995 (Sony)
I went driving last night on a dark canyon road.
The Lowdown
Tambu would be the ninth studio album from Toto, coming three years after the surprising ear-drum blast that we were greeted with on
Kingdom of Desire. The name Tambu comes from a genre of Caribbean music, which of course suggests that the mood for the
Tambu album would be a lot more sedate than was found on
Kingdom of Desire. Also the album cover is highlighted by an almost cartoon voodoo style comic that dominates the album cover, amongst a load of other miscellaneous items, which kind of indicates the thrown down and flowing essence of its material.
Tambu would be a well-crafted Toto album with top notch production and engineering team to go with it, of which well-known producer, mixer and engineer Elliot Scheiner would heavily contribute to. The band at this time were now on the Sony label and the album would be nominated for an engineering grammy in 1997. It’s only single of note would be “I Will Remember” which unsurprisingly was a ballad.
The biggest thing of note though is the exclusion of Jeff Porcaro on the album who had sadly died in 1992 which meant that the band had lost what was probably their cornerstone musician. His replacement would be the highly rated British drummer Simon Phillips, a drummer with an equally impressive palmares that had worked with some of the biggest names in the business and these included Jon Anderson, Judas Priest, Mike Rutherford, Mike Oldfield, Jeff Beck and Toyah to name just a few and despite his drumming style being different to that of Jeff Porcaro he immediately slotted into the Toto line-up.
One final interesting thing of note according to Wiki, is that the release date for the album was May 1995 in Europe but North America had to wait for nearly a year before it got a release there in June 1996 and I think that this indicates where the Toto fanbase in terms of record sales was at around this time.