A drum machine that swings — somebody had to sit there and nudge the hi-hats off the grid by a hair, and that somebody was Teddy, Edward Theodore on the birth certificate, born uptown in Harlem in 1967. Choir-raised voices riding on top of it, cut in New York rooms not much bigger than a kitchen. Listen for the bass under all that: short, fat, played like a fist, no wasted notes.
Nobody in those rooms called it new jack swing at the time — a journalist stuck that name on it in a 1987 magazine profile and it stuck to Teddy for life. Barry Michael Cooper, who went on to write Juice and New Jack City (the film borrowed the phrase back).
Otis, that sound walked into a cinema in 1991 — New Jack City, where the soundtrack did half the lighting for you, and Teddy had a hand in it. I ran it twice a night for a while; you could hear the fourth row shifting on those hi-hats before anyone on screen said a word.