“Incantations delivered in weightless, improvisatory vocals above undulating grooves; they're entreaties of yearning and devotion… a preacher of sensuality in his pulpit.” So esteemed a New York Times concert review of Leon Ware from back in 2008, some 40 years into his career. With the news of Ware’s passing yesterday, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you have never heard Ware’s music. Despite 12 solo albums released over the course of his career, Ware never quite landed the R&B hit that he so graciously bestowed upon others. Only the rustling silk sheets of 1979’s Inside Is Love reached the lower echelons of the R&B charts—which is a shame, since songs like “Rockin’ You Eternally” and “Why I Came to California” and the 1976 album Musical Massage are exquisite in their own right.
Ware’s subject matter often centered around boudoir whispers, so it made sense that he moved at his smoothest when in the shadow darkness. Or as he put it a few years ago on the occasion of having his 1982 self-titled LP reissued by Be With Records: “I wear the bed. I’m one of the Soldiers of Love.” His moves manifested in the likes of Quincy Jones, Maxwell, Isaac Hayes, Donny Hathaway, Nancy Wilson, Ike and Tina Turner, Bobby Womack, Marcus Valle, and most famously, Marvin Gaye. His way with expressing the communion of love transcended language, with his songs perhaps even more popular and revered in Brazil and Italy.
Born and reared in Detroit, Ware’s career started as a songwriter at the local hit factory, Motown Records. By 1967, he had credits on songs from the Isley Brothers, Martha & the Vandellas, the Jackson 5 and soon after, Michael Jackson on his debut. But it was when Motown’s Berry Gordy was trying to convince his biggest star, Marvin Gaye, to come out of a recording sabbatical that Ware finally had his moment. As Ware told Jason King on the anniversary of Marvin Gaye’s sensual classic I Want You, Gaye loved a song that Ware had penned for Jackson (“I Wanna Be Where You Are”) and during a session at his home, Ware put on a demo of his unreleased duets with Minnie Ripperton. “Marvin walked towards his bedroom, turned around, looked at me, and said, ‘If you give me that album, I'll do the whole thing,’” Ware remembered.
The result was Gaye’s lover-man comeback, I Want You, as libidinous an R&B album as has ever been laid to tape. The dynamic between Ware and Gaye carried over to the unspoken language that lovers use at their most intimate. “Being two men sincerely dedicated to sensuality, that was all we ever discussed,” Ware said. “All that happened on that project was so innate, so natural. It deserves to be timeless. The aroma that anybody gets from it is real, and you should be feeling it.”
Here are nine other stunning works in which Ware made his mark in service of his collaborators.
“Got to Have You Back,” Isley Brothers (1967)
One of Ware’s earliest co-writing credits was on this primitive Isley Brothers cut, when they were still masters of shouted soul. This song, powered by Funk Brothers drums and a blast of fuzz guitar, finds the Isleys freshly wounded in their hearts, pleading for a lost love.
“I Wanna Be Where You Are,” Michael Jackson (1972)
Ware’s breakthrough song gave then-13-year-old Michael Jackson his third straight solo Top 40 hit and reached No. 2 on the R&B charts. An elegant bit of baroque pop that somehow folds in harpsichord, orchestra, flutes, and wah-wah guitar, the song has been covered by the likes of Beyoncé, Zulema (who had a disco hit with it), Marvin Gaye, Dusty Springfield, Jose Feliciano, the Fugees, and SWV with Missy Elliott.
“Body Heat,” Quincy Jones (1974)
After hearing his work for Donny Hathaway and the Miracles, Quincy Jones tapped Ware as vocalist and songwriter for his slinking 1974 album, Body Heat. On the steamy title track, Ware and an array of vocalists (including Al Jarreau and Minnie Riperton) raise the temperature with their harmonies, against a backdrop of heartbeat drums, softcore wah-wah guitar, and the arcing cry of an ARP from Billy Preston and Herbie Hancock.
“The Junkies,” Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson(1974)
In a rare soundtrack appearance by Ware, his voice appears on five tracks from renowned African-American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s score for The Education of Sonny Carson, a doc about the civil rights activist and community organizer. On this two-minute track, Ware lends his delicate high register, where it mingles with the string section and flute to sublime effect. One can hear how that intermingling of falsetto, synthesizer whinny, and supple strings would inform Ware’s work on I Want You a few years later.
“Inside My Love,” Minnie Riperton (1975)
In an alternate universe, the duo of Ware and Riperton would be as revered as that of Gaye with Tami Terrell. The two met while working on Jones’s album and the next year, Ware wrote this R&B hit for Riperton. On the surface the song scans as a lascivious paean to sex, with a chorus asking in an ever-escalating register: “Will you come inside me? Do you want to ride inside my love?” Tellingly, Ware attests that the lines were actually inspired by a preacher from his childhood bellowing the phrase, “Let us come into the house of the Lord.” The sacred and profane were one to Ware, though; “I’m a sensual minster, here to remind you all to make sex your principal religion,” he once quipped.
“The Voodoo Lady,” Lara Saint Paul (1977)
Italian-Eritrean singer Lara Saint Paul has had a long and storied career; her Wikipedia page alone features photos of her alongside Hillary Clinton, Luciano Pavarotti, and Quincy Jones. Starting in the early ’70s, she recorded with Jones and performed with the likes of Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, and Stevie Wonder. In 1977, Saint Paul came out to Los Angeles, where Ware produced this Afrobeat-flavored album with help from the Pointer Sisters, Ray Parker Jr., and James Gadson. This epic track features trills from Saint Paul and flutes that trek into spacey disco territory, to sweaty success.
“Mystery Dancer,” Shadow (1980)
Featuring three members of Ohio Players, Shadow never attained the successes of their former group. For their second album, they brought on Ware to write, arrange, and produce. With sweet three-part harmonies, this disco-kissed soul-jazz track might not have become a hit, but it showed off Ware’s ability to blend elegant orchestrations with body-moving grooves.
“Estrelar,” Marcos Valle (1983)
In the late ’70s, Brazilian MPB star Marcus Valle wearied of life under the military dictatorship of his country and briefly relocated to L.A. He soon found himself working with Ware on the two albums he made for Elektra in the early ’80s. And while Ware didn’t land a hit from their collaboration, upon Valle’s return to Brazil, he had his biggest hit with “Estrelar.” Co-written with Ware, it’s a dazzling boogie number dedicated to the joys of working out.
“Sumthin’ Sumthin’,” Maxwell (1995)
On Maxwell’s debut, Urban Hang Suite, the neo-soul star conceived of a concept album detailing a single love affair, from first contact through conclusion. If that overarching narrative brings to mind Gaye and Ware’s I Want You, it’s no coincidence, as Ware was a close collaborator with Maxwell on the album and garnered a songwriting credit on this hit.