David Was

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David Was (born David Weiss, October 26, 1952, in Detroit) is, with his stage-brother Don Was, the founder of the influential 1980s pop group, Was (Not Was).

Reviewed by The New York Times in 1980 as "the funkier art-funk band" (comparing them to Talking Heads), Was (Not Was) used members of Funkadelic; alongside jazz legends like trumpeter Marcus Belgrave; and singers Mel Torme,and Ozzy Osbourne. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Was fled his native Detroit for California, and found employment as the jazz critic for the now-defunct Hearst daily, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where he forged friendships with Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis, and the aforementioned Torme.

Was (Not Was) released five albums and enjoyed four Top 10 singles worldwide, and are working on releasing a new CD in the fall of 2006. In between, Was produced two soundtrack albums for the X-Files TV show and feature film, as well as music supervised features for Fox and Disney. He joined the ranks of network music composers on CBS' Education of Max Bickford, starring Richard Dreyfuss, and also did the music for ABC's "That Was Then."

As a record producer, he was worked with Bob Dylan, Rickie Lee Jones, Roy Orbison, k.d. lang, Wayne Kramer (of MC5 fame) and the Holly Cole Trio of Canada. He will produce and direct a forthcoming Sonny Rollins documentary in the winter of 2006.

David is a regular contributor to NPR's midday news newsmagazine, Day to Day, where he writes essays about classical, jazz and other forms of music.