In the interim though, there's still room for a few CDs to be out there, so we just took it upon ourselves to put it out on our own.

Ed: How is it selling?

Jan: It's doing great-it's really wonderful. For me, it's a long-term thing. Again, I'm not obviously looking at singles, or anything like that.

Ed: But when Miami Vice was on, you actually got several number one singles from the instrumentals, right?

Jan: Yes, which is wonderful. I just wish that there was more room for instrumental music, but [singles] are basically all nothing but vocals. It's always been that way. You just break through once in a while with something, and I came around at the lucky moment, when there was so much innovation happening, and so fast, as far as the sounds, themselves, you know what I mean? When I came out with some of the stuff, it was just sounds that were just totally otherworldly. By now, they're fairly common-it's not as unusual to hear all these different sounds. And samples: samples were really just starting to happen at this time, and it sounded unlike anything that people had heard. And I have to say that it was a combination of that, and some of my melodic ideas also struck a chord. So because of those two, it became really popular.

Definitely Miami

Ed: How did initially you hook up with the producers of Miami Vice?

Jan: I was working on another movie that wasn't that great-so it's not even worth mentioning. I had some time to kill, and a friend of mine said, "Let's drop by and visit Michael Mann." He had been aware of other stuff I've done; from my records. So we went over to his office at 20th [Century Fox], and he was there with Thomas Carter, the director of the pilot, and they were just beginning to actually get the thing off the ground. This was like early '84, and they were still casting, nothing was shot yet, and Michael just started saying that he would like to make sure that this "doesn't sound like TV". [chuckle] I understood exactly what he meant, because I was one of the people who just got sick of it. I mean, how many times can you do the same run of the mill, white bread TV score? And I had some sketches on a cassette, and I just played him a few things, and one of the things that I played was a just about finished version of the theme.

He heard it, and both him and Thomas loved it, and then I still wrote a few more things, just to try some things, but we ended up going to the original [theme song], that was written even before I met them.