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The hit-making, pioneering quartet known as Jodeci is back with a new CD The Past The Present and The Future and maybe some of their old habits. Only three of four of them showed up for their interview with the Tom Joyner Morning Show but the group admitted that DeVante, the group’s main producer in their 90’s heyday is simply afraid to fly and had wanted to get started on a brand new project.

Hopefully, he can get past that for what should be an upcoming tour.

As most of their diehard fans know, the group is composed of two sets of brothers Dalvin and DeVante DeGrate and K-Ci and JoJo Hailey. Although they never officially broke up, Jodeci went their separate ways after their 1995 album The Past The Present and The Future. JoJo and K-Ci remained a duet, scoring a huge hit with 1997’s All My Life and releasing five solo albums during Jodeci’s hiatus. The two also showed up on several reality shows, confronting K-Ci’s alleged alcoholism and fractured relationships with his children while JoJo emerged on VH1’s Couples Therapy.

Now, they’re back, working with Timbaland who ironically enough is one of the people that Devante, in one of the music industry’s most infamous bootcamps (Devante took a group of musicians to upstate New York years ago to work on their craft) helped develop.

“We really didn’t leave, we just stopped putting out records,” says Dalvin. “We still had #1 singles on the radio and you know music had started going through a transitional period. Hip-hop became really, really dominant in the music business so it kind of pushed R&B music to the back. And we didn’t want to fall by the wayside as many groups did trying to push ballads on the radio in the mainstream when it was dominated by hip-hop. There’s a perception Jodeci broke up but we never broke up.”

Jodeci, R&B’s Original Bad Boys Return With ‘The Past, The Present And The Future’ Of Music  was originally published on blackamericaweb.com

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