TAMIA l PRESS RELEASE

VOGUE l July 1997

“Speed Queen” There can’t be many things better in this life, if you are 21 years old and have a hell of a voice, than to be the new girl on Quincy Jones’s block. You’re singing on the same album as Barry White. You know you’re on the money.

Tamia, a Canadian beauty who has been singing since she was ten, met Jones at a party for Luther Vandross; they became friends, he asked her to sing, and what do you know: The first single he’s released from his first album in six years, Q’s Jook Joint, is Tamia’s. Nothing random about that, not when the record features Ray Charles, Queen Latifah, Stevie Wonder, and Chaka Khan. And Tamia delivers “You Put A Move On My Heart” with a wonderful sophistication and enviable ease.

A gift of a voice, a peach of a body, a solo album in the making, a sole in Speed 2 (no surprise: It’s during her number that the cruise ship loses control)--this self-possessed creature is so seductive that it’s hard even to mind all this great good fortune. “I’m very, very flattered,” she says, without a whiff of cutesy nor a trace of artfulness. She is a real-life natural woman. Oh, and the video? The last few frames: pure sex. --Daisy Garnett