Successful film music is designed to enhance rather than dominate a scene, and thus many soundtrack albums, when removed from the context of the movie, are little more than nice background music.

A short video biography detailed the life and just a few of the accomplishments of Avant, the first of the evening’s honorees, before Davell Crawford and Kori Withers performed tributes to the exec.

Just as sunshine pop offered a counterweight to psychedelic hard rock in the late 1960s, soft jazz evolved in the 1970s as a lighter FM alternative to the mystical psychedelic jazz fusion movement.