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At Maurice's request, Open Our Eyes was co-produced by Charles Stepney with White.Stepney had previously worked with The Dells, The Rotary Connection, Terry Callier, Minnie Riperton, and the Ramsey Lewis Trio, to name a few.The soundtrack was recorded at Paramount Recording Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard and released on Stax Records.The band developed a growing popularity on college campuses but, in spite of this, some members of EWF started to become restless and the band broke up after having been together less than six months.Maurice began shopping demo tapes of the band, featuring Donny Hathaway, around to different record labels and the band was thus signed to Warner Bros. Maurice's astrological sign, Sagittarius, has a primary elemental quality of Fire and seasonal qualities of Earth and Air, according to classical triplicities.(Sagittarius in the northern hemisphere occurs in the autumn, whose element is earth, and in the southern hemisphere, it is spring, whose element is air. adding Michael Beale on guitar, Chester Washington on reeds, and Leslie Drayton on trumpet; Drayton also served as the group's musical arranger.
A performance at New York's Rockefeller Center introduced EWF to Clive Davis, then the President of Columbia Records.Other members have included Philip Bailey, Verdine White, Fred White, Ralph Johnson, Larry Dunn, Al Mc Kay and Andrew Woolfolk.The band has received 20 Grammy nominations; they won six as a group and two of its members, Maurice White and Bailey, won separate individual awards.Prior to this album's release some personnel changes took place as Roland Bautista and Ronnie Laws left the band to pursue new musical opportunities.Philip Bailey had recommended his former Denver East High School classmate, saxophonist Andrew Woolfolk, to the band as replacement for Laws; Woolfolk had been busy in New York studying sax with sax maestro Joe Henderson and was about to start a career in banking when Bailey called.