Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

The Essence of Roots Reggae: Taj Weekes & Adowa

 

There are some CDs you can play over & over and never get tired of like ALL of Bob Marley’s work, Earth Wind & Fire’s “I Am” & “All ‘n’ All”, The Commodores Greatest Hits, The Bee Gees Greatest Hits, Branford Marsalis’ “I Heard You Twice The First Time”, Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” and Steel Pulse’s ” True Democracy”,  to name a few of my favorites which I will probably play until Jah calls me home. Add to this list Taj Weekes & Adowa’s roots reggae classic, “Deidem”. Being a big fan of roots reggae in the vein of The Abyssinians,  I-Wayne & Luciano, the sound of Taj Weekes & Adowa  easily secures itself into the deep & rich legacy of conscious reggae’s uplifting vibration. Adowa’s deft musicianship coupled with Taj’s haunting, poetically poignant &  spiritually-soaked lyrical flow is truly a feast for our famished souls.


“Deidem”(which means “all of us”) was well received & was up for consideration for Best Reggae Album by The Recording Academy for the 51st Annual Grammy Awards in 2009. If you were to listen to the music of the artists who were on the list of nominees for this category–Burning  Spear, Elephant Man, Heavy D, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Shaggy and Sly & Robbie–you’d have to admit that Taj Weekes & Adowa had a superior product that year. I listened to all of the CDs that were nominated and, with the exception of Burning Spear’s “Jah Is Real”, none of them was in the same league as “Deidem”.

Adding to the exceptional talents of this St. Lucian-based reggae band, is their commitment to humanitarian issues. Taj Weekes practices what he preaches as demonstrated by his work as Goodwill Ambassador to the Caribbean in cooperation with the International Consortium of Caribbean Professionals (ICCP) and as founder of his charity, They Often Cry Outreach, which is dedicated to improving the lives of underprivileged, at-risk and orphaned children in the Caribbean and beyond. It is blazing fires like this that point to a better way to BE in this world. As Taj reflected in an interview,“What is the use of art if it doesn’t provoke  discussion or stir thought?  Music certainly doesn’t need another artist singing about rims and women’s body parts.  There’s enough of that already.  We’ve been jumping and waving for what seems like forever, maybe it’s time we sit down and get our thoughts provoked a little.” Preach my brother!

Stay tuned for Taj Weekes & Adowa’s  upcoming release, Love, Herb & Reggae which I am sure will be a healing for our jaded souls.

Stay conscious

OneLove

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more