Skip to main content

Sanchez VibeZ

Forty-nine tracks from a Jamaican singer whose speciality is taking someone else's song and making it permanently his.

 

Sanchez

Sanchez — born Kevin Anthony Jackson — has one of the most recognisable voices in Jamaican music: high, pure, and with a quality of yearning that has made him the island's definitive lovers-rock singer for four decades.

His career is built substantially on interpretation. A large part of this playlist consists of readings of American soul and pop songs, recast over Jamaican rhythms, and the reason it works is that he treats each one as a song rather than as a novelty. He is not doing reggae versions; he is singing the song, and the rhythm happens to be Jamaican.

He also came from the church and has returned to gospel repeatedly, which explains the particular kind of intensity in the upper part of his range.

What to listen for

"Brown Eye Girl" and "I Can't Wait" are the dancehall-era records that made him a star at home.

"Love We Had Stays On My Mind" is the Dells reading and one of the finest things here — a Chicago soul ballad that turns out to have been waiting for a Jamaican arrangement.

"Wherever I Lay My Hat" appears twice and is the Marvin Gaye song, and "End Of The Road" is the Boyz II Men one.

"Let It Be Me" with Sly & Robbie is the best-produced track on the list — that rhythm section can make almost anything sound inevitable.

"Missing You", "Lonely" and "Hurt" are where the voice is most exposed, and "Paper Roses" is the country-pop reading that has no right to work.

"Amazing Grace" and "Jah Promise" are the gospel selections, and "With You" with Shaggy is the crossover.

"Pretty Looks" and "I'll Always Be True" are the ones Jamaican audiences would name first.

Go deeper

Number One and the various Praise Him gospel records are the two ends of his catalogue, and both are worth hearing.

For the wider lovers-rock tradition: Beres Hammond is the other great modern Jamaican ballad singer and the essential next stop, along with Freddie McGregor, Gregory Isaacs and Dennis Brown — the last of whom is the voice everyone in this tradition is measured against.

Why the covers work: he is not making reggae versions of soul songs; he is singing the songs, and the rhythm underneath happens to be Jamaican. That distinction is everything — the arrangements serve the melody rather than the novelty, which is why several of these readings have displaced the originals for a whole audience.

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

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
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