Producer Series: Thom Bell

I’ve been listening to the sounds of Thom Bell since I was a kid & have yet to grow tired of listening to his productions. I’ve compiled playlists of various producers from Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis to Gamble & Huff, but it’s Bell’s music the goes the deepest. This masterful producer, arranger, and songwriter, with a preference for substance over style has gifted us with an unforgettable musical legacy. Though he was never in the limelight driving the ladies crazy like Marvin Gaye or Smokey Robinson, his work behind the scenes made him arguably the most important figure of soul music throughout the 1970s. Born in Jamaica but raised in Philadelphia, Bell found his love for music very early in life while studying classical piano at the age of 5. Working diligently throughout his childhood, Bell’s recognition rose fast and he was conducting and arranging songs for local groups by his late teens. When Bell caught his first break and a major label (Cameo Records) came calling in 1967, he was only 24 years old. While Marvin Gaye, James Brown, and Sam Cooke among many others had popularized their own form of soul music before Bell’s national inception, Bell introduced a style to the world that would later be dubbed “Philly Soul”. Seeking solace in sweeping strings, endearing horns, and other grandiose orchestral arrangements, this smooth stylistic innovation brought enormous success to Bell’s name throughout the 3 major groups he worked with: The Delfonics, The Stylistics, and The Spinners. I have to say, Ronnie Dyson’s “Give In To Love” is one of my favorite tracks. How this song never became a major hit has perplexed me for the longest time. Enough talk….lay back & relax to some of my favorite Bell-crafted gems.

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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 ...

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...

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...

Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

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