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

Brian Culbertson VibeZ

Twenty-six tracks from a Midwestern pianist and trombonist who has built one of the most durable careers in contemporary instrumental soul.

BC-Wine-Glass-1

Brian Culbertson

Brian Culbertson is an unusually complete musician for the smooth-jazz field: he plays piano, keyboards, trombone and bass, arranges his own records, and produces them. He grew up in Illinois in a musical household and released his first album while still at university.

What separates his catalogue from the genre's reputation is that the funk in it is real. The rhythm sections on his records swing properly, the horn arrangements are written rather than sketched, and he has consistently hired first-rate players rather than relying on programming.

He is also a skilled collaborator with singers, which is where a good deal of this playlist lives. Giving a vocalist an instrumental musician's arrangement produces something different from a standard R&B production — more room, more harmonic movement, less compression.

What to listen for

"Don't Go" is the track most people find first and the best introduction — a slow, minor-key groove with the melody carried on Fender Rhodes.

"No Limits" with Stokley Williams of Mint Condition is the best vocal track here, and Stokley is one of the most underrated singers of his generation.

"You're My Music" and "The Truth" with Noel Gourdin are the other standout collaborations.

"The Secret Garden" and "Colors of Love" are the most ambitious arrangements, and both show what he can do with strings.

"If Only For One Night" with Dave Koz is the Luther Vandross reading, and "Let's Chill" is the Guy cover, which is a bolder choice than it appears.

"Love Will Never Let You Down" with Patti Austin and Kirk Whalum is the most star-studded thing here, and "Still Here" with Vivian Green is the most soulful.

"Michelle's Theme", "By Candlelight" and "In Your Embrace" are the instrumental deep cuts, and "Skies Wide Open" with Avant is the R&B crossover.

Go deeper

Bringing Back the Funk (2008) is the album that best makes the case for him, recorded with Maurice White and Bootsy Collins among others. Colors of Love (2018) is the most romantic.

For the wider field: Boney James, Kirk Whalum, Jeff Lorber and Mint Condition, whose records are the closest thing to a band version of this sound.

Listening note: the rhythm sections are the argument against the genre's reputation. These records swing — the drums are played, the bass moves, the horn parts are written out rather than sketched — and that is why the funk material holds up next to records nobody would file as smooth jazz. Follow the band rather than the melody.

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