Skip to main content

The Original Quietstorm – A Tribute to Melvin Lindsey (July 8, 1955 – March 26, 1992)

Ninety-five records in tribute to the radio host who invented an entire format by accident, at the age of twenty, on a station that had nothing else to play.

937f03_970f754ba7174c5e9fe80f22923d7794_mv2

 

The Original Quiet Storm: a tribute to Melvin Lindsey

Melvin Lindsey was a student intern at WHUR, Howard University's radio station in Washington DC, when in 1976 he was asked to fill an evening shift at short notice. He played slow records — soul ballads, jazz-inflected pop, quiet album tracks — and the show, named after a Smokey Robinson song, became the most influential programming idea in Black American radio.

Within a decade, stations across the United States had a Quiet Storm slot. The format is now so established that people assume it was always a genre. It was not: it was one young man's late-night record selection.

Lindsey died in 1992, aged thirty-six. A ninety-five track tribute is the appropriate scale, because the format was always about duration rather than highlights.

What to listen for

The most instructive thing about this set is how much of it is not soul music at all. Journey's "Open Arms", Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams", Christopher Cross's "Sailing", Boz Scaggs' "JoJo" and Champaign's "How 'Bout Us" were all Quiet Storm staples, and that catholic taste was the format's defining characteristic.

Herb Alpert's "Making Love In The Rain" opens the set and is a perfect choice — a trumpet player's record with Janet Jackson and Lisa Keith on backing vocals, produced by Jam and Lewis.

Keni Burke's "Risin' to the Top" and Stevie Wonder's "All I Do" are the canonical grooves.

Nancy Wilson's "Guess Who I Saw Today" is the jazz-vocal entry and the most devastating three minutes here — a song that is entirely a setup for its final line.

Deon Estus's "Heaven Help Me" and Loose Ends' "You Can't Stop The Rain" are the mid-eighties selections most likely to have been forgotten, and Herbie Hancock's "Stars in Your Eyes" is the deep cut.

Lionel Richie appears four times, which is historically accurate.

Go deeper

Smokey Robinson's A Quiet Storm (1975) is the album the format took its name from, and its title track is where the whole idea begins.

WHUR still runs a Quiet Storm programme, which makes it one of the longest-running formats in American radio. Melvin Lindsey's story is worth reading properly — it is a better piece of music history than most artist biographies.

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