Skip to main content

Chilled Soul 12 (a bit of this, a bit of that)

Forty-four tracks with a title that admits the brief: a bit of this, a bit of that. In practice it is the most musically curious volume in the series.

Image result for chilled soul

ChilledSoul 12

The disclaimer in the title is a little misleading. This is not a grab-bag; it is a set that deliberately reaches outside R&B into contemporary jazz, British pop, Hawaiian soul and hip-hop instrumentals, and the through-line is a preference for real players over programming.

More than any other volume, this one rewards reading the credits. Several tracks here are by musicians rather than by artists in the marketing sense, and they are the best things on it.

What to listen for

Makaya McCraven's "Black Lion" is the most significant inclusion — a Chicago drummer and producer whose method involves recording live improvisation and then editing it like hip-hop, with Brandee Younger on harp and Joel Ross on vibraphone. It is jazz made by someone who grew up on J Dilla.

Trevor Lawrence Jr.'s "Auckland" with Nicholas Payton is the other musicians' pick, and Lawrence is one of the most in-demand drummers in Los Angeles.

Ron Artis II appears twice, and that is a genuine discovery: a Hawaiian singer, pianist and guitarist from a large musical family, working in a soul tradition almost nobody associates with those islands.

Pete Rock's "Take Your Time" is the hip-hop foundation, and having him here alongside McCraven makes an argument about lineage that the playlist never states out loud.

RC & The Gritz's "Leave Me Alone" with Erykah Badu is the live-band moment — that is her touring band, and they are superb.

Kandace Springs' "Don't Need The Real Thing" is the jazz-vocal entry, and Leifur James' "Mumma Don't Tell" is the strangest-sounding thing here.

The Neighbourhood's "Livin' In a Dream" with Nipsey Hussle is the unlikeliest pairing and one of the last things Hussle recorded.

Go deeper

Makaya McCraven's Universal Beings is essential and one of the best jazz records of the last decade. Brandee Younger's own albums are the harp thread to follow.

Ron Artis II's catalogue is worth exploring properly, and Kandace Springs' Soul Eyes is the album to hear next.

Read the credits: more than any other volume in the series, this one is populated by working musicians rather than by artists in the marketing sense — drummers, harpists, pianists, producers. Look up who is playing on the tracks that stop you and the playlist turns into a map of a whole scene rather than a collection of songs.

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