Skip to main content

Chilled Soul Vol. 17: Old School Magic

Forty-four records from the seventies and eighties, sequenced by somebody who clearly knows which album track is better than the single.

Image result for old school music r&b

Chilled Soul Vol. 17: Old School Magic

This is the volume where the series turns backwards, and it is the best-curated set in the run. The reason is straightforward: almost none of these are the obvious choices. Where a lazy old-school playlist reaches for the ten records everyone owns, this one reaches past them to the album cuts and second singles, and the result is a set that sounds familiar without being predictable.

The temperature is consistent throughout — slow to mid-tempo, heavy on Philadelphia and Chicago, strings and Fender Rhodes everywhere — and it holds across forty-four tracks, which is not easy.

What to listen for

Michael Henderson's "Valentine Love" in the slow version opens the set, which is a statement of intent: Henderson was Stevie Wonder's bass player before he was a singer, and this is a connoisseur's opening track rather than a crowd-pleaser.

Keni Burke's "Risin' to the Top" is one of the most sampled basslines in hip-hop and one of the great grooves of 1982.

The Isley Brothers' "For the Love of You" is the centrepiece and arguably the finest thing they recorded — listen to how little the drums do.

David Ruffin's "Walk Away From Love" is the post-Temptations solo record that deserved to be much bigger, and The Dramatics' "Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get" is the Detroit entry.

Stevie Wonder's "All I Do" and "Rocket Love" are both from Hotter than July and both are better than that album's singles.

Gary Taylor's "Tease Me" is the deepest cut here by some distance — a songwriter's record from someone whose name almost nobody knows.

Teddy Pendergrass appears twice, and "Be Sure" rather than the obvious choice is the better of the two.

Bobbie Houston's "I Want to Make It with You" is a Bread cover, which is exactly the kind of left turn that makes this playlist work.

Go deeper

Keni Burke's You're the Best and Michael Henderson's Goin' Places are the two albums most listeners here will not own and should.

For the method, take any artist on this list and listen to the album the track came from rather than their greatest hits. The seventies was an album era in soul music too, and the compilations have flattened it badly.

Why the choices matter: almost every track here is the second or third song someone would name from the artist rather than the first, and that is the discipline that makes the set work. A playlist of the obvious records is a jukebox; a playlist of the better records from the same albums is an education.

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