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

The Producer Series: Quincy Jones

Forty-two tracks spanning six decades of a career that has no real equivalent. Quincy Jones died on 3 November 2024, aged ninety-one.

Quincy Jones (1933–2024)

Quincy Jones was a trumpeter, then an arranger, then a film composer, then a record executive, then the producer of the best-selling album ever made — and he was genuinely first-rate at each of those jobs in turn, which is the part that beggars belief.

He arranged for Count Basie and Frank Sinatra. He wrote film scores when Black composers were almost entirely excluded from that work. He ran a label, produced television, and then in his late forties took on a former child star's solo career and reorganised popular music around it.

His method was consistent across all of it: hire the best musicians available, give them room, and edit ruthlessly. He treated a pop single with the same structural seriousness as an orchestral chart.

What to listen for

The Michael Jackson material is the centre and needs no defence — but listen to it for arrangement rather than hooks. "Rock With You" and "Human Nature" are masterclasses in what to leave out; "Billie Jean" is famous partly for how little is in it.

The Brothers Johnson's "Strawberry Letter 23" and "I'll Be Good To You" are the funk productions, and the former has one of the most beautiful guitar tones ever committed to tape.

"Ai No Corrida" and "Betcha Wouldn't Hurt Me" come from his own albums, where he behaves like a bandleader rather than a producer.

"Just Once" and "One Hundred Ways" gave James Ingram his career, and "Baby, Come To Me" with Patti Austin is the other half of that story.

"Moody's Mood For Love" with Take 6, Brian McKnight and Rachelle Ferrell is the jazz-vocal showpiece, and "Soul Bossa Nova" is the 1962 instrumental that outlived every context it was ever placed in.

Aretha Franklin's "Angel" and "Somewhere" are the ones to sit with quietly.

Go deeper

The Dude (1981) and Back on the Block (1989) are the essential solo albums. Walking in Space (1969) is where the jazz arranger and the pop producer meet.

His autobiography, Q, is worth reading for the studio detail alone, and his early work for Count Basie explains everything about how he later built a pop record.

Listening note: the through-line across sixty years is editing. Jones' instinct was always to remove rather than to add, which is why a 1962 big-band chart and a 1982 pop single share the same quality of air around the parts. Listen for what is missing and the whole catalogue starts to sound like one person's work.

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