Skip to main content

Jordan Rakei Vibez

Fourteen tracks from a New Zealand-born, Australian-raised, London-based multi-instrumentalist who makes some of the most quietly sophisticated soul music anywhere.

Jordan Rakei

Jordan Rakei was born in Tauranga, New Zealand, of Māori, Australian and European descent, grew up in Brisbane, and moved to London in 2015 — which turned out to be the right city for what he does.

He is a genuine multi-instrumentalist who writes, plays, produces and mixes his own records, and his music sits at the meeting point of neo-soul, jazz and electronic production. The harmonic language is the distinguishing feature: Rakei's chord movement is closer to jazz than to anything on soul radio, and he sings in a light, slightly grainy tenor that sits comfortably inside it.

He also records instrumental house music under the name Dan Kye, which appears on this playlist.

What to listen for

"Wildfire" and "Mind's Eye" are the two best entry points — both built on the kind of chord progression that takes a few listens to fully hear.

"Midnight Mischief" in the Tom Misch remix is the most immediate thing here, and the two artists are natural companions.

"Signs" with Common is the biggest-name collaboration, and "Ottolenghi" with Loyle Carner is the better record — Carner is one of the most thoughtful British rappers working, and Rakei's hook is superb.

"Add the Bassline" and "My Time" show the funkier side, and "Family" in the acoustic version is the most exposed.

"Best Part" in the BBC Maida Vale session is a Daniel Caesar and H.E.R. cover and is worth hearing for how completely he rebuilds it.

"Eye To Eye" in the Dan Kye remix is his own house project reworking his own song.

Go deeper

Wallflower (2017) and Origin (2019) are the albums, and The Loop (2024) — recorded with a live orchestra at Abbey Road — is the most ambitious.

Tom Misch, Loyle Carner, Alfa Mist and Barney Artist are the London circle he works within, and all four are worth following.

For the harmonic tradition he draws on: D'Angelo's Voodoo, Robert Glasper, and further back Donny Hathaway and Stevie Wonder's mid-1970s albums.

One more thing worth noting about doing everything yourself. Rakei writes, plays, produces and mixes, which is rare enough, but the real consequence is coherence — the harmonic ideas in the chords, the production choices and the vocal arrangement all come from the same head, so nothing pulls against anything else. That is why the records reward repeat listening: there is more design in them than the gentle surface suggests.

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