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

Classic Recordings: Al Jarreau – This Time

Nine tracks from the 1980 album where Al Jarreau worked out how to be a pop star without giving up a single thing that made him extraordinary.

This Time, 1980

By 1980 Al Jarreau had made four albums and built a devoted following, particularly in Europe, on the strength of a vocal technique with no real precedent — percussive, elastic, capable of imitating instruments, and rooted in serious jazz training.

This Time, produced by Jay Graydon, was the commercial breakthrough. Graydon was a Los Angeles session guitarist and producer at the centre of the West Coast studio world — he played the solo on Steely Dan's "Peg" and co-wrote "After the Love Has Gone" for Earth, Wind & Fire — and he gave Jarreau a polished, radio-ready setting without smoothing out the vocal invention.

The album went gold, won a Grammy, and set up Breakin' Away the following year, which made him a star.

What to listen for

"Spain (I Can Recall)" is the centrepiece and one of the great vocal performances in any genre. Chick Corea's instrumental is fiendishly difficult; Jarreau sings the melody, writes and sings a lyric, and then sings the solo. The Return to Forever original had already made it a fusion standard, and Jarreau's version is the one most people know.

"Never Givin' Up" and "Gimme What You Got" are the up-tempo tracks and the most obviously commercial things here — and both are considerably more rhythmically complex than they first appear.

"Alonzo" is where the vocal experimentation is most exposed. Listen to the percussive consonants and the way he uses breath as an instrument.

"Distracted" and "(A Rhyme) This Time" are the deep cuts, and "Your Sweet Love" and "Love Is Real" are the ballads.

"(If I Could Only) Change Your Mind" closes.

Go deeper

Breakin' Away (1981) is the follow-up and the commercial peak, containing "We're in This Love Together" and "Mornin'."

Look to the Rainbow (1977), the live double album recorded in Europe, is the record musicians point to — it captures what he actually did on a stage, without production.

Chick Corea and Return to Forever's Light as a Feather contains the original "Spain" and is essential.

And Jay Graydon is worth following into the West Coast session world — he and David Foster made a great deal of the most immaculately recorded music of that era.

One last note on the balance. Commercial breakthroughs usually cost a jazz singer something, and the remarkable thing about This Time is how little was surrendered — the production is glossy, and the vocal invention on "Spain" and "Alonzo" is as unfettered as anything on the live records. Graydon understood that the strangeness was the selling point rather than the obstacle.

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