Skip to main content

The Producer Series: James Poyser

Forty-nine tracks from the keyboard player who is the connective tissue of neo-soul. If you love a record from that world, James Poyser is probably on it.

The Soulquarian at the piano

James Poyser was born in Sheffield, England to Jamaican parents and raised in Philadelphia, and he is one of the central figures in a scene that is usually described through its singers. As a keyboard player, producer and songwriter, he was part of the Soulquarians — the loose collective around Questlove, D'Angelo, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, Common and Bilal that gathered at Electric Lady Studios and produced an extraordinary run of albums around the turn of the century.

He is also, since 2014, a member of The Roots and therefore of the house band on The Tonight Show, which means a great many people hear him nightly without knowing it.

What he brings is harmony. Poyser's chord voicings — jazz-derived, unresolved, warm — are what give neo-soul its particular colour, and they are the difference between a soul record and a soul record you cannot stop playing.

What to listen for

The Erykah Badu material is the core. "Other Side Of The Game," "A.D. 2000," "Window Seat" and "Sometimes" span her whole career, and "Other Side Of The Game" in particular is a Poyser co-write and one of the defining records of the genre.

Common's tracks — "Retrospect for Life" with Lauryn Hill, "All Night Long" with Badu, and "I Am Music" with Jill Scott — show the collective at work.

Kenny Lattimore and Chanté Moore appear twice, and their duet album is one of the most underrated grown-folks records of the 2000s.

Jaguar Wright and Bilal's "I Can't Wait" is the deep cut — Jaguar Wright's Denials Delusions and Decisions is a great lost Philadelphia album.

The Roots' "The Lesson-Part III" live from the Old Hit Factory is the band document, and Mariah Carey's "Mine Again" is the mainstream crossover that nobody expects.

Kindred The Family Soul's "Far Away" and Vivian Green's "Sweet Memory" round out the Philadelphia contingent.

Go deeper

Erykah Badu's Baduizm and D'Angelo's Voodoo are the two Soulquarian landmarks. Common's Like Water for Chocolate is the third.

Questlove's book Mo' Meta Blues is the best available account of what that scene actually was.

And the general lesson holds: in a genre built on feel, the keyboard player is usually the person deciding what the feel is.

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