Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

Fifty-one tracks with one criterion: the woman singing has to be able to sing . Not stylise, not emote — sing. A playlist about technique The title is an instruction and a verdict, and the selections take it seriously. What is assembled here is not a survey of great female vocalists in general but of a specific thing — the gospel-rooted, technically formidable, control-and-power tradition that runs through American soul and its descendants. It spans jazz, gospel, R&B, reggae and contemporary soul, which is the right decision. The technique in question does not respect genre boundaries, and hearing Ella Fitzgerald next to Emeli Sandé next to CeCe Winans makes the continuity obvious. What to listen for Vesta Williams' "Sweet Sweet Love" is the deep cut that vindicates the whole exercise. Vesta had a four-octave range and never got the career it warranted; she died in 2011 and is one of the great under-heard voices in soul. Kelly Pr...

Forty-four tracks of contemporary jazz for a Sunday afternoon. Unfashionable, superbly played, and considerably deeper than the genre's reputation allows. In defence of smooth jazz Smooth jazz is the most maligned genre in American music, and some of the criticism is fair — the format's radio incarnation was formulaic, and it swallowed a lot of players who were capable of more. But the dismissal has also buried a great deal of genuinely excellent musicianship, and a well-chosen mix like this makes the case better than any argument. The lineage is real: it runs from Wes Montgomery's CTI records through Grover Washington Jr. and George Benson, and its practitioners are almost without exception serious players who chose accessibility rather than being incapable of anything else. What to listen for Grover Washington Jr.'s "Jammin'" is where to start. Washington is the pivotal figure — Winelight and "Just the Two of Us" effectivel...

Roughly sixteen Lalah to fourteen Randy across thirty tracks. Two singers, a generation apart, both defined by restraint — and one hell of a close fight. The tale of the tape Randy Crawford is from Macon, Georgia, and made her name as the uncredited voice on The Crusaders' "Street Life" in 1979 — a record that became a standard and did not carry her name on the label. She built an enormous career in Europe, particularly Britain and Germany, while remaining oddly under-celebrated in America. Her long partnership with Crusaders pianist Joe Sample produced some of the finest jazz-soul vocal records of the last fifty years. Lalah Hathaway is the daughter of Donny Hathaway , which is both an inheritance and a burden. She is a technician of a kind that appears once a generation — capable, audibly, of singing multiple notes simultaneously by manipulating her vocal harmonics, a feat that stops other singers dead. She has five Grammys and a catal...

One of the best blues guitarists of his generation, stuck inside a career as a sensitive pop songwriter. Eighteen tracks of John Mayer's ongoing identity problem. The player and the persona John Mayer arrived in 2001 with Room for Squares and a hit about a woman's body being a wonderland, which set his public image for a decade. Underneath it was something else entirely: a guitarist good enough that B.B. King , Buddy Guy and Eric Clapton all sought him out, and who formed the John Mayer Trio explicitly to play blues. He has also spent years being his own worst advocate. A pair of extraordinarily ill-judged magazine interviews in 2010 — including racist language he later apologised for at length — did lasting damage, and much of his subsequent work has been made in the shadow of it. Since 2015 he has toured as a member of Dead & Company alongside surviving members of the Grateful Dead, which has turned out to suit him better than anything else he ha...

Ten tracks from a 1994 album by a man whose earlier record supplied the backbone of hip-hop. Bob James kept working long after everyone stopped paying attention. Restless, 1994 Bob James occupies an odd position. He is a serious jazz pianist — he studied composition, worked with Sarah Vaughan, and recorded an avant-garde album for ESP-Disk in 1965 — who then became one of the founding figures of the commercial jazz-funk that later got called smooth jazz. His significance to hip-hop is enormous and largely accidental. "Nautilus," from his 1974 album One , is among the most sampled records in existence, and "Take Me to the Mardi Gras" supplied the bell sound that opens Run-DMC's "Peter Piper" and dozens of others. An entire generation of producers built careers on his catalogue without most listeners ever learning his name. Restless comes from the middle of his long, steady run of albums, and it is a good example of what he d...

Fourteen tracks from a man who had ten number ones on the R&B chart in the 1980s and is somehow still filed as a footnote. Freddie Jackson deserves better. The quiet storm's most reliable voice Freddie Jackson came out of Harlem, sang in church at White Rock Baptist, and worked as a backing vocalist — including for Melba Moore , who became his mentor and got him signed to Capitol. His 1985 debut Rock Me Tonight was an immediate enormous success, and he spent the rest of the decade as one of the most consistent hitmakers in R&B. His register is specific: the quiet storm , the late-night radio format built on slow, romantic, adult soul. Jackson is arguably its definitive male voice — a warm, unhurried baritone-tenor with a gospel foundation and no interest whatsoever in vocal acrobatics. The reason he is under-discussed is largely that critics have never valued this lane. The audience always has. What to listen for "Rock Me Tonight (For Old T...

Thirty-one tracks from the woman who fused hip-hop and soul so completely that nobody has been able to separate them since. Mary J. Blige earned the title. The Queen of Hip-Hop Soul Mary J. Blige was discovered singing an Anita Baker cover into a karaoke machine at a mall in Yonkers. The tape reached Uptown Records, where Sean Combs was an A&R executive, and the combination they arrived at — a gospel-rooted soul voice over hard hip-hop production, sung by someone dressed like the neighbourhood rather than like a diva — changed R&B permanently. What's the 411? (1992) established the template. My Life (1994) — made during a period of depression and addiction she has since discussed at length — is the record her audience holds closest, and one of the most emotionally raw albums in the genre. She has since won nine Grammys, been nominated for two Academy Awards in the same year for Mudbound , and entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. T...

Twelve tracks from a Grammy-nominated singer, rapper and songwriter of Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee and African American heritage. Mumu Fresh is one of the most complete artists you have probably not heard. Maimouna Youssef, called Mumu Fresh Maimouna Youssef was born in Baltimore and raised partly in Philadelphia by theatrical parents who home-schooled her. She attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington D.C., and her heritage — Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee and African American — is central to how she presents her work. Her breakthrough came in 2007 with a Grammy nomination for her vocal on The Roots' "Don't Feel Right," and she appeared in Dave Chappelle's Block Party the same year. She has released the Black Magic Woman EP, The Blooming , and Vintage Babies with DJ Dummy, featuring Common and Malik Yusef, and performed a Tiny Desk concert in 2018. She is both a rapper and a singer of real technical quality, which is rarer tha...

The best-selling instrumental musician in history, and the most mocked. Thirty-nine tracks make the case that the mockery has always been slightly beside the point. Kenneth Gorelick, reconsidered Kenny G has sold something in the region of seventy-five million records, which makes him the most commercially successful instrumentalist in the history of recorded music. He also holds a Guinness record for the longest held note on a saxophone — over forty-five minutes, using circular breathing — which tells you he is a genuinely capable player whatever else is true. The critical hostility is real and has a specific origin: Pat Metheny's famously furious 2000 essay attacking his overdubbed duet with a Louis Armstrong recording. That criticism was about a specific act, not about the man's whole existence, but it hardened into a general contempt that has followed him ever since. The 2021 documentary Listening to Kenny G treated the question seriously and reached...

Thirty-two tracks with a very specific accent. This is East Coast rap in its imperial phase, when New York and New Jersey set the terms and everybody else adjusted. The boom-bap capital What defines East Coast rap of this period is not a single sound but a set of priorities: dense sampling drawn from jazz and soul records, drums that hit hard and dry, and above all an emphasis on lyricism as the point of the exercise. Where the West Coast built records around groove and the South would later build them around rhythm and repetition, New York built them around what the rapper was saying and how. The mix covers the Native Tongues end, the Bad Boy end, the Def Squad end and the harder Queensbridge and Brooklyn material, which is a fair reflection of how varied the scene actually was. What to listen for A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation" is the softest thing here and possibly the best — built on a Ronnie Foster sample, and one of the most beloved...

Fifteen tracks from a saxophonist who decided that the church and the jazz club were the same building. Kirk Whalum's Gospel According to Jazz is a genuine project, not a genre exercise. The Gospel According to Jazz Kirk Whalum is from Memphis, the son and grandson of Baptist ministers, and his uncle was the gospel singer Hugh "Peanuts" Whalum — who appears on this playlist. That lineage is the whole point of the series he began in 1998 and has continued across multiple volumes: a deliberate attempt to bring jazz improvisation and gospel worship into the same room, recorded live in churches with a full band and congregation. Whalum is better known to most listeners as the saxophone solo on Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" — one of the most-heard instrumental performances in pop history. He has also worked extensively with Bob James, Luther Vandross and Quincy Jones, and won a Grammy for a later volume of this series. What to...

They wrote "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "I'm Every Woman" and "Reach Out and Touch." Then they made their own records, and those turned out to be superb too. Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson They met at a Harlem church in 1963. Nickolas Ashford had arrived in New York from Michigan with nothing and had been sleeping in a park; Valerie Simpson was a gospel singer and pianist. They began writing together, sold songs to Scepter Records, and by 1966 were staff writers at Motown . What they wrote there is close to unbelievable for one partnership: "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" and "You're All I Need to Get By" for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell; "Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)" for Diana Ross; and, later, "I'm Every Woman" for Chaka Khan. Their own recording career, beginning properly in the 1970s, produce...

Twelve tracks from a band who could make a wedding cry and a dancefloor move, sometimes on the same album side. [spotify Atlantic Starr's two modes Atlantic Starr formed in White Plains, New York in the mid-1970s around the Lewis brothers — David, Wayne and Jonathan — and were, at their start, a genuine funk band with horns and a large lineup. Their commercial identity ended up being something else. Under producer Bobby Eli and later on their own, they developed a specialism in the slow, orchestrated ballad, and the two records everybody knows — "Secret Lovers" and "Always" — are both in that mode. The lineup changed repeatedly, most consequentially when Sharon Bryant left and Barbara Weathers joined; Weathers sings on their biggest hits. That instability is part of why the band is remembered for songs rather than as an institution. What to listen for "Always" is the number one, a wedding standard, and a ver...

Eleven tracks, one continuous evening, and the album that made neo-soul a thing people could name. Urban Hang Suite is a concept record about a single relationship, and it is close to perfect. Urban Hang Suite, 1996 Maxwell was twenty-three when this came out, and Columbia had sat on it for the better part of a year, unsure what to do with a young Black artist making music that sounded like 1973. It was released in April 1996, sold slowly, and then would not stop selling. The concept is explicit: the album traces a single romance from first meeting to consummation to commitment, and the tracks are sequenced as a continuous suite with instrumental themes bookending it. That structure is why it works as an album rather than a collection. The band matters enormously. Leon Ware — who wrote and produced Marvin Gaye's I Want You , the record this is most obviously in conversation with — co-wrote here, and Stuart Matthewman of Sade produced and played guitar an...

Twelve tracks from a British singer who had a gospel voice, a top ten career, and an unusually clear sense of what she was for. Mica Paris Michelle Wallen was born in south London to a family of Jamaican descent and grew up singing in the Pentecostal church — her grandparents were ministers. She was a backing vocalist for the British soul group Hollywood Beyond before releasing So Good in 1988 at nineteen, which made her a significant figure in the wave of British soul that also produced Soul II Soul, Loose Ends and Omar. Her voice is the reason to be here: a full, gospel-trained contralto with genuine power, used with more restraint than most singers with that equipment manage. She has since built a substantial career as a broadcaster and actor as well, and has returned repeatedly to gospel and blues material. What to listen for "My One Temptation" -era material established her, and "Breathe Life Into Me" in the extended remix is the dance ...

Fifty-nine tracks selected on one criterion: the voice has to sit low and mean it. This is a playlist about the bottom of the male range. The register that built quiet storm radio There is a specific thing a deep male voice does in soul music, and it has almost nothing to do with power. A baritone sitting close to the microphone at a slow tempo creates an intimacy that a tenor cannot — it is the reason the entire quiet storm format exists, and the reason so much of this repertoire is built for late-night listening. What is impressive about this selection is its historical range. It runs from Ben E. King in 1961 to Leon Bridges and Leslie Odom Jr., and the through-line holds across sixty years because the physical quality being selected for does not change. What to listen for Donny Hathaway's "For All We Know" is the standard against which the rest of the playlist measures itself. Nobody has ever done more with less. Barry White's "I've Got ...