Skip to main content

The Music of Ashford & Simpson

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, produced a run of sophisticated, gospel-inflected soul and disco records. They married in 1974 and worked together until Ashford's death in 2011.

What to listen for

"Solid" is the one everybody knows — a 1984 hit and about as durable a piece of pop songwriting as exists.

"Found a Cure" in the Tom Moulton mix is the essential dance record here. Moulton effectively invented the disco remix, and his treatment gives the song room to build across seven minutes.

"Is It Still Good to Ya" and "Don't Cost You Nothing" are the deep album cuts that DJs prize, and "It Seems to Hang On" in the Tommy Musto re-touch shows how well these records take reinterpretation.

"Street Corner" and "Love Don't Make It Right" in the 12-inch disco mix are the mid-tempo grooves, and "Top of the Stairs" is the underrated one.

Throughout, listen to Valerie Simpson's piano. She is a genuinely accomplished player and the harmonic movement in these records comes from her hands.

Go deeper

Is It Still Good to Ya (1978) and Solid (1984) are the albums.

The Motown material is the essential context — go and hear Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's duets knowing who wrote them, and then Diana Ross's Diana Ross (1970), which Ashford & Simpson wrote and produced almost entirely.

Simpson also produced and wrote for Chaka Khan, and "I'm Every Woman" is one of the great songs of the twentieth century in either the Khan or the Whitney Houston version.

A closing thought on the partnership. Ashford & Simpson wrote for other people for years before they recorded seriously, and the songs they kept tend to be the ones about staying rather than falling — commitment, endurance, the long middle of a marriage. That is unusual subject matter for soul music and it is why "Solid" has outlasted almost everything around it. They were married for thirty-seven years, and the material knows it.

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