Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

The first woman from a West African griot dynasty to become a professional kora virtuoso. Twenty-one tracks of Sona Jobarteh, who changed what the instrument is allowed to be. Breaking a seven-hundred-year rule The kora is a twenty-one-string harp-lute from West Africa, played in the Mande tradition that spans Gambia, Senegal, Mali and Guinea. It belongs to the griot or jali families — hereditary musicians, historians and praise-singers who have carried oral history for centuries. Playing it professionally has been the province of men in those families for around seven hundred years. Sona Jobarteh is Gambian-British and comes from one of the principal griot families: her grandfather Amadu Bansang Jobarteh was a master player, and her cousin Toumani Diabáté is the most celebrated kora musician alive. She became the first woman from such a family to take up the instrument professionally, and she did so having also trained classically at t...

Eighteen Connick, seventeen Bublé. Two men who built careers on the Great American Songbook, thirty years apart, and a genuinely close contest. The tale of the tape Harry Connick Jr. is from New Orleans, the son of a district attorney, and was a serious jazz pianist before he was a singer — he studied with Ellis Marsalis and James Booker, which is roughly the best musical education available anywhere. His breakthrough was the 1989 soundtrack to When Harry Met Sally , and his 1990s big-band records were his own arrangements, played by his own orchestra. He has also acted extensively and led relief efforts in New Orleans after Katrina. Michael Bublé is from Burnaby, British Columbia, and came up singing standards in clubs before being discovered by David Foster. His skill set is different: he is a superb pure vocalist and one of the great living entertainers, with an instinct for making a two-thousand-seat room feel small. He has sold vastly more rec...

Fifty-five tracks of remixes, alternate versions and mixtape cuts. In 1990s R&B and hip-hop, the remix was frequently the better record — and this is the evidence. When the remix was the point For roughly a decade, the American single had a peculiar economy: the album version went to radio, and the remix — often an entirely new production with new verses and different guests — went to the clubs, the mixtapes and the video. Frequently the remix was what people actually meant when they named the song. Puff Daddy built a career on this, and so did a generation of producers who understood that a familiar vocal over an unfamiliar beat is one of the most reliable pleasures in music. This playlist is a working archive of that period. What to listen for "I'll Be There For You / You're All I Need To Get By" appears in the Puff Daddy Mix , which is the version everyone knows — built on Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and one of the great ra...

Thirty-two tracks from the Naughty By Nature guitarist who became one of the most successful producers in R&B. Kay Gee had two careers and did well at both. From East Orange to the top of the R&B chart Keir Gist — Kay Gee — was the DJ and producer of Naughty By Nature , the East Orange, New Jersey trio whose "O.P.P." and "Hip Hop Hooray" are two of the most recognisable rap records ever made. He handled the beats while Treach handled the rapping, and their sound — sample-driven, chant-heavy, built for enormous crowds — defined a certain kind of early-1990s crossover hip-hop. His second career was arguably more interesting. Through his Divine Mill label he produced and developed R&B acts, most notably Zhané , Next and Jaheim , and became one of the defining producers of the smooth, hip-hop-inflected R&B of the late 1990s and 2000s. What to listen for "O.P.P." is built on the Jackson 5's ...

Forty records that should be famous and are not. This is the most valuable kind of playlist — the one built entirely from things you will not find any other way. The songs that fell through Every era produces records that were as good as the hits and did not become them — because of label politics, bad timing, a missed radio window, or simple luck. This mix is a working archive of exactly that, drawn largely from R&B's 1970s through 2000s, and its value is that almost none of these will be familiar even to people who know the era well. What to listen for Christión's "Face Like Yours" is the holy grail for collectors of this period. The Bay Area duo were signed to Roc-A-Fella, released one album in 1997, and vanished. Ghetto Cyrano is now a genuine cult object. Brownstone's "5 Miles To Empty" deserved to be enormous. Gary Taylor's "Tease Me" comes from a singer-songwriter who wrote for Whitney Houston and Anita B...

She released her first records without showing her face and won five Grammys before most people knew her name. Seventeen tracks of H.E.R. Having Everything Revealed Gabriella Wilson is from Vallejo, California, and appeared on television as a child prodigy — she was on The Today Show at ten, playing piano. She was signed young, released under her own name, and it did not work. The reinvention was the masterstroke. In 2016 she began releasing music as H.E.R. — the acronym stands for Having Everything Revealed — with no artist photographs, no interviews and no biography. The anonymity forced attention onto the records, and the records were extremely good: spare, guitar-led R&B with real musicianship underneath. She is a genuine instrumentalist, which sets her apart in contemporary R&B. Her guitar playing is the centre of her live show, and her Grammy count — including Song of the Year for "I Can't Breathe" and an Academy Award fo...

Twenty-one songs from the record that ended the greatest creative run in the history of popular music, and did it by refusing to be a single album. Stevie Wonder saw the future…… Songs in the Key of Life (1976) By 1976 Stevie Wonder had released Music of My Mind , Talking Book , Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale in four years, winning Album of the Year three times. He then signed what was reported as the largest recording contract anyone had yet been given, and used it to make a double album with a bonus EP attached — a format the industry actively discouraged. It entered the American chart at number one, which almost nothing did in 1976, and stayed there for months. More importantly, it is the record where Wonder stopped writing songs about his own interior life and started writing about everyone else's. What to listen for "Love's In Need Of Love Today" opens with nothing but voices, which is a statement of intent: ...