Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

The only artist to win Grammys in jazz, pop and R&B. Al Jarreau could use his voice as a rhythm section, a horn line, or simply as a voice, and thirty-one tracks show all three. The instrument nobody else had Al Jarreau was born in Milwaukee in 1940, the son of a minister, and had a master's degree in vocational rehabilitation and a career as a counsellor before committing to music in his thirties. That late start is worth knowing; he arrived fully formed because he had spent years developing something entirely his own. What he developed was a vocal technique with almost no precedent: a percussive, elastic approach that used the voice to imitate instruments — not novelty scat, but genuine rhythmic and timbral invention, with clicks, pops and glottal effects deployed as musical elements. He is the only person to have won Grammy Awards in the jazz, pop and R&B categories, which is less a trivia fact than an accurate description of where he sat. He died in 2017...

A classically trained jazz pianist who wrote pop hits, scored films, and ended up as one of the most sampled musicians in hip-hop. Patrice Rushen has had at least four careers. The musician's musician who happened to have hits Patrice Rushen was a serious jazz pianist first. Born in Los Angeles in 1954, she was leading her own trio as a teenager, recorded three well-regarded jazz albums for Prestige before she turned twenty-three, and worked as a sideperson with Jean-Luc Ponty, Sonny Rollins and Donald Byrd. The turn toward R&B in the late 1970s was not a compromise so much as an expansion, and it produced a run of records that were commercially successful and harmonically far more sophisticated than the chart around them. She wrote, arranged, produced and played, which was rare for anyone in that era and almost unheard of for a woman. She later became the first woman to serve as musical director for the Grammy Awards, worked extensively in film and television ...

A white singer from Manhattan whose label deliberately hid his face because the record was working on Black radio. Bobby Caldwell died in March 2023; sixteen tracks are the appropriate way to mark it. Bobby Caldwell, 1951–2023 Bobby Caldwell was born in Manhattan and raised largely in Miami, and in 1978 released "What You Won't Do for Love" — a record so completely at home in the soul idiom that TK Records marketed it without his photograph, using a silhouette on the sleeve, so that Black radio would play it without hesitation. It worked. A great many listeners assumed for years that he was Black. That story has been told often enough to become the headline, which slightly obscures the more interesting fact: he was a genuinely excellent singer and songwriter whose catalogue holds up entirely on its own terms. He wrote for Boz Scaggs, Chicago and Peter Cetera, and later in life made several albums of Great American Songbook material. His influence ...

(More rare footage from this masterful jam session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KFMLNop0_g )

Twenty-two tracks spanning forty years of the most persistently reinvented career in pop. Whatever you think of Madonna, the records are the argument. The professional survivor Madonna Louise Ciccone arrived from Michigan into downtown New York at the tail end of the disco era, absorbed the club culture around her — particularly the Black and Latino, largely queer dance scene that would later give her "Vogue" — and built a career on the principle that a pop star could change completely every few years and survive it. The reinvention is the usual headline, and it is real: the club singer, the Catholic provocateur, the Erotica-era transgressor, the Evita-era respectability, the electronica turn, the disco revival. What gets discussed less is her ear for collaborators. Madonna has consistently found producers at the exact moment they were doing their best work — Nile Rodgers, Patrick Leonard, Shep Pettibone, Nellee Hooper, William Orbit, Mirwais,...

He has won Song of the Year twice and Album of the Year once, and most people could not pick him out of a lineup. Thirty-nine tracks of D'Mile, the most decorated producer of his generation. Dernst "D'Mile" Emile II D'Mile is the son of Dernst Emile Sr., a Haitian-American musician, and grew up in Brooklyn surrounded by instruments. He spent years as a working producer — credits with Kelly Rowland, Janet Jackson and others — before the run that made him unavoidable. That run: Lucky Daye's Painted , H.E.R.'s "I Can't Breathe" (Song of the Year, 2021), Silk Sonic's An Evening with Silk Sonic (Record and Song of the Year, 2022), and Victoria Monét's Jaguar II . Four consecutive years at the centre of the Grammys, for records that sound nothing like each other except in one respect: they are all played rather than programmed. That is the D'Mile signature. Live bass, real drums, horn and string arrangements, chord...

Sixty-three pieces of solo piano and small-ensemble music for reading, thinking, and — as the title cheerfully admits — taking a nap. No apologies required. Music that gets out of the way There is a large and growing world of contemporary piano music made for exactly this purpose: gentle, largely tonal, mostly short pieces, played on close-miked pianos with the mechanism audible — you can often hear the felt of the hammers and the release of the sustain pedal. It descends from Erik Satie by way of minimalism, and it exists because a great many people want music that occupies the room without occupying the mind. It gets dismissed fairly often, and the dismissal misses something. Writing music that holds attention loosely without becoming irritating is a real skill, and the best of this material has genuine harmonic interest for anyone who chooses to listen closely. What to listen for The titles tell you the intended use, and they are unusually honest ab...

Eleven Bread, nine America. Two soft-rock bands from the same moment, matched almost track for track, and a genuinely close fight once you stop laughing at the premise. The tale of the tape The dream battle format needs two contenders who are actually comparable, and these two are almost uncomfortably so. Both arrived around 1970. Both built their sound on acoustic guitars, close harmony and unhurried tempos. Both sold enormously, were dismissed as soft, and have since been quietly reassessed by musicians who noticed how carefully the records are made. Bread was David Gates , James Griffin , Robb Royer and drummer Mike Botts , later joined by Larry Knechtel — a Wrecking Crew veteran who played the piano on "Bridge Over Troubled Water." That is a serious band. Gates was a Tulsa-born arranger and session player, and Bread records are built with a precision their gentleness disguises. America was Dewey Bunnell , Gerry Beckley and Dan Peek — three s...

Thirty-six tracks from the Toronto producer who has been on more consequential rap records than almost anyone of his generation, without ever developing a house style. Boi-1da, and the producer as chameleon Matthew Samuels — Boi-1da — was born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in Ajax, Ontario. He met Drake through an online beat-making forum, which is a very 2007 origin story, and became one of the defining producers of the following fifteen years. What is unusual about him is the absence of a signature. Where most producers of his stature are identifiable within a few bars, Boi-1da's records sound like whatever the artist needed — the airy dancehall bounce of "Controlla," the grinding menace of "The Blacker The Berry," the sparse piano of "Real Friends." He is a producer in the older sense: someone who serves the song rather than stamping it. He has won multiple Grammys and has an enormous number of platinum records, and r...