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Producer Series: DeVante Swing

He invented the sound of 1990s R&B, ran a house full of teenage artists, and then largely vanished. Twenty-one tracks of DeVante Swing's strange, brilliant, difficult legacy.

The architect of the bad-boy R&B group

Donald DeGrate Jr. — DeVante Swing — was the producer, multi-instrumentalist and creative director of Jodeci, the group that arrived in 1991 and immediately made every other R&B act look overdressed. Where Boyz II Men wore matching suits and sang about commitment, Jodeci wore leather and combat boots and sang about everything else, and the production underneath was harder, sparser and more gospel-derived than anything else on radio.

DeVante's influence runs much wider than his own group. His Swing Mob collective — the artists living and working in his New York house, sometimes called Da Bassment — included Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Ginuwine, Static Major and Playa. Essentially every major innovation in late-1990s R&B production came out of people who passed through that house.

Accounts of that period are genuinely mixed — several alumni have described it as both a formative education and a difficult, controlling environment. It is worth holding both.

What to listen for

"Freek'n You" is the peak — slow, spare, built almost entirely on a keyboard figure and K-Ci and JoJo's voices, and one of the defining R&B records of the decade.

"Come and Talk to Me" in the remix is the record that broke them, and "Stay" and "Love U 4 Life" show the gospel foundation most clearly — both K-Ci and JoJo Hailey grew up in church, and it is audible in every phrase.

"What About Us" and "Alone" are the darkest things in the catalogue. "Room 454" is DeVante's own interlude and a good indication of how experimental he was willing to get.

2Pac's "No More Pain" is a DeVante production from All Eyez on Me, and it sounds like nothing else on that album.

Tony Thompson's "Slave" and Da Basement's "Love You Down" are the Swing Mob artefacts, and Mariah Carey and Dru Hill's "The Beautiful Ones" — the Prince cover — shows the lineage he was working from.

Go deeper

Forever My Lady (1991) and Diary of a Mad Band (1993) are the albums; The Show, the After Party, the Hotel (1995) is the most ambitious.

Then follow the alumni. Timbaland and Missy Elliott's subsequent work, Ginuwine's Ginuwine...the Bachelor, and Static Major's writing for Aaliyah and Lil Wayne. That is one house's output, and it is most of a decade of American music.

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