Skip to main content

Producer Series: Salaam Remi

He produced Amy Winehouse's Frank, Nas's Stillmatic, and the Fugees' first album. Thirty-six tracks of a producer whose range is genuinely absurd.

Salaam Remi, connector

Salaam Remi is a New York producer, the son of session guitarist Van Gibbs, and one of the most quietly consequential figures in the last thirty years of Black music. He started young — remixing for Zhané and the Fugees in the early 1990s — and never settled into a single lane.

His two defining relationships tell the story. With Nas, he produced across Stillmatic, God's Son, Hip Hop Is Dead and Life Is Good, providing the warm, sample-based, live-instrument sound that anchored Nas's later career. With Amy Winehouse, he produced most of Frank and a substantial part of Back to Black — and it was Remi who first understood that her voice belonged over jazz and soul arrangements rather than contemporary pop.

He is also deeply rooted in Caribbean music, having worked extensively in reggae and dancehall, which is why so many of his hip-hop records have an unusual rhythmic looseness.

What to listen for

Nas's "I Can" is the biggest — built on Beethoven's Für Elise, aimed squarely at children, and one of the most-played rap records in American schools.

"Cherry Wine" pairs Nas and Amy Winehouse, which is essentially Remi's two great collaborators meeting through him. It is among the last things she recorded.

The Miguel tracks — "How Many Drinks?" and "All I Want Is You" with J. Cole — show his modern R&B instincts. Ms. Dynamite's "Danger" is the UK connection.

His own records are worth attention: "Black On Purpose Intro" uses Malcolm X, and "Black Love" with Teedra Moses and D-Nice comes from the same album — a 2020 project made in response to that summer.

The remixes — the Jackson 5's "ABC," Wyclef's "We Trying To Stay Alive," and a reworking of Marvin Gaye's "Save The Children" — show where he came from.

Go deeper

Amy Winehouse's Frank (2003) is the essential Remi production and, for many, the better of her two albums — jazzier, funnier, less mythologised.

Nas's Life Is Good (2012) is the one where their partnership peaks.

And the Fugees' Blunted on Reality — the first album, before The Score — features his early remix work and is the record that started the whole career.

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