Skip to main content

Jorja Smith VibeZ

Jorja Smith was nineteen when Drake put her on a record and twenty-one when she won the Brit Critics' Choice. Twenty-seven tracks of a singer who has spent since then declining to be rushed.

Walsall, and a voice with a hard edge in it

Jorja Smith grew up in Walsall in the West Midlands, the daughter of a Jamaican-English father who had been in a neo-soul group. She was working in a coffee shop in London when "Blue Lights" — her own song, built on a Dizzee Rascal sample and written about police harassment of young Black men — started circulating in 2016.

What followed was a rapid ascent: features with Drake and Kendrick Lamar, the Brit Critics' Choice Award, and a debut album, Lost & Found, that arrived in 2018 to strong reviews. What is more interesting is what she has done since, which is largely to slow down — releasing at her own pace, working with British producers rather than American ones, and resisting the obvious pop trajectory.

Her voice is the reason. Smith has a slightly grainy, faintly nasal tone with real weight in the lower register, and she sings with the clipped precision of someone who does not much like showing off.

What to listen for

"Blue Lights" remains her most significant record and one of the sharpest pieces of social writing in recent British pop. "Little Things" is the opposite pole — a garage-inflected dance record and her biggest streaming hit.

"Be Honest" with Burna Boy is the Afro-fusion moment, produced by P2J, and "Get It Together" puts her alongside Drake over a Black Coffee record.

"Loose Ends" with Loyle Carner is the best of her collaborations — two of the most understated British artists of their generation, neither trying to dominate. "Tyrant" with Kali Uchis is the most stylish.

"February 3rd," "Gone" and "The One" are the deeper album cuts where the songwriting is doing the work. "Bussdown" with Shaybo shows a harder edge.

Go deeper

Lost & Found (2018) and falling or flying (2023) are the albums; the latter, made largely with the production duo DAMEDAME*, is the more adventurous.

Her Be Right Back EP is short and among her best work.

For the British soul context she belongs to: Cleo Sol, Mahalia, Olivia Dean and Ray BLK. For the ancestor everyone points at, Amy Winehouse — though the comparison flattens both of them, and Smith's phrasing owes at least as much to lovers rock and UK garage as to jazz.

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