Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

Rock dis!: downtempo

Fifty-five tracks pitched at the tempo of a long evening. Nothing here is trying to get your attention; it has already assumed it.

Slow music, seriously made

The downtempo half of a two-part set, this is R&B built for the hours after midnight — slow tempos, soft drums, and vocals that stay conversational rather than reaching for a big moment. What separates it from ordinary chill-out compilation fare is the quality of the songwriting; these are proper songs played quietly, not ambience with a voice on top.

It also functions as a survey of the independent and adjacent-to-major R&B world, where a great deal of the genre's most interesting work has migrated. Very few of these artists get radio play. Almost all of them are worth following.

What to listen for

Christión's "Face Like Yours" is the historical anchor — the Bay Area duo signed to Roc-A-Fella in the 1990s, whose one album has become a cult object among R&B obsessives. Its presence here signals what the rest of the list is measuring itself against.

Terrace Martin with Preston Harris on "You And Me" is the jazz-adjacent highlight; Martin is the saxophonist and producer who shaped much of Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly.

Mack Wilds' "The Sober Up" is worth flagging — better known as an actor from The Wire and 90210, he has made genuinely good R&B records that almost nobody took seriously because of the day job.

Khamari's reading of Jackson Browne's "Doctor, My Eyes" is the boldest cover on the list. Christian Kuria with Braxton Cook on "Bitter Pill" is the most harmonically interesting thing here.

Leven Kali, Arin Ray, Jay Wile and Mack Keane with ESTA. fill out the modern independent lane, and Stephen Simmonds — a Swedish soul singer from the 1990s — is the deepest cut on the whole playlist.

Go deeper

Christión's Ghetto Cyrano (1997) is the one to find. It is the kind of record that explains a whole aesthetic once you hear it.

Terrace Martin's catalogue is a doorway into the Los Angeles jazz-soul world — Velvet Portraits, and then the Dinner Party project with Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington and 9th Wonder.

And the companion piece to this mix is its uptempo counterpart. They were built as a pair, and playing one after the other is the intended experience.

A practical note. Mixes like this one are increasingly the only place a lot of these artists get heard at all — independent R&B has almost no radio infrastructure left, and algorithmic playlists tend to circle the same forty songs. If two or three names here stop you, the useful move is to go straight to their albums rather than waiting for the algorithm to surface more. That is how a scene stays alive: listeners choosing to follow a thread rather than being handed one.

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

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

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more