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

Producer Series: George Duke

George Duke played with Frank Zappa and Miles Davis, produced Deniece Williams and Jeffrey Osborne, and wrote some of the most joyful funk of the 1970s. Twenty-nine tracks of a musician who genuinely did everything.

The keyboardist who refused to specialise

George Duke was born in San Rafael, California in 1946 and decided to be a musician after seeing Duke Ellington perform when he was four. He trained seriously in jazz, then spent formative years in Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention — an education in precision, humour and genre indifference that shaped everything after.

From there: work with Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis, the long partnership with bassist Stanley Clarke, a run of solo funk and fusion albums, and a second career as one of the most in-demand producers in Black music. He was among the earliest serious adopters of synthesizers in jazz, and he used them like a jazz musician — for colour and voicing rather than novelty.

He died in 2013. The list of musicians who cite him is very long and spans several genres.

What to listen for

"Sweet Baby" and "Touch And Go" with Stanley Clarke are the Clarke/Duke Project material — two virtuosos deliberately making pop records, and succeeding. "No Rhyme, No Reason" is his own best-known vocal.

The production work is where the breadth shows. Deniece Williams' "Black Butterfly" is one of the most beautiful records of the 1980s and arguably his finest hour as a producer. Jeffrey Osborne's "Stay With Me Tonight" is the biggest. A Taste Of Honey's "Sukiyaki" — an English-language reworking of a 1961 Japanese hit — went top three and is one of the strangest success stories in soul.

Phil Perry appears twice, Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind & Fire once, and Chanté Moore's "Precious" represents the 1990s. "Speak Low" is the straight-ahead jazz reminder of where he came from.

Go deeper

Reach for It (1977) and A Brazilian Love Affair (1980) are the two solo albums to own — the latter recorded in Rio with Milton Nascimento and Flora Purim, and one of the great cross-cultural jazz records.

For the Zappa education, The Grand Wazoo and Over-Nite Sensation feature him prominently.

His records have been sampled extensively in hip-hop — Daft Punk, MF DOOM, Common and many others have leaned on his catalogue. If you dig through the samples you end up with a decent Duke primer by accident.

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