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: Raphael Saadiq

Forty-nine tracks and one clear argument: Raphael Saadiq is the most important producer in modern soul music, and he has been for thirty years.

The bassline underneath everything

Charles Ray Wiggins, from Oakland, has had roughly four careers. He was the bassist and co-frontman of Tony! Toni! Toné!, the most musically substantial R&B group of the early 1990s. He formed Lucy Pearl with Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Dawn Robinson. He made a run of solo albums — Instant Vintage, The Way I See It, Stone Rollin', Jimmy Lee — that got progressively better and less commercial. And throughout, he has been the producer other artists call when they want a record to sound like it was played rather than assembled.

His method is consistent: real instruments, analogue warmth, and an unfashionable insistence on bass as the harmonic centre of a record. He is a bass player first, and it shows in everything he touches.

What to listen for

D'Angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" is the headline — Saadiq co-wrote it, and it is one of the most revered soul records of the last thirty years. "Lady" from Brown Sugar is the other D'Angelo collaboration and just as important.

The Solange work is the modern peak. "Cranes in the Sky" and "Where Do We Go" from A Seat at the Table won a Grammy and reintroduced him to an audience who had no idea of the history behind the sound.

Bilal's "Soul Sista" is a neo-soul cornerstone. Anthony Hamilton's "Ain't Nobody Worryin'" and John Legend's "Show Me" show the range within the genre.

Then the surprises, which are the real pleasure of this playlist: the Bee Gees' "With My Eyes Closed," Marcus Mumford's "Go In Light," The Isley Brothers, Total's "Kissin' You," TLC, and Beyoncé and Stevie Wonder on "So Amazing." Very few producers have a credit list this wide without a house style to show for it.

Go deeper

Tony! Toni! Toné!'s Sons of Soul (1993) is the essential listen and one of the great American albums of that decade — a band playing live in a room, at a moment when almost nobody was.

Of the solo records, The Way I See It (2008) is the Motown homage and the most immediately enjoyable; Jimmy Lee (2019) is the hardest and best, an album about his brother's addiction and death.

He also scored HBO's Insecure and co-wrote for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Follow the credits; they go everywhere.

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