Eddie Rockerz 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 ...

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...

Twenty-five tracks, one mood, no wasted motion. RHYTHM & FORM make Afro house the way a good chef makes stock — slowly, with very few ingredients, until it tastes like more than it is. Heat, patience, and the long build This is a producer project rather than a personality project, and the track titles tell you everything about the intent: "COCOA BREEZE," "CARIBBEAN," "ISLAND," "JUNGLE," "AFRIKA," "TRINIDAD," "LAGOS," "WAKANDA," "RED EARTH PULSE." Place names and weather. Nobody is trying to sell you a persona here. The music is the whole pitch. What you get is Afro house in its most patient form — the strain that owes as much to the long, hypnotic builds of South African deep house as it does to the percussion traditions it borrows from. Tracks open with a single hand-drum figure, add a bass note, add a pad, and let the arrangement accumulate over four or five minutes ...

Olivia Dean writes the kind of songs that seem simple until you try to explain why they work. Forty-two tracks in, the answer is still: she means it, and she swings. The East London singer who made warmth a whole aesthetic Olivia Dean grew up in Walthamstow, east London, and came through the BRIT School — the same institution that produced Amy Winehouse, Adele and King Krule. What she took from it seems to be less a style than a work ethic. She released a run of EPs in the late 2010s, spent a stretch as a backing vocalist, and built an audience the slow way before her debut album Messy arrived in 2023 and earned a Mercury Prize nomination. Her music sits in a lineage that runs through 1960s soul and Motown pop, but she is not a revivalist. The arrangements are live and roomy — real strings, real backing vocals, a rhythm section that breathes — while the writing is entirely contemporary in its emotional register. She writes about ambivalence, about the ord...

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...

Twelve tracks, and at least four of them are load-bearing walls of the entire post-disco R&B canon. The S.O.S. Band did not make many albums. They did not need to. Atlanta, Minneapolis, and the sound of the eighties groove The S.O.S. Band came out of Atlanta at the end of the 1970s — the name stood for Sounds of Success — fronted by Mary Davis , whose voice had a cool, slightly withholding quality that turned out to be exactly right for what came next. Their 1980 debut single "Take Your Time (Do It Right)" was a straight-up post-disco smash, and it could easily have been the whole story. What changed everything was the arrival of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis . Fresh out of The Time and newly working as an independent production team, the pair began producing the band in 1983, and the S.O.S. Band became the laboratory where the Jam & Lewis sound was worked out — the spacious programmed drums, the icy synth stabs, the tempo pulled deliberatel...