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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 records like Evelyn "Champagne" King's "Love Come Down" still move a room forty years on. He also produced Whitney Houston's earliest hits, arranged for George Benson and Kenny G, and worked as an educator and author later in life. He died in 2016, and the tributes made the same point over and over: half the music you love from that era has his hands on it.

What to listen for

The Evelyn "Champagne" King run is the heart of it. "Love Come Down" and "Betcha She Don't Love You" in their 12-inch versions are the definitive statements — extended, patient, built so the bassline gets room to be the lead instrument. "I'm In Love" opens the playlist in a Dave Lee tribute edit, which is a nice touch: a modern dance producer paying respects.

The Whitney Houston tracks — "You Give Good Love," "Thinking About You," "Where You Are" — are Kashif productions from her 1985 debut, before the ballads took over. They are looser and funkier than her later reputation suggests.

Don't skip the instrumentals. "The Mood," "Call Me Tonight," "Edgartown Groove" and "Movie Song" are where you hear the construction with the vocal removed — effectively a lesson in how these records were built. And "Inside Love" with George Benson and the two Kenny G cuts show how far his arranging reached beyond straight R&B.

Thirty-six tracks. Consider it a syllabus.

Go deeper

The full picture requires the albums Kashif produced rather than just the singles. Evelyn "Champagne" King's Get Loose (1982) is the definitive Kashif production job start to finish. Melba Moore's Never Say Never and Howard Johnson's Keepin' Love New fill in the rest of the early-eighties run.

For the wider context, this era belongs to a small group of producers who solved the same problem at the same time. Leon Sylvers III at SOLAR, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis in Minneapolis, and Nick Martinelli in Philadelphia were all working out how to make machines swing. Kashif got there first.

He also wrote a genuinely useful book, Everything You'd Better Know About the Record Industry, which tells you something about how he thought.

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