Sixty-eight tracks from the production team who made Bad Boy the most dominant label in American music for five years. The Hitmen earned the name. The team behind the throne The Hitmen were the in-house production collective at Bad Boy Records — a rotating group including Chucky Thompson , Deric "D-Dot" Angelettie , Stevie J , Mario Winans , Nashiem Myrick , Ron Lawrence and others, working under Sean Combs' direction. Their method was straightforward and enormously effective: take a recognisable record from the 1970s or 80s, build a new track around a substantial and unmissable portion of it, and put a great rapper or singer on top. Purists complained that it was not really production. It was, however, extremely well done, and it made hip-hop the dominant commercial force in American music. The economics also mattered. Clearing large samples was expensive, and Bad Boy's willingness to pay for them was itself a competitive advantage. What to listen...

(One of my favorites!! Bob Marley has transcended – Nasio Fontaine defintely is his successor ! Many have felt this since the release of this classic.~~OneLove fam!)

Thirty-two tracks for a producer who shaped one of the most beloved albums in R&B and never became a household name. Chucky Thompson died in August 2021. Carl Edward Thompson Jr., 1968–2021 Chucky Thompson was from Washington D.C. , and that matters more than almost anything else about him. He came up in the city's go-go scene — the percussion-heavy, continuously-mixed funk tradition that is D.C.'s own invention and is barely known outside it — and played with Chuck Brown , go-go's founding figure, before joining Bad Boy. That background is why his productions sound different from the rest of the Hitmen catalogue. Where the house style was built on a looped sample, Thompson brought live percussion, real musicians and a rhythmic looseness that came directly from go-go. His major credits include Mary J. Blige's My Life , The Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die , and Faith Evans' Faith . He died of complications from COVID-19 in Los Angeles on ...

The thirtieth volume of a long-running series, built for a warm evening and a cold drink. Forty-seven tracks, no hurry. Thirty volumes in A series that reaches its thirtieth edition has stopped being a playlist and become an institution. What that longevity produces is a consistent ear — you know what you are getting — combined with a genuine obligation to keep finding new material, which is why a volume this deep into the run is still largely made up of artists most listeners will not know. The brief here is specific: summer, evening, mid-tempo, and a strong bias toward the independent and international end of contemporary soul. What to listen for Syd's "Control" is the most recognisable name — The Internet's frontwoman, and one of the most distinctive vocal presences in modern R&B, working with almost no volume at all. Terrace Martin with Arin Ray and Elena Pinderhughes on "Beige" is the musician's pick. Pinderhughes is a ...

One of my favorite cuts from Stevie’s double-album “Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants” (1979). Something powerful, primordial & unworded takes hold within every time I hear this song. This video has a few lyrical errors, but still doesn’t take away from the beauty of the piece. The corrected line is: Fancy I fell, not “feel” – there is a subtle change of meaning in the broader context of the song. The Flower Power was a slogan back in the 60’s/70’s symbolizing peaceful resistance to the hatred & warmongering which is still with us – the nature of the Beast, I guess.

Twenty-five tracks from the producer whose horn loops taught a generation what a sample could feel like. Pete Rock is the warmest sound in hip-hop. The Chocolate Boy Wonder Peter Phillips grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, and is the cousin of Heavy D — which is how he got into a studio young. His method became one of the most identifiable in the genre: horn stabs and flute lines lifted from 1970s jazz and soul, layered thick, and drums with an audible swing that most of his contemporaries could not replicate. Where DJ Premier chopped samples into fragments, Pete Rock tended to keep them whole and let them breathe. The result is music that sounds like nostalgia even on first listen, and it is why his records have aged as gracefully as they have. He has also had an unusually long second act as a remixer, and he continues to be called on by artists half his age. What to listen for "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)" is the essential and one of the mos...

Eleven tracks from a Philadelphia MC whose flat, unhurried delivery is one of the most distinctive in rap. Bahamadia never raised her voice and never needed to. Bahamadia Antonia Reed came out of Philadelphia and was mentored by Guru of Gang Starr, which is the right lineage — both share a cool, almost conversational delivery that puts all the weight on the writing. Her 1996 debut Kollage , with production from DJ Premier , Guru and The Roots , is one of the most respected albums of its era among people who care about technique, and one of the least commercially successful. She has never had a hit and has never stopped being cited. What sets her apart is the rhythm. Bahamadia raps slightly behind the beat with almost no dynamic variation, which forces you to listen to the words rather than the performance. It is a difficult thing to sustain and almost nobody else does it. What to listen for "Uknowhowwedu" is the signature record and the best introdu...

Twenty tracks from a saxophonist who has spent forty years teaching at Berklee and making the kind of records the academy tends to sneer at. Both facts are relevant. Professor Beasley Walter Beasley was born in El Centro, California in 1961, graduated from Berklee College of Music in 1984, took a short-term teaching post there a year later, and never left — he is now a full professor. He plays soprano and alto saxophone, sings on his own records, and runs his own label and publishing company. That combination is worth pausing on. Smooth jazz is routinely dismissed as commercially motivated fluff made by players who could not cut it elsewhere. Beasley is a career academic at one of the most demanding music schools in the world who has chosen this idiom deliberately, and his stated influences — classical training, jazz education, a lifelong love of R&B and funk — describe exactly what the records sound like. What to listen for The covers are wh...

Sixteen tracks from a Philadelphia band who were signed as teenagers by Grover Washington Jr. and have been working ever since. Pieces of a Dream Pieces of a Dream formed in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s when its founding members — keyboardist James Lloyd and drummer Curtis Harmon — were still teenagers. Grover Washington Jr. heard them, took them under his wing, and produced their first records. That mentorship shaped everything. The band works in the space Washington himself defined: jazz musicianship in service of a groove, with soul and funk instincts and no interest in playing over an audience's head. They have released steadily for forty-five years and are one of the most consistent working bands in the idiom. The Philadelphia connection matters too. This is a city with its own deep soul tradition, and the band's rhythmic feel comes as much from Gamble and Huff as from any jazz school. What to listen for "Mt. Airy Groove" is the signatu...

Thirty-one tracks from a producer who came out of a college dorm in North Carolina and became one of the most influential figures in modern hip-hop and soul. 9th Wonder Patrick Douthit was a student at North Carolina Central University when he formed Little Brother with Phonte and Big Pooh. Their 2003 debut The Listening was made on a cracked copy of FruityLoops and became a cult landmark almost immediately — warm, sample-heavy, deliberately out of step with the rap mainstream. What followed was unusual. 9th Wonder produced for Jay-Z ("Threat," on The Black Album ), Destiny's Child , Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar , while simultaneously building an academic career — he has taught at North Carolina Central, Duke and Harvard, where he was a fellow at the Hiphop Archive. He also runs Jamla Records and has developed Rapsody into one of the most respected MCs of her generation. Very few producers can point to a comparable record as a talent deve...

Twelve tracks. One album. A supergroup that lasted about eighteen months and left behind one of the best soul records of its decade. Lucy Pearl, 2000 Lucy Pearl was Raphael Saadiq of Tony! Toni! Toné!, Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest, and Dawn Robinson of En Vogue — three people from three of the most respected groups of the 1990s, each of whom had left or was leaving their band. The self-titled album arrived in 2000 and was exactly what that lineup promises: Saadiq's live-band soul instincts, Muhammad's crate-digging and rhythmic sense, and Robinson's voice, which had carried some of the biggest R&B records of the previous decade. Then it fell apart. Robinson left after one album amid disputes; Joi replaced her briefly; nothing more materialised. What remains is a single record that people have been recommending to each other for twenty-five years. What to listen for "Dance Tonight" is the hit and the one everybody knows ...

Eight tracks from a British singer with Jamaican and Nigerian roots and a voice that sounds like it has been around considerably longer than it has. Tamera Tamera is from London, of Jamaican and Nigerian heritage, and emerged in the early 2020s as one of the most promising voices in a British R&B scene that is already crowded with good ones. What distinguishes her is tone. Her voice has a slightly husky, unhurried quality with real weight at the bottom, and she sings behind the beat in a way that suggests dancehall phrasing as much as American soul. That combination — London R&B production, Caribbean rhythmic instincts, West African melodic sensibility — is exactly what makes the current British scene distinctive. A great deal of her early work involves P2J and the Ari PenSmith circle, which places her squarely in the most productive corner of UK Afro-fusion. What to listen for "Wickedest" is the record that broke her and remains the b...

Thirteen tracks from a singer whose falsetto got him a Grammy nomination and whose taste in collaborators is stranger than almost anyone's in R&B. Gallant Christopher Gallant grew up in Columbia, Maryland, studied at NYU's Clive Davis Institute, and moved to Los Angeles. His 2016 debut Ology earned a Grammy nomination for Best Urban Contemporary Album and established him as one of the most technically gifted male singers of his generation. The falsetto is the immediate thing — enormous range, deployed with real control — but what makes him interesting is the production. Gallant's records are built on unstable, harmonically ambiguous foundations, closer to art pop than to R&B convention, and he has never made an obvious play for radio. He also had one of the more memorable career moments available to a young singer: a televised performance of "Weight in Gold" alongside Seal and Sufjan Stevens , which is a sentence that should not make se...

Thirty tracks from the most physically astonishing rapper alive. Busta Rhymes has been doing things with breath control that nobody else attempts for thirty-five years. Trevor Smith Jr. Busta Rhymes was born in Brooklyn to Jamaican parents, and that Caribbean inheritance is the key to everything — his rapid-fire, patois-inflected delivery comes directly out of the Jamaican deejay tradition, sped up and applied to New York rap. He came up in Leaders of the New School , and his verse on A Tribe Called Quest's "Scenario" in 1991 is one of the most famous guest appearances in the genre's history — the moment a supporting player took over a record entirely. What followed was a solo career built on two things: a physical technique that few rappers can approach, and an understanding that hip-hop was a visual medium. His videos with Hype Williams are among the most inventive ever made. What to listen for "Woo Hah!! Got You All in Check" and ...

Eighteen tracks from an album about therapy, generational trauma and the impossibility of being anybody's saviour. This is not an easy record and it was not meant to be. Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, 2022 Kendrick Lamar had not released an album in five years when this arrived in May 2022, and it is the most difficult thing he has made. Where To Pimp a Butterfly was a public reckoning with race and fame, Mr. Morale turns almost entirely inward: infidelity, therapy, his father, his mother's trauma, his own inherited damage, and an explicit refusal of the role his audience had assigned him. The framing device is a therapy session, and Whitney Alford — his partner — and the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle both appear as voices. It is structured as a double album, and it is genuinely uncomfortable in places, on purpose. It won the Grammy for Best Rap Album and divided his audience more than anything he has done. What to listen for "United In Grie...

Twenty-five tracks from a singer, pianist, arranger and multi-instrumentalist who was, at his peak, the most musically accomplished man in R&B. Brian McKnight Brian McKnight is from Buffalo, New York, and grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist household singing in church — his older brother Claude McKnight founded the a cappella group Take 6 , which tells you a great deal about the harmonic standards in that family. What separates him from his peers is musicianship. McKnight writes, arranges, produces and plays multiple instruments, and his records are built on genuinely sophisticated harmony — the chord movement in his ballads owes more to jazz than to anything on R&B radio. He has sixteen Grammy nominations and no wins, which is its own kind of career. What to listen for "Back At One" is the signature record and a small marvel of construction — a counting song that never feels like a gimmick, with a bridge that lifts exactly where it...

Eight tracks, and every one of them is a monument. This is the Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes catalogue at the moment Teddy Pendergrass was the greatest singer in America. Philadelphia International, at full power Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes had been working since the 1950s without much success when they signed to Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International in 1972. Two things then happened at once: they got the best writing and production team in American music, and their drummer, Teddy Pendergrass , moved to the front of the stage. Pendergrass had a voice like nothing else — a huge, rough, gospel-scarred baritone that could sound utterly desolate one moment and physically overwhelming the next. Melvin remained the group's leader and namesake, which became a source of tension, and Pendergrass left in 1976 for a solo career that made him the biggest male soul star of the late 1970s. A 1982 car accident left Pendergrass paralysed from the chest down...

Eleven tracks for a rapper who spent a decade turning independence into a business model and was murdered outside the shop he built. We miss you, bro. Ermias Asghedom, 1985–2019 Nipsey Hussle was from South Central Los Angeles, of Eritrean and African American descent, and affiliated with the Rollin' 60s Crips from his teens. What he built out of that starting point is the reason he is remembered as more than a rapper. He spent roughly a decade releasing mixtapes independently and refusing the major-label deals available to him. In 2013 he sold Crenshaw for one hundred dollars a copy — a deliberate provocation about the value of music that Jay-Z answered by buying a hundred of them. He opened The Marathon Clothing store on Slauson Avenue, invested in the neighbourhood, funded a STEM centre, and worked on programmes to reduce gang violence. His debut studio album Victory Lap arrived in 2018 and was nominated for a Grammy. He was shot dead outside his own stor...

Forty-one tracks that treat the African continent and its dance floors as one continuous conversation. Volume seven, and the ear has not slipped. The chill end, seventh time out What keeps this series worth following is the refusal to chase the biggest record. The selections are made on mood — melodic, mid-tempo, built to run for hours — which means South African deep house sits comfortably next to Nigerian pop and neither has to shout. This volume in particular catches a specific moment: the point at which amapiano's log drum had become a continental default and Nigerian artists were beginning to reach for South African producers rather than the other way round. What to listen for Rema appears four times, which is the right call for this period. "Calm Down" became one of the most-streamed African records ever made, but "Peace Of Mind" and "Runaway" are the better songs. Tems gets two — "Damages" and ...

Six tracks from a band of Los Angeles session musicians who decided to become a band and accidentally made one of the most-streamed songs of all time. The best players in the room Toto formed in 1976 out of the Los Angeles session scene — Jeff Porcaro and his brothers, Steve Lukather , David Paich , Steve Porcaro , David Hungate and singer Bobby Kimball . These were the musicians other artists hired: between them they played on Steely Dan records, Boz Scaggs' Silk Degrees , and, most famously, most of Michael Jackson's Thriller . That pedigree is the reason critics disliked them. A band of professionals with no scene, no scruffiness and no ideology looked like the opposite of rock authenticity, and they were treated accordingly despite selling enormously and winning six Grammys in one night for Toto IV . The reassessment has been complete and slightly absurd — "Africa" became an internet phenomenon in the 2010s and is now among the most-streamed ...