When Crossover works
Soul, funk and the crossover between them made up the main stream, the one the station put its own name on, and it is the hardest of the eight to describe, because it's defined by what it mixes rather than by what it is. Soul with horn sections. Funk slow enough to talk over. Brazilian records that American labels filed under jazz because they had nowhere else to put them.
The common thread is players. Everything here is made by people who could read, and who chose not to show you. That is why it holds up at three in the afternoon, which is the hour of the day least tolerant of effort.
If you come to this from straight jazz it will sound soft for about a week, and then the bass lines start arriving and it stops sounding soft.
Where it came from
Crossover is what happened when jazz musicians stopped pretending they did not want to sell records. Creed Taylor founded CTI in 1967 and took it independent in 1970, and the label's whole proposition was a jazz player, a string arrangement and a rhythm section that would not frighten a radio programmer.
Blue Note followed. Donald Byrd's Black Byrd, produced by Larry and Fonce Mizell in 1973, became the best-selling record in the label's history and split its audience permanently: one half heard a trumpeter finding a new language, the other heard a bebop man selling up. Both were right, which is why the argument has never finished.
The records on this page sit on the far side of that argument, where the question stopped being interesting and the bass lines stayed.
Crossover: five records
- Marvin Gaye, 1971What's Going On.
One continuous side, every song leaning on the next. Still the model for how a soul record should be sequenced. Gaye produced it himself after Motown refused to release the single, and the label gave in only when it sold a hundred thousand copies in a week.
- Roy Ayers Ubiquity, 1976Everybody Loves the Sunshine.
Vibraphone, two chords, and more patience than any record that popular has a right to. Ayers recorded it in two days, and the title track has been sampled by more than a hundred records since, from Mary J. Blige to Dr. Dre.
- Donald Byrd, 1975Places and Spaces.
A bebop trumpeter handing the arrangements to the Mizell brothers. Purists have still not forgiven it. The Mizells wrote the arrangements around the studio rather than the band, layering keyboards and voices until the trumpet had to find room.
- Erykah Badu, 1997Baduizm.
The record that made the whole lineage audible again to people born after it ended. Badu cut it with the Soulquarians in Philadelphia, the same room and nearly the same players as the D'Angelo record below.
- D'Angelo, 2000Voodoo.
Everything played a fraction behind the beat on purpose. Play it loud or the point disappears. Questlove's drumming is deliberately dragged behind the click, which is why the record sounds drunk at low volume and enormous at high.
The honest objection
The obvious choice here is Sade's Diamond Life, and it is not on the list. It belongs on the smooth jazz page, where the arrangements make more sense next to Winelight than next to Voodoo. If you think that is a dodge, you are probably right.
The faces on the records
William Gottlieb photographed the New York clubs between 1938 and 1948 for Down Beat and the Washington Post. The Library of Congress holds the negatives; the pictures are in the public domain.
