Strictly Butter | 02

Tabou (Roots Remix) - Les Nubians

Keep It Real - DJ LBR & Cut Killer

Going Home - DJ Mitsu The Beats

Back In The Day (Puff) - Erykah Badu

Ain't No Sunshine - J. Rocc Remix - Kashmere Stage Band

Concrete Waves DJ Premier Remix - Kendra Morris

Dont Cry ft Sparky T - Those Guys From Athens

Twice (Questlove’s Twice Baked Remix) - Robert Glasper Experiment Feat. Solange Knowles & The Roots

Brokenfolks - Georgia Anne Muldrow

New York (U.S.) - Madlib

Why Don't You - Cleo Sol

Travel In Blue - Mos Def Feat Jazz Liberatorz

Fall in Love (Suns of Dub Mix feat. Addis Pablo Extended BDR Edit) - Slum Village

If I Ruled The World feat. Nas - Nina Simone & Lauryn Hill

Eye Know (7' Version) - De La Soul

"Tabou (Roots Remix)" — Les Nubians 

Sisters Helene and Celia Faussart turned a Sade obsession into a Francophone neo-soul album, recording Princesses Nubiennes in 1998. The real story sits in the Washington Post piece from 1999, which catches the Faussarts crossing the Channel to work with producer Lee Hamblin at Soul II Soul Studios. "Tabou" is their Gallic recasting of "The Sweetest Taboo," and the Tabou / Makeda 12" carries the 8:12 Roots Remix that lets Black Thought stretch out over live re-tracking. By 2003 the album had moved roughly 400,000 copies in the States, an unlikely number for a record that almost no one bought in Paris.

"Keep It Real" — DJ LBR & Cut Killer 

A cut from Cut Killer's Mixtape N°15 – Keep It Real, the 1995 cassette that landed in the same Parisian moment as La Haine, where Anouar Hajoui himself appears at a Chanteloup-les-Vignes window mixing Edith Piaf into KRS-One. Sight & Sound unpacks that scene beautifully. DJ LBR was the 1988 DMC vice-champion of France and a founding member of the Double H crew, and the two of them adapted the Kid Capri / Ron G / DJ Clue model to Paris, as Red Bull Music Academy traced in their essential '90s French rap survey. The tapes were the bible for an entire generation of French heads.

"Going Home" — DJ Mitsu the Beats 

A Rhodes-and-drum vignette from Celebration of Jay, Mitsu's twenty-track Dilla salute released August 8, 2014 on Jazzy Sport. Mitsu, also of GAGLE, mastered the project with Taiji Okuda at MSR+, and Okayplayer caught the proper register: tight, crunchy drums and pin-point chops that. Mitsu's note on the album's intent stated that you don't escape Dilla's worldview once you've recognized it, which goes a long way toward explaining the global appreciation J Dilla left behind.

"Back in the Day (Puff)" — Erykah Badu 

The second and final single from Worldwide Underground (Motown, October 2003), the album the Albumism community ranks fourth in her catalog and the album Prince told Erykah to her face was "not nothing". Badu wrote and produced with James Poyser and Rashad "Ringo" Smith, with co-writing credit to Audrie Magget, and the track interpolates "Face to Face" by jazz-funk obscurity Flight, as WhoSampled documents. The session moved between Electric Lady in New York, The Studio in Philadelphia, and Palmyra in Dallas. It peaked at #62 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart and #13 on Adult R&B.

"Ain't No Sunshine — J. Rocc Remix" — Kashmere Stage Band 

The Kashmere Stage Band, the funk powerhouse that Conrad O. "Prof" Johnson built out of teenagers at a Houston public high school between 1968 and 1977, are properly contextualized through Jamie Foxx's Thunder Soul documentary and the Now-Again campaign that surrounded it. Now-Again's Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974 anthology framed them as the greatest high school band ever, full stop, sixteen-year-olds who could hold their own with the JBs. The 2006 J. Rocc & Oh No remix 12" paired Rocc's head-nod take with a Bonus Beat on the A-side and the original on the flip, and J.Rocc later folded the remix into his Instrumentals Vol. One on Bandcamp.

"Concrete Waves (DJ Premier Remix)" — Kendra Morris 

Kendra's own Bandcamp page for the Concrete Waves single is the cleanest entry point: digital release November 22, 2011 on Wax Poetics Records, followed by a limited-edition Serato Control Vinyl pressing in blue concrete swirl on December 6. Premier's "320 Remix" is a clinic in his late-period R&B mode, stitching Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick's "La Di Da Di" into Laurie Anderson's "Born, Never Asked" beneath Morris's vocal. The pressing was capped at 1,500.

"Don't Cry (ft. Sparky T)" — Those Guys From Athens 

Released December 15, 2021 via the duo's Bandcamp, with the Greek turntablist Sparky T cutting scratches that work as the track's call-and-response. Those Guys From Athens have built a reliable lane of soulful, downtempo edits, and this one's chopped vocal and muted guitar give Sparky room to scratch the way it should be done, conversing with the singer.

"Twice (Questlove's Twice Baked Remix)" — Robert Glasper Experiment feat. Solange & The Roots 

From Black Radio Recovered: The Remix EP, which Blue Note announced for October 9, 2012 release with a producers' bench of Questlove, 9th Wonder, Pete Rock, Georgia Anne Muldrow, plus Glasper himself. Worth remembering that the original "Twice" was Glasper Experiment's cover of a Little Dragon song, so Questlove's 9:23 remix is two layers of reinterpretation deep, with Roots-style drum pocket under Solange's ad-libs. The EP did the work of formalizing the jazz-and-hip-hop conversation Blue Note has been encouraging for decades.

"Brokenfolks" — Georgia Anne Muldrow 

A cut from VWETO II, Muldrow's 2019 instrumental beat-suite for Mello Music Group, which Treble previewed at announcement and which she described as "an astral funk laden mindscape, best used for long term discussions, late night car ciphers, deep contemplation." VWETO is Ki-Kongo for "gravity," fitting for a sixteen-track set of MPC-and-synth sketchbooks where the low end does most of the work. Muldrow's lineage (first woman signed to Stones Throw, "Master Teacher" co-credit on Badu's New Amerykah Pt. 1) stands behind every cut here.

"New York (U.S.)" — Madlib

From Madlib Medicine Show #11: Low Budget High Fi Music, released by Stones Throw in early 2011 and exhaustively contextualized in Marcus J. Moore's Bandcamp Daily guide to the entire Medicine Show series. The 3LP edition of #11 came in hand-silkscreened sleeves with Hennessy-infused paint. "New York (U.S.)" flips Black Ivory's "Find the One Who Loves You" for a piece of Harlem soul shaped through Madlib's Oxnard chop logic.

"Why Don't You" — Cleo Sol 

The second track on Rose in the Dark, Cleo Sol's solo debut on Forever Living Originals, produced by Inflo and released March 27, 2020. The Arts Desk made it one of their albums of the year and read it correctly as the individual companion piece to SAULT's collective politics: same Inflo personnel, same Seventies-soul reference points, but with Sol's voice making sense of the chaos rather than narrating it.

"Travel In Blue" — Mos Def feat. Jazz Liberatorz 

A DJ blend, not an official record, credited to user empe3 on SoundCloud and pairing Mos Def's "Travellin' Man (Remix)" with Jazz Liberatorz' "Blue Avenue" from Clin D'Oeil. The Jazz Liberatorz, a producer trio out of Meaux (DJ Damage, Dusty, Madhi) formed in 1999, became one of the connective tissues between French boom-bap and the late-2000s jazz-rap continuum, eventually working with Fat Lip, Tre Hardson, J. Sands, and Yasiin Bey in his own right on Fruit of the Past.

"Fall in Love (Suns of Dub Mix feat. Addis Pablo — Extended BDR Edit)" — Slum Village 

Suns of Dub, the project led by Addis Pablo (son of Augustus) and Ras Jammy, debuted on LargeUp's December 2013 Major Lazer / Walshy Fire mixtape, then made the standalone "Fall in Love" rework available as a free Dilla Month download in February 2014 via Okayplayer. Addis lays his father's instrument, the melodica, across Dilla's Fantastic Vol. 2 instrumental. The Augustus Pablo lineage and the Dilla lineage both turn on the same process that respects space, timing, and groove.

"If I Ruled the World (feat. Nas)" — Nina Simone & Lauryn Hill 

A track from The Miseducation of Eunice Waymon, Amerigo Gazaway's December 2018 entry in his Soul Mates "collaborations that never were"  this one imagining a session between Simone and Hill with Nas's verses dropped in from the It Was Written original. Gazaway's note on the project's origin is worth reading: the project answered a question posed at a 2016 MoPOP roundtable about why his prior conceptual collaborations had centered male artists. The vinyl came as a double LP on Soul Mates Records.

"Eye Know (7" Version)" — De La Soul 

Albumism's Jesse Ducker calls it "one of the best hip-hop love songs ever recorded", and the construction earns the claim: Steely Dan's "Peg" providing the bassline and the "I know I love you better" hook, the Mad Lads' "Make This Young Lady Mine" providing horns, Otis Redding's whistle from "(Sittin' On) the Dock of the Bay," Lee Dorsey drums from "Get Out of My Life, Woman," with Sly & The Family Stone's "Sing a Simple Song" stitched in. Prince Paul produced. The single peaked at #14 in the UK in 1989 and never released as a US single, with the 12" carrying CJ Mackintosh and Dave Dorrell's "Know It All Mix" and Prince Paul's own "Kiss Mix" alongside the 7" cut. WhoSampled and Wax Poetics put together a 30th anniversary mixtape by DJ/Producer Chris Read, with all the source material laid out for anyone who wants the deeper dive.

Listen to: Strictly Butter | 03