Sheldon Taylor's Souls of Black Notes

This weekend marks the 31st anniversary of the release of  Make It Last Forever, the debut album from R&B crooner Keith Sweat. Equal parts classic soul and hip hop courtesy of fellow Harlem native and album producer Teddy Riley, the seminal long player changed  R&B music. Younger audiences weaned on their parents' record collections were coming of age and required a soundtrack of their own. Three million copies later-- they had one. By the end of '87 R&B was at a crossroads. Prince's Minneapolis Sound was the hottest ticket in town and the success of urban  superstars from the previous era had peaked and its soulful elements were toned down by the mid-Eighties. Albums like Thriller, Whitney Houston, Can't Slow Down, Purple Rain , Rapture, Control and Sign O' The Times  reflected a new creative bar and commercial appeal.   In his autobiography Howling At The Moon: The O...

Hip Hop fans under the age of forty may not recognize the name but they know the game. Too young to witness DJ Hollywood holding court at '70's nightspots such as Charles Gallery and Club 371, there is no doubt they remember Kurtis Blow's booming baritone on  Christmas Rappin' and The Breaks or Big Bank Hank waxing poetic on The Sugar Hill Gang's " Rapper's Delight " to being mesmerized by party rocker Doug E. Fresh and Busta Rhymes' 1997 smash Whoo-Ha (Got You All In Check). Style. Delivery. Showmanship. No matter what flavor that they savored, all points lead back to DJ Hollywood. Each of those artists took a page from the legendary dj/emcee whose autobiography,  It's Star Time captures a critical yet overlooked era in hip hop history. Written in collaboration with Lucio Dutch, prolific author of several books under his  Hip Hop Memoirs imprint, Time is the latest in a series chronicling untold st...

                                                              Huge in stature yet humble and accessible, the late Heavy D transformed four square miles of a neighborhood just outside the Bronx into Money Earnin' Mount Vernon ---a musical mecca from which Al B. Sure, Pete Rock and CL Smooth and Diddy and many others would spring from. Rotund rappers have been around forever. Back in the 70s, seminal star DJ Hollywood ruled the rap roost before hip hop records. Constant fixtures on the first barnstorming rap tours in the mid 80s, the Fat Boys parlayed their popularity into a string of gold and platinum albums, movies and commercial endorsements. There were short-lived West Coast act...