CHR Music Radar Vol. 3: Where the Records Meet
House, hip-hop, jazz, reggae, garage and merengue cross paths in CHR Radar Vol. 3. Put it on shuffle and the connections start appearing.
There is no route through CHR Radar Vol. 3.
There isn't supposed to be.
Put it on shuffle and Frankie Knuckles might give way to Missy Elliott. Sade can land beside Moodymann. Bad Bunny might arrive before Donald Byrd's trumpet, Beres Hammond or a Dominican merengue record.
That unpredictability is part of the CHR idea.
Genres give us useful names. Records are considerably less obedient.
They migrate between cities. DJs reinterpret them. Musicians introduce one generation to another. Sometimes a remix carries a song farther than its creators imagined. Sometimes a record made in Chicago becomes part of London's musical vocabulary. Sometimes the interesting story begins with somebody saying, you need to hear this.
Here are six records from Vol. 3 worth knowing a little better.
Frankie Knuckles: “The Whistle Song”
There are dance records that announce themselves with enormous drums.
“The Whistle Song” barely needs to raise its voice.
A soft pulse. Keyboards. That floating whistle melody.
Then suddenly the room feels different.
Frankie Knuckles had already helped create the environment from which house music emerged. Born in the Bronx and part of New York's early DJ culture, he moved to Chicago in 1977 to become resident DJ at The Warehouse, the club whose name became inseparable from the music developing inside it.
By the time “The Whistle Song” appeared in 1991, Knuckles was showing another side of house. Pitchfork describes the instrumental as dance music capable of communicating through feeling rather than lyrics.
That matters in the CHR world.
Sometimes the DJ doesn't need to tell the room what to feel.
The right record creates the space and lets everybody else finish the sentence.
Eric B. & Rakim: “Paid in Full – Seven Minutes of Madness”
Start with New York hip-hop.
Then hand the record to two producers in England and watch what happens.
Coldcut's “Seven Minutes of Madness” remix of “Paid in Full” took Eric B. & Rakim's original and filled the spaces around Rakim's famously controlled delivery with a collage of sounds, including Israeli singer Ofra Haza, dialogue fragments and an astonishing collection of samples.
The result didn't simply extend the song.
It changed the room in which the song could exist.
The remix became a bridge between hip-hop and dance audiences, particularly in Europe, while preserving Rakim at its center.
There is something very CHR about that.
Take a record rooted in one culture.
Don't erase what made it distinctive.
Place it somewhere unexpected and discover that it has another life waiting.
Guru featuring Donald Byrd: “Loungin’”
Hip-hop has sampled jazz almost from the beginning.
Guru wanted to put the musicians themselves back into the conversation.
His 1993 Jazzmatazz project paired hip-hop production and MCing with actual jazz players. On “Loungin’,” the person standing across from him was not merely jazz-influenced.
It was trumpeter Donald Byrd.
The fascinating part is how little the record feels like a history lesson. Guru's famously measured voice doesn't fight Byrd's trumpet. Both occupy the same atmosphere.
Guru even frames the collaboration as an encounter between generations, referring to Byrd and himself as the horn player and the rhymesayer.
That's where “Loungin’” becomes more interesting than simply saying jazz meets hip-hop.
The older music isn't being displayed behind glass.
It is still participating.
For CHR, that's a useful principle: musical history matters most when somebody finds a way to make it move again.
Roy Davis Jr. featuring Peven Everett: “Gabriel”
“Gabriel” is one of those records whose passport gets complicated.
Roy Davis Jr. came from Chicago's house lineage. Peven Everett brought vocals and trumpet. Together they made a soulful, stripped-down record in 1997 that would become enormously important somewhere else.
Britain.
“Gabriel” became one of the foundational records embraced by the developing UK garage scene. Mixmag describes its combination of gospel-like vocals, house and reggae influence, trumpet and soulful production as unlike almost anything else in the genre.
Another wonderful detail: the record reportedly came together in roughly 14 hours.
Think about that journey.
Chicago musicians make a record.
British DJs hear something in it.
A new scene adopts it.
Eventually people begin describing it as one of their foundational records.
Music doesn't always migrate according to maps.
Sometimes the dance floor redraws the borders.
Beres Hammond: “Tempted to Touch”
The story behind “Tempted to Touch” begins with studio time.
Producer Donovan Germain recalled that Beres Hammond wanted to rent his studio, but the schedule was packed. Germain offered him one of his own reserved studio days on one condition:
Sing a song for his label.
The first song they made together was “Tempted to Touch.” Their working relationship continued from there.
That's almost too perfect.
One scheduling problem.
One trade.
One song.
And a lasting musical partnership.
The record sits beautifully between reggae, dancehall and lovers-rock sensibilities, with Hammond doing something he has always done exceptionally well: making romantic vulnerability feel effortless rather than fragile.
For a CHR playlist rooted partly in Miami, Caribbean music shouldn't feel like a special excursion.
It is part of the neighborhood.
The rhythms are already in the air.
Los Hermanos Rosario: “La Dueña del Swing”
Some records invite dancing.
“La Dueña del Swing” behaves more like dancing has already started and you are late.
Los Hermanos Rosario released the track on their 1995 album Los Dueños del Swing, helping cement one of the group's signature recordings.
The title itself tells you something about the record's posture.
Swing here isn't polite.
It's hips, percussion, velocity and confidence.
And the song keeps traveling. Nearly three decades later, Dominican artist Letón Pé cited “La Dueña del Swing” as the basis for the opening sample and inspiration behind her own “Rojo Rubí,” using the older merengue classic to build a contemporary song centered on female presence and movement on the dance floor.
There it is again.
A record survives not because everybody agrees to preserve it exactly as it was.
Somebody hears something unfinished inside it.
And begins again.
Shuffle is part of the story
That is the world inside CHR Radar Vol. 3.
Frankie Knuckles turns the nightclub into atmosphere.
Coldcut stretches New York hip-hop across the Atlantic.
Guru puts Donald Byrd's trumpet beside an MC.
“Gabriel” travels from Chicago into the foundation of UK garage.
Beres Hammond turns a studio favor into a reggae standard.
Los Hermanos Rosario make merengue move so hard that another generation is still answering it.
And around them are Jill Scott, Missy Elliott, Bad Bunny, Black Coffee, Sade, Common, Outkast, Maxwell, Moodymann, Janet Jackson, The Roots and plenty more waiting for shuffle to make the introductions.
That's why Vol. 3 isn't asking to be played from beginning to end.
The interesting part is the collision.
A familiar record beside one you've never heard.
A trumpet after a drum machine.
Merengue after house.
Hip-hop after reggae.
The shuffle button does what a good DJ has always done:
Puts two records close enough for you to hear something new in both.
