Eddie Kendricks – Intimate friends

Discovered this song in an awesome playlist by AAA Badboy, which was 60s, 70s and 80s soul music sampled in Jungle records. Check the playlist out here. The song I want to look at today is Intimate Friends by Eddie Kendricks. Released in 1977, it’s been sampled by a plethora of people including most notably Alicia Keys, Erykah Badu, Common, Knxwledge, Big Sean and Tom & Jerry (see end of the post).

The main body of the track is a sultry laid-back groove on the Fender Rhodes:

I’ve remade it in Logic. The red indicates the left-hand part, not note velocity:

I was umming-and-ahhing about weather or not to notate this in A or D major, but the presence of the E9 swayed me to A, functioning like a dominant chord. Perhaps we’d get more clues by transcribing the vocals and other melodic instruments, but this is fine for a quick job. It doesn’t really matter, but we never hear an A major chord (nor do we hear a D major).

The second chord is interesting. The shape screams Gm/F#, and for simplicity of reading that’s what I’ve notated, but tonally it sounds like an F# augmented chord with a flattened 9th on top, spicy! There isn’t an E natural on the F# chord, but there is elsewhere the groove so it naturally has that altered dominant sound to it.

I love the slash chord harmony in this. It’s a harmonic device very much of the time but I just don’t tire of it! The right hand part starts with the B minor shape but then moves to a G minor in first inversion, with lower and upper voices moving apart by one semitone. The lower voice continues down chromatically down to the A, creating a D in second inversion (the A functions as the 7th of the B minor) and then to a G#, which is the major third of the E9 chord.

The bass-line is A F#, B, E and could indicate a traditional I VI II V in A major, if you squint at it. To reiterate why I don’t think the key matters so much is that our I chord is a Bm/A, or A6 sus2/4, without that C# present in the chord it’s hard to really think of it as a traditional tonic chord.

I’m sure the likes of Phillip Tagg would have something to say about this progression, and its non-conformity to common practise tonal analysis. Anyway here’s some ’95 jungle breakbeats:

Erykah Badu – Fall In Love (Your Funeral)

One of my other favourite flips (read: interpolations) of this sample is the Karriem Riggins produced Fall in Love (Your Funeral) by Erykah Badu.

Let’s start off with the drums. I’ve used moises.ai to isolate the stems. Here’s four bars of the drums:

The kick and snare outline beats one and three and two and four respectively, although the playing is deliberately off kilter with a hugely humanistic feel to the programming/playing. The hi-hats are playing some textbook Dilla-esq quintuplet swing, a type of polyrhythm where instead of traditional swing, which is using a triplet 2:1 ratio, it uses a 3:2 ratio, meaning the second hi-hat is slightly earlier. There’s a great explainer here:

Quintuplet swing subdivides the beat into quintuplets. The first note is three quintuplets long and the second note is two quintuplets. This corresponds to a swing ratio of 3:2 or 60%. It has a more powerful and angular sound than the standard triplet swing.

Brooklyn Rose Ludlow

The tempo is just shy of 92 bpm and the instruments are about 20 cents flat, so I suspect there’s been some tape varispeed effect that’s slowed the track down.

The keyboard part is replayed and extended to a four bar loop instead of two, to my ears mimicking how a sampler would extend the loop. It’s been transposed up two semitones to B major, although Badu quite clearly sings using the C# minor pentatonic with many bluesy inflection and articulations in her voice (so maybe this song is in C# minor, or modal?). The chromatic run at the end as well as the chord stabs are played with the same quintuplet feel. There are some other pumping synth riffs that I wont transcribe for clarity. Here’s the drums and bass together.