Sampling has quietly reshaped music over the past five decades. A snare hit here, a vocal yelp there, maybe a drum loop that ...

Jay Mumford was attending Mamaroneck High School in the early Nineties when he made a hip-hop demo tape that sampled the drums from “Midnight Theme,” a song by the Seventies funk band Manzel that’s ...

Lots of funk and soul happening this week. Cimafunk taps George Clinton to feature on a new track, Lucky Daye is on a reimagined EWF song and more. Dr. Funkenstein is in, y’all, and he’s pulled out ...

Albums like To Pimp a Butterfly and 1999 blend jazz harmonies with sharp lyricism, proving the genre’s deep connection. Hip-hop may keep evolving, but funk and jazz remain its heartbeat, fueling its ...

A fixture in the Bay Area’s underground hip-hop, funk and boogie scenes for over 20 years, K-Maxx (a.k.a. Kenyan “Ken” Hopkins) died unexpectedly of unknown causes on Dec. 29, 2020. KQED was scheduled ...

Hear where moments of Kraftwerk, Enya, Herb Alpert and more ended up in producers’ deft hands. By Lindsay Zoladz Today’s playlist is a celebration of a tried-and-true method of discovering new-to-you ...

Drummer Clyde Stubblefield, the man behind what is arguably the most sampled beat in all of hip hop, died Saturday. He was 73. Stubblefield, a session drummer best known for his work with James Brown, ...

Forty-five years ago today (August 11, 1973), DJ Kool Herc spinned funk and soul records at a rec room in the Bronx, N.Y., that would spark a movement and culture that would be known as hip-hop. No ...