Lucy Camp is an emcee from San Jose who has been putting out music for the last six years. The last time we heard from her was when she dropped her Campfire mixtape last year as she recovered from a near-fatal car wreck. Now she’s healed (at least physically), and she’s ready to get a few things off her chest with a new EP, Someday Maybe. For the EP, Camp is working with her longtime producer and collaborator, Peter Anthony Red, who again is putting her in a position to succeed by finding the right balance between pop, West Coast boom bap, and just a touch of hyphy for those moments when the music needs to get a little more aggressive.

santpoort is the alias/side project of Netherlands producer Julien Mier. It’s a name he’s been using more frequently in the past year as he releases some smaller scale projects since releasing the wildly ambitious Industries in the Trees under his own name last year. Most recently, as santpoort, he released an LP called the art of being empty back in February of this year. Now he’s back with a new EP, loon society EP.

Georgia Anne Muldrow has given us one of the fullest and challenging catalogues of music since she began releasing music back in the mid-‘00s. Over the years, as emcee, vocalist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, she has given us projects that ventured into hip hop, house, funk, soul, gospel, punk, and jazz, just to name a few. Sometimes she’s mixing them all together, but other times she’ll go down a specific lane and explore further in that particular direction.

Mistura Pura is Federica Grappasonni, a deejay, vinyl collector, and producer from Milan. Her career as a producer putting out original music is still fairly young, with one previous album, Hollywood Spritz, coming out four years ago. Now she’s back to further cement her status with a new musical journey, The Blue Bus. Mistura Pura is a hard musician to pin down, and I mean that in the best way possible.

Small Professor is a producer from Philly who has been releasing music for over a decade. He’s collaborated with everyone from Curly Castro to Guilty Simpson, and he’s been part of groups like Them That Do. Over the years, he’s also been releasing quality instrumental projects at a steady pace, most notably his different “Jawn” collections, releasing almost one a month in 2020. Just last month, though, he took a step back and gave us a collection of some of his favorite material with the collection A Jawn Supreme (Vol.

Back in March of this year, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of Midnight Hour announced their new imprint, Jazz is Dead, with a compilation of artists that would be featured on their upcoming releases. The idea behind this project is to give older jazz musicians the opportunity to record all new material, and in doing so, put them in a position to once again be part of the current conversation, so that we aren’t just talking about them in the past tense.

Stik Figa is an emcee originally from Topeka, but now based in the D/FW area. He’s been going strong since the early 2000s, with a nice run on Mello Music Group, including a collaboration with L’Orange on the full-length album The City Under the City. In recent years, he and the label have parted ways, but he’s kept on making music, with his most recent release, If It’s the Last Thing I Do, coming out just this past May.

There have been a lot of exciting things happening in London the last few years in between the worlds of jazz, soul, and hip hop. One of the artists to emerge in this scene is saxophonist Nubya Garcia. Aside from releasing her own EPs in 2017 and 2018, she’s also appeared on albums by Moses Boyd, Joe Armon-Jones, and Moses Sumney, just to name a few. Now, after putting a lot of work in, it’s her time to step into the spotlight with her debut full-length album, Source.

Vex Ruffin is a producer/vocalist from Chino that has been releasing music since the early 2010s, and who joined up with Stones Throw in 2016. Since that time, we’ve gotten an album and a couple of EPs out of him, helping him to establish his own unique musical voice along the way. The most recent was Emilio, which just came out this past May. Now he’s back with his most personal and ambitious project to date, a full-length album called LiteAce Frequency.

Lisa Vazquez is a producer, vocalist, emcee, and multi-instrumentalist originally from Oregon. Over the last few years, she’s toured extensively, participated in beat battles, and produced a YouTube series called Flip It Fridays. Most recently, she put out a beat battle tape called Hit Like a Girl. She recently took the time to talk to us about all of this and more. Photo by Meleah Shavon Photography Scratched Vinyl: Let’s start with the basics – I tend to think of you as a producer, but you wear several hats.