Tracks 4, 5 and 6 from Diary Of A Mad Band (1993)

Track 7 from Murder Was The Case (The Soundtrack) (1994)

Track 14 from It's Real by K-CI & JoJo (1999)

Jodeci stood out from the other vocal groups of their era because they were styled a little more like rappers, in casual jeans and timbs. The elephant in the room that I'll acknowledge is that the now-disgraced Sean "Puffy" Combs was working at Uptown Records at the time, and was the reputed architect of that image. But Combs hadn't moved into production yet, and Jodeci members DeVante Swing and Mr. Dalvin were behind a lot of the group's production, alongside Al B. Sure on their first album and.

In the early '90s, DeVante Swing started gathering a group of talented up-and-comers in his Rochester studio Da Bassment that came to be called Swing Mob, including a bunch of people that would shape the sound of R&B over the next decade: Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Ginuwine, Static Major, Stevie J, and Tweet. Missy and Timbaland have a few writing and production and feature credits on On Diary of a Mad Band and The Show, The After Party, The Hotel, and you can hear what sounds like Missy's voice or Tim's production style even on some tracks they're not credited for. It's not quite the fricky-fricky Timbo sound that really flowered on Aaliyah's One In A Million in 1996, but you can hear him starting to develop his signatures. "In The Meanwhile" features probably Timbaland's first on-record guest verse, and it's pretty awkward, it reminds me of Puffy on "Dolly My Baby." Missy's verses on those albums are a lot of fun, though, she was really a natural born star. 

Jodeci made a couple soundtrack appearances after The Show, The After Party, The Hotel, but that was the last album the full group made together for 20 years. Instead, the two brothers in the group, K-Ci and JoJo, split off as a duo and basically picked up right where Jodeci left off, and DeVante Swing did some writing and producing on a few K-Ci & JoJo tracks, including "Still Waiting." Love Always went triple platinum like Jodeci's top-selling album Forever My Lady, and while Jodeci never got into the top 10 of the Hot 100, K-Ci & JoJo got to #1 twice, with "All My Life" and 2Pac's "How Do U Want It." Ultimately, K-Ci & JoJo have made five albums, including reuniting with Timbaland on the Static Major-written "Game Face." "Down For Life" is a pretty nice Babyface composition, too. And then Jodeci finally reunited for a fourth album in 2015. While they still perform together, it feels increasingly unlikely that we're gonna get any new music from them, which is fine, they have a pretty strong catalog as is.