Memphis producer DJ CBee SUPREME, founder of Impeccable Taste Productions and a name behind work connected to GloRilla, La Chat and Harley-Davidson Canada, along with a 2024 Memphis Hip Hop Award for producing “Big Freak 4,” turns his attention to something much more local on his new eight-track instrumental album, A Cup of Cordova. Out September 8th, the project is built entirely around the growing coffee, café and bakery culture of Cordova and greater Memphis, with individual tracks pulling direct inspiration from real neighborhood spots like Belltower Coffee, Rollin Café, Shipley Do-Nuts, Sweet Eye Coffee, and BIGGBY Coffee. It’s a genuinely specific concept for an instrumental record, less a generic lo-fi mood board than a musical map of an actual community, blending lo-fi hip-hop warmth with Memphis jazz and West Coast-leaning production throughout.
My three favorite tracks on the album are, incidentally, three songs in a row in the middle of the record. “Oh, Dessert!” is an incredible beat; the wah guitar line dances back and forth against a huge sub bass, and it’s so bouncy it’s genuinely addictive to listen to. “Sweet Eyes in Cordova” has a lovely melody that feels like a Michael Jackson song in how vocal it is, with those repeated notes; if you imagine MJ singing this melody, it clicks immediately, and the harmony is so smooth that it fits perfectly with the idea of falling for a pair of sweet eyes. “Big Beans at Biggby” carries an incredibly soulful melody that’s reminiscent of something familiar without being able to place exactly what, but it will absolutely get you moving.
That run through the middle of the album is a good showcase of what CBee SUPREME is doing across the whole project, taking a concept that could easily have stayed surface-level, coffee shop as vibe, and giving each track enough of its own identity that the businesses behind them feel like genuine inspiration rather than a marketing gimmick tacked onto beats that would exist anyway. The instrumentation stays warm and unhurried throughout without ever feeling static, which tracks with an artist whose catalogue already spans hundreds of tracks and work across film, TV and advertising, someone clearly comfortable building mood rather than chasing hooks.
A Cup of Cordova succeeds as exactly what it sets out to be, a snapshot of a specific place and its specific rituals, translated into music that works whether or not a listener has ever set foot in Cordova, Tennessee. For an instrumental record built around something as everyday as a coffee run, it’s remarkable how much personality CBee SUPREME manages to pack into eight tracks, and the album stands as a strong argument that local culture, treated with this much care, can carry a project just as well as any bigger concept could.