With a New House EP, Tyler Reese and Daghe Invite Oakland to the Dance Floor

It’s been clear for years now that Tyler Reese has something special — she just needed the right place to showcase her gifts. A church-trained, powerhouse vocalist who once dreamt of performing on Broadway, Reese works behind the scenes as an audio engineer and vocal producer at Studio X, an independent recording studio in East Oakland.

On a recent, rainy Sunday evening, a fashionable crowd about 200-deep packed into the Black-owned vintage boutique ReLove to watch Reese step into the spotlight. To her surprise, fans not only belted the lyrics to her first-ever single, the sultry neo-soul track “Secondhand Smoke,” but also immediately caught the vibe of her new EP, WHTVR, a five-track collection of flirty, dance floor-ready house songs that showcase Reese’s dynamic vocal range and playful personality.

“I walked out and I started crying,” Reese says. “After the show, so many people came up to me and they said, ‘Please keep doing this.’”

Daghe, the Oakland DJ and tastemaker, executive-produced the project. He says Reese’s talent and open-mindedness, unclouded by ego or pressure to fit into a certain box, has reinvigorated his faith in the Bay Area music scene.

“Before I worked on this project, I was over it, you know?” he says.

“Working with her just feels like early HBK,” adds Daghe, referencing his hip-hop collective that dominated the Bay’s music scene in the 2010s. “Like, let’s just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, let’s try this. … It’s getting me hyped.”

That playful spirit is infectious on the standout track “Chemical X,” where Reese’s angelic vocal runs are punctuated with playground chants over a drum ‘n’ bass beat. Vallejo rap star Nef the Pharaoh ditches his usual gruffness for a surprisingly whimsical guest verse where he namechecks all the characters from The Powerpuff Girls — not just Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup, but deep cuts like Miss Sara Bellum.

“Daghe has videos of us playing patty cake and high-fiving and screaming in the booth during that session,” Reese says with a huge smile.

With WHTVR, Reese knows she’s standing on the shoulders of other Black women who helped shape the past and present of house music, including Teedra Moses, the New Orleans R&B singer who’s experienced a career revival thanks to Kaytranada’s popular remix of her 2009 hit “Be Your Girl.”

The Bay Area has made its own contributions to house thanks to artists like Martha Wash, the legendary vocalist whose voice appeared on iconic hits like C+C Music Factory’s “Everybody Dance Now (Gonna Make You Sweat).” It took years (and a lawsuit) before she got proper credit. More recently, her story has inspired a greater appreciation for how she and many other church-raised Black singers have imbued house music with a spiritual ecstasy that fuels dance floors worldwide.

In Oakland and San Francisco, parties like Elements and Silk spotlight house music’s Black roots. But the genre’s also been heavily gentrified — so much so that the subgenre of Afro-house has come to be associated with white people.

Daghe says the Bay doesn’t have enough multicultural spaces for dance music. “I can’t get with white Afro-house, you know what I’m saying?” he adds. “I can’t get with the coffee shop shit.”

Daghe and other collaborators on WHTVR, including rapper Kevin Allen, who produced two of the beats, come from the Bay’s hip-hop scene, and Daghe wasn’t sure if their audience would embrace the sound. But the studio sessions and the EP release show, put on by eclectic event producer Wine & Bowties, proved to him and Reese that the Bay Area is ready for some fresh energy. They’re fired up, and say there’s more on the way.

“It just made me get re-happy, re-excited about the Bay Area and what it can be,” he says.

“After the show, people were posting on Instagram, people were texting me and saying, ‘I love Oakland,’” Reese says. “It’s been ages since I’ve heard somebody say ‘I love Oakland,’ but people were leaving that show saying, ‘Nah, this is what makes me love this place.’ And that was an amazing affirmation.”