Max B
Charley Wingate was born in Harlem in 1978 and raised largely by his grandparents, singing as a child in the Boys Choir of Harlem while his mother struggled with addiction. Released in 2005 after eight years on a robbery sentence, he connected through his childhood friend Cam'ron to Jim Jones's ByrdGang crew, writing hooks and melodies — including for the hit "We Fly High" — before a publishing dispute split them. Recording as Max B, or "Max Biggaveli" (a splice of Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, and Tupac Shakur), he pioneered a loose, melodic style of rap-singing he called "the wave." A 2009 robbery-conspiracy conviction sent him to prison for what was later reduced to twenty years; he was released in November 2025. Future, Young Thug, French Montana, and Cash Cobain all trace their melodic rap-singing back to him.
In the late 1980s, Max B's older brother Eric left him a sack of cassette mixtapes — DJs like Kid Capri blending "all the old music together, all the Frankie Beverly and Maze, and Luther Vandross," as Max B remembered it from a New Jersey prison in 2013, "all the great artists." He idolized Eric and held onto the tapes: "I learned the music, and just studied." Of everything on them, Vandross's reach — a lead vocal built to bend a note past where the beat expects it to land — is the clearest ancestor of the loose, sung hooks Max B rode over rap tracks as "the wave."
listen forVandross's "Never Too Much" rides a bright, driving groove built purely to carry his voice, and his phrasing refuses to sit where the beat expects it — a note held a fraction too long, bent flat on purpose before it resolves. Max B's "Quarantine (Take Your Breath Away)" does the same trick over a sparser rap beat: the hook slides out of a rapped cadence into a sung, unhurried melody that drifts behind the drums instead of locking to them. That elastic, off-the-grid phrasing is the thread between Vandross's soul tenor and Max B's wave.