https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2JhwKYWfVj5YUJDsiZJYh7?si=7fe292a49b014fdc

Twenty-seven tracks from a rapper who called himself the Overweight Lover, meant it as a joke, and turned out to be one of the most consequential figures in hip-hop history. Heavy D (1967–2011) Dwight Arrington Myers was born in Jamaica, raised in Mount Vernon, New York, and was the first artist signed to Uptown Records — Andre Harrell's label, the institution that essentially invented the fusion of hip-hop and R&B that dominated the following two decades. That position matters more than his hit records. Heavy D was not just Uptown's first act; he later ran the label as its president, and he was the person who brought in a young intern named Sean Combs . A remarkable proportion of nineties Black music traces back through him. As an artist he was a genuine anomaly: a large man who danced superbly, a rapper whose records were unfailingly good-humoured at a moment when the genre was turning hard, and a Jamaican who kept dancehall audibly in his delivery. He di...

Fifty-six tracks with an unusually high proportion of singers who were, at the time, entirely unknown outside their own city. Chilled Soul Vol. 9 The ninth volume sits at the point where the series' taste crystallises. The production values are consistent — live-sounding, warm, uncluttered — and the selections come from an international spread of artists who had almost no commercial profile. What is notable in retrospect is the ratio. Roughly two-thirds of the artists here never became famous, and the set still holds up completely, which is the strongest possible argument for this kind of curation. What to listen for Thirdstory appears twice, and they are the discovery: a New York trio built on three-part harmony in a decade that had almost entirely abandoned it. "Only Love" is the pick. Seinabo Sey also appears twice — a Swedish-Gambian singer with an enormous, church-derived voice, and "I Owe You Nothing" is one of the best recor...

Fifty-two tracks that move between Lagos, London, Kingston, Tokyo and Los Angeles without ever flagging the border crossings. Chilled Soul Vol. 8 This is the most restless volume in the series and the one least concerned with being soul music. Electronic producers, Japanese beatmakers, Nigerian singers, South African rappers and American pop all appear, and the connective tissue is texture rather than genre. It is also the volume most rooted in a specific year. Almost everything here is from 2017, and hearing it now is a good reminder of how quickly the boundaries between these scenes were dissolving. What to listen for Uyama Hiroto's "Spektrum" with fat jon is the deepest cut here by some distance — Japanese instrumental hip-hop from the circle around Nujabes , and one of the most beautiful things on the list. 9th Wonder's "TheAnimalSoul!!!!!" is the American equivalent, and placing the two next to each other is a real piece of curation. C...

Thirty tracks from a Canadian singer who revived a format the industry had written off, and did it by taking it entirely seriously. Michael Bublé Michael Bublé is easy to patronise and hard to argue with. He arrived in the early 2000s singing standards with a full orchestra at a moment when that was commercially inexplicable, and he has sold tens of millions of records doing it. The reason he works, where most revivalists do not, is that he is a genuinely excellent singer with proper technique and an unusually good ear for a phrase. He does not imitate Sinatra; he uses the same tools. The other reason is that he understands the repertoire is not a museum — his best records mix Cole Porter with the Bee Gees, Van Morrison, the Beach Boys and George Michael, and treat all of them as songs rather than as artefacts. His arrangers deserve much of the credit, and the big-band charts on these records are played by first-rate musicians. What to listen for ...

Forty records from the decade when Black American music went almost entirely electronic and somehow got warmer in the process. '80s Jam Session The eighties are the most misrepresented decade in soul music. The received view is that the drum machine ruined it — that the warmth of the seventies gave way to something brittle and synthetic. This set is a straightforward refutation. The machines are everywhere, and the records are as full-blooded as anything from the previous decade. What actually changed was the division of labour. Where a seventies record was a band in a room, an eighties record was a producer building an arrangement piece by piece, and the best of them — Jam and Lewis, Leon Sylvers, Kashif, Nick Martinelli — used that control to make things a live band could not. What to listen for Luther Vandross's "Never Too Much" is the decade's opening statement — his first single as a leader after years of session work, and the basslin...

Fifteen tracks from a band-and-singer project that produced one of the most overlooked soul albums of the last decade. The PLAYlist featuring Glenn Lewis Glenn Lewis is a Toronto singer whose 2002 single "Don't You Forget It" made him briefly one of the most promising voices in R&B, and whose career thereafter was derailed by the usual combination of label politics and bad timing. He has one of the most agile high tenors in the music, and for fifteen years it went mostly unused. The PLAYlist is the project that changed that: a musicians' collective who built a full album of live-instrument soul around him, released in 2017 as Chasing Goosebumps . It is exactly the record his voice deserved and almost nobody heard it. The playing is the point. This is a band record in the seventies sense — real bass, real drums, horn arrangements, and a singer given room to do what he does rather than a track to fit into. What to listen for "CHASING GOOSEBUMPS...

Eleven tracks from the record where a cartoon band made their strangest and least commercial album, and got it right. Gorillaz: Humanz-era selections Gorillaz began as a joke about manufactured pop — Damon Albarn and the illustrator Jamie Hewlett inventing an animated band so that the music could be anything without a frontman's biography getting in the way. Twenty-five years on, the joke has produced one of the most interesting bodies of work in British pop, largely because the conceit removed every constraint about genre. These selections come mostly from Humanz (2017), which is the least loved of their major albums and in some ways the most interesting. It was built as a party record for a catastrophe — Albarn has described the brief as imagining a specific dark political event — and it is deliberately fragmented, with interludes, abrupt transitions and a guest list that never lets any one voice dominate. What to listen for "Submission" w...

Twenty-five records by an arranger who shaped the sound of Chicago soul, died at forty-five, and is still not nearly as famous as his work. Charles Stepney (1931–1976) Charles Stepney is the most important figure in this blog's producer series that most listeners will never have heard of. A Chicago arranger, composer and producer who worked at Chess Records in the sixties, he brought a formal musical education — vibraphone, orchestration, an ear trained on Ravel and Ellington as much as on blues — into the middle of a soul label. What he did with it was extraordinary. His arrangements are harmonically adventurous in ways that pop records of the period simply were not, using string and woodwind voicings that come from art music and placing them under grooves that are entirely funk. He co-produced and arranged the run of Earth, Wind & Fire albums that made them the biggest band in America, produced The Emotions , Deniece Williams and Rotary Connection...

Twenty-seven tracks from a Scottish-Zambian songwriter who was studying medicine when the music took over, and who writes hooks that other people's careers get built on. Emeli Sandé Emeli Sandé grew up in Aberdeenshire, the daughter of a Zambian father and an English mother, and was several years into a medical degree in Glasgow before she committed to music. That is not a detail for colour: the discipline shows in how her records are built. She arrived as a writer first, supplying songs and hooks to British rappers and producers, and the crossover to her own records happened almost by accident. Our Version of Events (2012) became one of the biggest-selling British albums of its decade, and she then spent years being marketed as an inspirational balladeer, which flattened a considerably more interesting artist. The later work is where she gets interesting. The gospel influence moves to the front, the arrangements get sparser, and the writing becomes more poli...

Twenty-nine tracks from the singer who led a generation of Jamaican musicians back towards roots reggae when the industry had written it off entirely. Chronixx Jamar McNaughton is the central figure in what became known as the reggae revival — a loose movement of Jamaican artists who emerged in the early 2010s playing roots reggae with live instruments and Rastafarian themes at a moment when dancehall had dominated the island's output for two decades. His father is the singer Chronicle, so the name is a deliberate lineage joke. What made Chronixx more than a revivalist is that he never pretended it was 1977: his records use contemporary production values, and his writing engages directly with present-day Jamaican politics, policing and class rather than with an inherited iconography. The voice is the other thing. It is high, slightly nasal and enormously expressive, and he phrases like a singer rather than a chanter, which is part of why the music travelled so far ou...

Fifty-nine tracks and an early snapshot of the years when West African pop stopped asking permission and simply became global. Soundz of Africa Assembled around 2018, this set catches afrobeats at the precise moment before the international breakthrough — when the records were already enormous across Africa and in London, and still largely invisible to American radio. What is striking now is how complete the sound already was. The production, the mixing and the songwriting on these tracks are not the work of a scene finding itself; they are the work of an industry operating at full capacity, entirely outside the structures that usually decide what the world hears. What to listen for Wizkid's "Ojuelegba" is the historical pivot — a song named after the Lagos neighbourhood he grew up in, which Drake and Skepta later remixed, and which arguably opened the door for everything that followed. Yvonne Chaka Chaka's "Umqombothi" is the oldest recor...

Forty-nine records about love in its least commercial sense — devotion, grief, repair, and the kind of affection that has survived something. DeepLove VibeZ Most love-song playlists are really about desire. This one is about the other thing: the slower, less photogenic version that shows up after the drama, and the set is assembled accordingly. There is almost no seduction here at all. The range is deliberately wide — soul, gospel, folk, ambient, Brazilian jazz, a talent-show performance and a charity single all appear — and it holds together because the emotional register never breaks. What to listen for Artists for Grenfell's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" is the most context-dependent inclusion here. It was recorded in 2017 in response to the Grenfell Tower fire in London, which killed seventy-two people, and knowing that changes what the performance is doing entirely. Commodores' "Sweet Love" and O'Bryan's "Still Water (Love)...

Fifty-eight pieces of gospel, jazz, classical and devotional music assembled as a memorial. This is a playlist made for grieving, and it should be approached that way. Sunday Meditation The dedication in the title gives the set its purpose, and it is worth taking seriously. This is not a Sunday-morning mood playlist; it is a memorial, assembled in response to the deaths of children and young people, and its fifty-eight tracks are sequenced as a service rather than as a selection. What makes it work is that it does not resolve. A lesser set would have moved from grief to comfort in an orderly way. This one holds both at once for nearly four hours, and it draws on several traditions rather than one because no single tradition has a sufficient answer. What to listen for Bobby McFerrin's "The 23rd Psalm" opens the set, and the choice matters: McFerrin's setting addresses God as female throughout, a version he wrote for his mother. It reframes the most famili...

Thirty-two tracks from a Toronto duo who took gospel-trained singing, put it over the coldest production in R&B, and made the contrast the whole point.   dvsn dvsn are the singer Daniel Daley and the producer Nineteen85 , and they arrived on OVO Sound in 2015 with no photographs, no interviews and no explanation — just the music, which was an unusually disciplined way to start. Nineteen85 was already one of the most successful producers in pop, having made "Hotline Bling" and "Hold On, We're Going Home" for Drake. What he does in dvsn is stranger: enormous amounts of empty space, drums that arrive late or not at all, and long instrumental passages that leave a listener waiting. Daley's voice is the counterweight. He sings with genuine church technique — runs, held notes, real falsetto control — and putting that instrument into so cold an arrangement produces the tension the whole project runs on. What to listen for "Too ...

Seventeen tracks from a Chicago poet's first album — a record that treats self-preservation as a political act and Chicago as a character. Jamila Woods: HEAVN (2016) Jamila Woods came to music through poetry and through teaching: she was closely involved with Young Chicago Authors , the organisation behind the youth open-mic scene that also produced Chance the Rapper, Noname and Saba. HEAVN is her first album and it is unmistakably the work of a writer. The record's subject is Black women's interiority and survival, and its method is to build songs out of borrowed fragments — playground rhymes, hymns, a Paula Cole hook, the Cure — reassembled so that familiar material carries entirely new weight. It is also a Chicago record in the most specific way. Streets, lake water, neighbourhood names and local organisations appear throughout, and the album functions partly as a map. What to listen for "Blk Girl Soldier" is the centrepiece and the best p...

Nine tracks from a late-career album that is tougher, funnier and more bitter than anything its maker released at her commercial peak. Toni Braxton: Sex & Cigarettes (2018) Toni Braxton has one of the most distinctive instruments in the history of popular music — a contralto so low that early in her career the industry reportedly struggled to place her, and a vibrato that is entirely her own. She has also had a career unusually marked by bankruptcies, label disputes and serious illness. Sex & Cigarettes was her first album in four years and it is short, focused and unsentimental. At nine tracks it does not outstay its welcome, and the writing has an edge her nineties ballads carefully avoided: this is a record about infidelity, aging and refusing to be pleasant about either. The production is deliberately spare. Where her biggest hits were built on enormous Babyface arrangements, this one leaves the voice largely exposed, which at this stage of a career is a ...

Twenty-six tracks from a Midwestern pianist and trombonist who has built one of the most durable careers in contemporary instrumental soul. Brian Culbertson Brian Culbertson is an unusually complete musician for the smooth-jazz field: he plays piano, keyboards, trombone and bass, arranges his own records, and produces them. He grew up in Illinois in a musical household and released his first album while still at university. What separates his catalogue from the genre's reputation is that the funk in it is real. The rhythm sections on his records swing properly, the horn arrangements are written rather than sketched, and he has consistently hired first-rate players rather than relying on programming. He is also a skilled collaborator with singers, which is where a good deal of this playlist lives. Giving a vocalist an instrumental musician's arrangement produces something different from a standard R&B production — more room, more harmonic movement, less compress...

Eighty-six records assembled with one instruction: no sitting down. Dancehall, soca, afrobeats, house and hip-hop, sequenced for a basement rather than a listening room. Basement Jam Session Every other playlist on this blog is built for attention. This one is built for a room full of people, and the difference in construction is total: the tempos are matched, the transitions are hard, and nothing is included because it is interesting. What makes it worth hearing as a set rather than just using as a utility is the geography. Jamaican dancehall, Trinidadian soca, Barbadian and Nigerian pop, Latin trap, South African gqom and American club records all sit next to each other, and the sequencing treats them as one continuous tradition — which, on a sound system, they effectively are. What to listen for Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" is the oldest and most important record here — the 1982 track built on Kraftwerk that effectively invented electro and, th...

Eight tracks from a New York band who had one enormous 1979 hit, a long apprenticeship before it, and a catalogue that deserves better than one song. G.Q. G.Q. are remembered, when they are remembered, for "Disco Nights (Rock Freak)" . What that reputation obscures is that they were a working band with years of history behind them: they had recorded through the mid-seventies as The Rhythm Makers , and that earlier catalogue has been mined by crate-diggers and hip-hop producers ever since. The lineup was built around Emanuel Rahiem LeBlanc , Keith Crier , Herb Lane and Paul Service , and they played their own instruments, which by 1979 was already becoming unusual in dance music. That matters to how the records sound: there is a looseness in the rhythm section that programmed disco does not have. They also sang properly, in close harmony, which is why the ballads on this short set are considerably better than the hit-single reputation suggests. What to listen fo...

Sixty-five records that between them define what most people mean when they say the word soul — and a useful reminder of how high the ceiling is. Sweet Soul Chillout This is the canon set, and its value is exactly that. Where most of the playlists on this blog exist to argue for records nobody plays, this one is the baseline: sixty-five tracks that a serious listener should be able to recognise within two bars, assembled without any attempt at obscurity. It functions best as a standard against which the other collections can be measured. Almost everything ambitious in contemporary soul is in conversation with something on this list. What to listen for Maxwell's "Ascension" opens the set, which places the whole thing: 1996, the moment when a generation of singers decided to rebuild the seventies from the inside. The Isley Brothers appear twice, and "Footsteps In the Dark" is arguably the most consequential four minutes here — the source of...