Four movements, thirty-three minutes, recorded in a single day in December 1964. This is not background music and it was never meant to be. A Love Supreme John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme on 9 December 1964 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, with the quartet that had been together for three years: McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. It is a devotional work. Coltrane had overcome heroin addiction in 1957 and described the experience as a spiritual awakening; this album is the offering he made in response. The liner notes, which he wrote himself, open with the words "Dear Listener: All Praise Be To God To Whom All Praise Is Due," and the fourth movement is a wordless setting of a poem he included in the sleeve — Coltrane plays the syllables of the text on the saxophone. It sold in numbers almost no jazz record of its ambition has matched, and it has become a genuine sacred text; an African...

Seventy-four tracks making a case that does not need making. British soul has been world-class for forty years and remains almost entirely undocumented. Brits got soul The history runs deeper than most listeners realise. Britain's Black communities — Caribbean, West African, and their descendants — built a parallel music economy from the 1960s onward: sound systems, pirate radio, soul weekenders, rare groove nights and specialist record shops, largely ignored by the mainstream press and enormously influential on everything that followed. What came out of it is a distinct tradition. British soul tends to be cooler in temperature than American, more indebted to reggae and jazz, and less concerned with vocal display. Seventy-four tracks is about the minimum needed to show the range. What to listen for Omar's "There's Nothing Like This" is the essential record. Released independently in 1990, it is the founding document of modern British soul, and Om...

Ninety tracks from the label that brought Jamaican music to the world by the simple method of never stopping. VP Records is a family business that became an institution. Vincent and Patricia VP Records takes its name from Vincent and Patricia Chin , who ran Randy's Record Mart and Studio 17 in Kingston — one of the most important recording spaces in Jamaican history — before emigrating to New York in the late 1970s and founding VP in Queens. What they built is the largest independent reggae and dancehall label in the world, and the primary route by which Jamaican music reaches international audiences. The Strictly the Best compilation series, running since 1990, is effectively the genre's annual report. This selection concentrates on the late-1980s and 1990s dancehall era — the period when digital riddims replaced live bands and the music became faster, harder and enormously influential on hip-hop. What to listen for Ini Kamoze's "Hot Stepper...

Fifty-five tracks assembled around a quality rather than a genre. The title is a thesis, and the music mostly supports it. A dedication, and a premise worth examining The framing here — the feminine voice as an energy that is soft, yielding, nurturing and nourishing — comes out of a familiar way of thinking about gender as complementary energies, with roots in Taoist yin and yang and in various strands of contemporary spiritual practice. It is worth saying plainly that this is a contested framework. Associating softness and nurture specifically with femininity has a long history of being used to narrow what women are permitted to be, and a number of the artists on this playlist have spent their careers refusing exactly that association. Solange , H.E.R. and Amber Mark are not soft or yielding in any useful sense; they are precise, controlled and frequently furious. What the selection actually demonstrates is something more interesting than its title: that r...

Sixteen tracks from a Tony and Grammy winner with two Oscar nominations, who also happens to be a genuinely excellent soul singer. Leslie Odom Jr. Leslie Odom Jr. grew up in Philadelphia, trained at Carnegie Mellon, and became internationally known as Aaron Burr in Hamilton — a performance that won him the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical and, with the cast recording, a Grammy. What is less widely known is that he was a recording artist before and has continued since, working largely in the Great American Songbook and in soul. He is a genuine jazz-literate singer with excellent time and an unusually clear sense of what a lyric means — which is the actor's contribution. His portrayal of Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami earned Academy Award nominations for both acting and for the song "Speak Now," which he co-wrote. What to listen for "Wait for It" is the Hamilton track and one of the best things in that show — Burr's entire...

One hundred tracks by white men singing Black American music. The category is loaded, and the records are mostly excellent. Blue-eyed soul, and what the term is doing The phrase dates to the mid-1960s, when Black radio stations used it to describe white acts — the Righteous Brothers among the first — whose records they were willing to play. It was a marketing term before it was a genre, and it has always carried an implicit question: who is allowed in, and who decides. The honest answer is that the audience decides. Some of the artists here were fully accepted by Black radio and Black listeners; others were not, and a few had careers that depended on access their Black contemporaries were denied. Both things are true simultaneously and are worth holding while you listen. What is not in dispute is that a great many of these records are genuinely good. What to listen for Bobby Caldwell's "Coming Down from Love" is the emblematic case — his la...

Twenty-eight songs by a man from a fishing town in Lincolnshire who wrote some of the most enduring Black American music of the twentieth century. Rod Temperton Rod Temperton was born in Cleethorpes, England in 1949 and worked in a frozen-food factory before answering an advertisement and joining Heatwave , a multinational funk band formed by American servicemen in Germany. He was their keyboard player and, it turned out, an extraordinary songwriter. Quincy Jones heard Heatwave and brought him to Los Angeles. What followed is one of the least-known great catalogues in popular music: three songs on Off the Wall , three on Thriller including the title track, and a run of material for George Benson, the Brothers Johnson, Patti Austin, James Ingram and Michael McDonald. He was almost entirely private, gave very few interviews, and was known in the industry as "the Invisible Man." He died in 2016, and the news was released only after his funeral. What to listen f...

Thirty-one tracks of nylon-string guitar played with a delicacy nobody else in the idiom has matched. Earl Klugh is the quietest virtuoso in jazz. Earl Klugh Earl Klugh was born in Detroit in 1953 and is almost unique among jazz guitarists in playing exclusively acoustic nylon-string guitar — no electric, no amplification beyond a microphone. That choice defines everything: the tone is warm and woody, the attack is soft, and the whole music sits at a volume that requires you to lean in. He was playing professionally as a teenager, recorded with Yusef Lateef at fifteen, and joined George Benson's band before working with Chick Corea's Return to Forever. That is a serious jazz apprenticeship, and it is worth knowing before filing him under easy listening. His influences are unusual for the genre — he has named Chet Atkins as a primary one, which explains the fingerstyle technique and the country-adjacent clarity of his lines. What to listen for "Livi...

Twenty-nine tracks from an Atlanta producer who shaped TLC, launched Boyz II Men and then made records with Madonna and Gwen Stefani. Dallas Austin Dallas Austin is from Columbus, Georgia, moved to Atlanta as a teenager, and was producing hits before he was twenty. He is one of the small group of people — with Jermaine Dupri, L.A. Reid and Babyface — who turned Atlanta into the centre of American Black music in the 1990s. His range is the notable thing. Austin produced hard-edged new jack swing, glossy pop-R&B, and later straight pop and rock for white artists, without any obvious change in method. He is also a genuine multi-instrumentalist who plays much of what is on his records. He founded Rowdy Records and, later, the Dallas Austin Foundation, and has worked extensively in music education in Atlanta. What to listen for The TLC material is the core. "Creep" won a Grammy and is one of the strangest hit records of the decade — a song a...

Fifty-one tracks and not a single one you would hear on the radio. This is the Prince catalogue below the waterline, and it is where the real argument lives. The problem of abundance Prince recorded relentlessly. The Paisley Park vault reportedly holds thousands of unreleased recordings, enough for decades of posthumous releases, and even within his official catalogue the sheer volume means that dozens of superb songs never got near a single. That creates a specific pleasure for listeners: almost nobody has heard all of it, and a well-assembled deep-cuts playlist can genuinely surprise people who have owned the albums for forty years. He died in April 2016 of an accidental fentanyl overdose, and the reissue programme since has been unusually generous — the Sign o' the Times and 1999 super-deluxe editions in particular have released genuinely important material. What to listen for "When We're Dancing Close and Slow" is from For You and Prince -e...

Fifty-four tracks tracing what happened after nine men from Staten Island signed a deal that let each of them sign somewhere else. The solo-deal clause Wu-Tang Clan arrived in 1993 with Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and a business arrangement that had no precedent: RZA negotiated a group deal that explicitly allowed every member to sign individually to any label they chose. It was, in retrospect, one of the smartest moves anyone in the genre has made. What followed was an extraordinary run of solo albums — Method Man's Tical , Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx , GZA's Liquid Swords , Ghostface Killah's Ironman , Ol' Dirty Bastard's Return to the 36 Chambers — mostly produced by RZA, and collectively more influential than the group albums. This playlist concentrates on that solo material and on the R&B crossover records, which is the right emphasis — it is where the Clan's reach is widest. What to listen for "I'll Be Th...

Twelve tracks from a guitarist who studied the Wes Montgomery method so closely that he became the most convincing inheritor of it. Norman Brown Norman Brown is from Shreveport, Louisiana, raised in Kansas City, and studied at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, where he later taught. He was signed to Motown's jazz imprint MoJazz in the early 1990s. The defining technical feature is the octave technique — playing a melody in two octaves simultaneously, with the thumb, which Wes Montgomery developed and which almost nobody else has made their own. Brown uses it constantly, and it gives his lines a warmth and thickness that a single-note player cannot achieve. After the Storm (1994) was his commercial breakthrough and remains his best-known record. He later won a Grammy for Just Chillin' . What to listen for "That's The Way Love Goes" is the Janet Jackson song, and it is the track that made the album — a genuine crossover hit for an instr...

The Foreign Exchange is probably one of the most melodic & funked-up Hip Hop groups in the underground scene today. It’s a real shame that more people don’t know the crazy talent the members of this group possess. The combination of Phonte’s inventive lyricism & soulful falsetto and Nicolay’s ambient grooves and brilliant sequencing is really impressive stuff.

Thirteen songs by one writer. If you know soul music at all, you know at least eight of them — and you probably have never said his name aloud. One of the finest R&B songwriters who will always be remembered through his timeless hits. Skip Scarborough (1944–2003) Clarence "Skip" Scarborough wrote or co-wrote a startling number of the ballads that define seventies and eighties soul, and he did it as a working songwriter rather than a star. He died in 2003, and his name still means almost nothing to general listeners while the songs remain in constant rotation. What is most striking about his catalogue is its consistency of temperature. Scarborough wrote warm songs — not sentimental, not showy, but generous. The melodies sit comfortably in the middle of a singer's range, the chord movements are richer than they first appear, and there is almost always a turn in the bridge that lifts the whole thing. What to listen for Bill Withers'...

Twenty-eight tracks connected by one man's pen. If a soul record from the last forty years has strings that make you sit up, Clare Fischer probably wrote them. Clare Fischer Clare Fischer (1928–2012) is one of the most consequential musicians almost nobody outside the profession can name. He was a serious jazz pianist and composer — his tunes "Morning" and "Pensativa" became standards, and he was a pioneer of Latin jazz and bossa nova in America. Herbie Hancock has said flatly: "I wouldn't be me without Clare Fischer." That is not a small statement. From the 1970s he became the most sought-after orchestral arranger in popular music. His longest and most productive relationship was with Prince , from 1984 onward — and by most accounts the two men never worked in the same room. Prince would send tapes; Fischer would return arrangements. The distance seems to have suited both. He received thirteen Grammy nominations and won...

Twenty-seven tracks from a songwriter who had one of the biggest debut albums in history and then spent thirty years refusing to repeat it. Tracy Chapman Tracy Chapman grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, raised by a single mother, and studied anthropology and African studies at Tufts. Her self-titled 1988 debut was released into a pop landscape dominated by synthesisers and sold twenty million copies on the strength of a woman, a guitar and a set of songs about poverty, domestic violence and political change. The record won three Grammys, and its success owed something to an accident: when Stevie Wonder's equipment failed at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert at Wembley, Chapman was sent back out to fill the gap, alone, in front of a global television audience of several hundred million. Sales went vertical within days. She has released sparingly, given almost no interviews, guarded her privacy absolutely, and declined to perform live for long stretches. In 202...

Thirteen instrumental tracks by Sade's band, made without Sade. It is a considerably stranger and more adventurous record than that description suggests.   Sweetback Sweetback is Stuart Matthewman , Andrew Hale and Paul Denman — the three musicians who, with Sade Adu , make up Sade. The band is genuinely a band rather than a backing group, and Sweetback is what they do between albums. Their self-titled 1996 debut is largely instrumental, built on dub bass, jazz guitar and trip-hop-adjacent drum programming, with guest vocals scattered across it. It arrived at the height of the British downtempo moment and fits alongside Massive Attack and Portishead more than alongside anything Sade released. Matthewman in particular has had a substantial parallel career — he produced most of Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite , which is one of the most important neo-soul albums ever made. What to listen for "Au Natural" and "Softly Softly" are the two that m...

Fifty-seven tracks from a south London singer who became one of reggae's biggest international stars without ever leaving the tradition behind. Maxi Priest Max Alfred Elliott was born in Lewisham, south London, to Jamaican parents — one of nine children, in a Pentecostal household. He took his stage name after converting to Rastafari, and came up through the Saxon Studio International sound system, the legendary south London operation that also produced Smiley Culture and Tippa Irie. What he became is unusual: a British singer working in lovers rock — the romantic, soul-influenced strain of reggae that is genuinely a British invention — who then broke internationally on a scale almost no reggae artist from anywhere has matched. His cover of Cat Stevens' "Wild World" and the American number one "Close To You" made him a global star. He has kept working for four decades and remains one of the most respected voices in the music. What ...