Eighteen tracks from a British producer who started in dubstep, became a singer-songwriter, and ended up as the most in-demand collaborator in American rap. James Blake James Blake emerged from the London post-dubstep scene around 2009 making instrumental tracks defined by enormous sub-bass and long silences. Then he started singing, and his self-titled 2011 album turned out to be something else entirely: a piano-and-voice record with electronic architecture, and one of the most influential British albums of its decade. His 2013 album Overgrown won the Mercury Prize. Since then he has become an unlikely fixture in American hip-hop — working with Kendrick Lamar , Beyoncé , Jay-Z , Frank Ocean , Travis Scott and André 3000 — largely because his sense of space is unlike anyone else's. He has also spoken publicly and usefully about depression and about the "sad boy" framing applied to men who write about emotion. What to listen for ...

Thirteen tracks and roughly twenty-five guests. Black Radio III closes a trilogy that spent a decade arguing jazz and Black popular music were never separate things. Black Radio III, 2022 Robert Glasper's Black Radio arrived in 2012 and won the Grammy for Best R&B Album — a jazz pianist's record, in an R&B category, which was the entire point. The premise was simple and radical: put a jazz trio behind singers and rappers, treat both traditions as equals, and see what happens. The third volume, released in 2022, is the most explicitly political of the three. It opens with a spoken-word piece by Amir Sulaiman and returns repeatedly to questions of Black life, faith and survival, without ever becoming a lecture. It won Best R&B Album at the Grammys, ten years after the first one did. What to listen for "Black Superhero" is the statement track — Killer Mike , BJ The Chicago Kid and Big K.R.I.T. on one record, and a genuinely thrilling...

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Twenty-nine tracks from a Philadelphia keyboard player who went from a band's touring musician to the most in-demand producer in hip-hop, twice. (Not just some white boy from South Florida….Don’t get it twisted!) Scott Storch Scott Storch is the rare producer whose career has two entirely separate first acts. He came up as the keyboard player in The Roots — that is him on "You Got Me" — which means his grounding is live band musicianship rather than sampling. He then left Philadelphia, went to Los Angeles, and played on Dr. Dre's 2001 , where his keyboard work on "Still D.R.E." produced one of the most recognisable piano figures in the music. From there he built a production catalogue that dominated radio in the mid-2000s. His signature is specific: real keyboards rather than samples, an obvious taste for Middle Eastern and Mediterranean scales, and an unusually clean, dry mix that leaves the drums exposed. What to lis...

Twelve tracks from the Bristol trip-hop band who were always the warmest of the bunch. Morcheeba made unease sound like a Sunday afternoon. Morcheeba Morcheeba formed in the mid-1990s around brothers Paul and Ross Godfrey and singer Skye Edwards , and arrived into the middle of the trip-hop wave alongside Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky. What distinguished them was temperature. Where Portishead was genuinely bleak and Massive Attack genuinely menacing, Morcheeba brought blues guitar, country-ish slide and a singer with a warm, unhurried voice. The result was more accessible and, for a long time, less critically respected — which now looks like a category error. Skye left in 2003, released solo work, and rejoined in 2010. The band has continued in various configurations since. What to listen for "Over and Over" and "Big Calm" are the essentials from their strongest period — Big Calm (1998) is the album most people name. "S...

Nine tracks from the 1980 album where Al Jarreau worked out how to be a pop star without giving up a single thing that made him extraordinary. This Time, 1980 By 1980 Al Jarreau had made four albums and built a devoted following, particularly in Europe, on the strength of a vocal technique with no real precedent — percussive, elastic, capable of imitating instruments, and rooted in serious jazz training. This Time , produced by Jay Graydon , was the commercial breakthrough. Graydon was a Los Angeles session guitarist and producer at the centre of the West Coast studio world — he played the solo on Steely Dan's "Peg" and co-wrote "After the Love Has Gone" for Earth, Wind & Fire — and he gave Jarreau a polished, radio-ready setting without smoothing out the vocal invention. The album went gold, won a Grammy, and set up Breakin' Away the following year, which made him a star. What to listen for "Spain (I Can Recall)" is...

Seventeen tracks from a mixtape made in lockdown by an artist who had spent a decade making some of the most demanding music in pop. CAPRISONGS is FKA twigs having fun, which is its own kind of statement. CAPRISONGS, 2022 Tahliah Barnett grew up in Gloucestershire, worked as a backing dancer in London, and emerged with LP1 in 2014 as one of the most singular artists in British music — a producer, choreographer and director whose work sits somewhere between avant-garde electronic music and pop. MAGDALENE (2019) was made in the aftermath of surgery for uterine fibroids and the end of a relationship, and it is a genuinely harrowing record. CAPRISONGS , released as a mixtape in January 2022, is the deliberate opposite: loose, social, full of voice notes from friends, and built around club rhythms rather than art-song structures. She has described it as a record made for going out with your friends, and the framing device — a Capricorn birthday, astrology chat, f...

Eighteen tracks from three men who started as Anthony Hamilton's backing singers and turned out to have one of the most powerful things in music: a real blend. The HamilTones The HamilTones — 2E (Anthony Eastin), J. Vito and Tony Lelo — began as the backing vocal trio for Anthony Hamilton , which is where the name comes from. They became known in their own right through viral videos: three men in a car or a hotel room, harmonising, frequently taking material nobody would expect and turning it into church. What they have is genuinely rare. All three are gospel-trained, all three can lead, and the blend between them is tight enough that they can perform with no instruments at all and hold a room. Their later work has become substantially more political, and that turn is the most interesting thing about them. What to listen for The a cappella arrangements are the whole event. "Never Gonna Let You Go" and "Best Friend" show what three vo...

Twenty-two tracks of Carl Sandburg's love poetry read aloud over original music. This is a spoken-word record, and it asks you to actually listen. The Lover: The Love Poetry of Carl Sandburg This is Michael Hoppé and Tim Wheater's 2001 album, and its origin is unusually charming. Hoppé is a composer; his grandfather was E.O. Hoppé , one of the major photographic portraitists of the early twentieth century, who photographed poets including Sandburg. An earlier Hoppé album drew on those portraits; Sandburg's granddaughter heard it, a connection was made through Sandburg's biographer, and this record followed. Hoppé composed the music. Tim Wheater — better known as a flautist — narrates, and his speaking voice turns out to be a rich, unhurried baritone entirely suited to the job. Six instrumental interludes break up the readings. Who Carl Sandburg was Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) was the son of Swedish immigrants, born in...

Seventeen tracks from a Harlem artist who has been a dancer, a choreographer, a singer, a director and a film actor, usually all at once. Teyana Taylor Teyana Taylor came out of Harlem and first appeared on My Super Sweet 16 before choreographing Beyoncé's "Ring the Alarm" at sixteen. She was signed to Pharrell's Star Trak, then to Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music, and her music career has been repeatedly overshadowed by everything else she does. She reached a much wider audience through the video for Kanye West's "Fade," in which she dances alone in a gym, and has since directed videos herself under the name Spike Tey . Her acting career, particularly in A Thousand and One , has drawn serious critical attention. The frustration running through her music story is real: K.T.S.E. , the 2018 album produced by Kanye West, was released unfinished and without her approval, and she has been candid about it. What to listen for "Gonna Love M...

Fifteen tracks from a Canadian artist who has spent twenty-five years refusing to make the same record twice, or to play the game at all. k-os Kevin Brereton is from Toronto, of Trinidadian descent, and the name is an acronym for Knowledge of Self . He emerged in the late 1990s and immediately became known for two things: making genuinely genre-fluid music — hip-hop, reggae, rock, folk, all in the same album — and being publicly, persistently critical of the music industry he was working inside. He famously pulled back from an early record deal and has spoken at length about commercialism and about the pressures placed on Black artists to perform a particular kind of authenticity. That stance cost him commercially and is the reason he is respected. He has won multiple Juno Awards and is one of the most significant figures in Canadian music, which is a category that includes a great deal more than most international listeners know. What to listen for "Cr...

Twelve tracks from an Ethiopian-born artist whose debut album was so hard to categorise that his label essentially gave up trying. Kenna is one of pop's great what-ifs. Kenna Kenna Zemedkun was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and raised in Virginia Beach, where he became close friends with Chad Hugo of The Neptunes . That friendship produced his 2003 debut New Sacred Cow , produced largely by Hugo, and one of the more interesting records of its decade. The problem was that nobody could file it. Kenna makes new wave — synthesisers, Depeche Mode and U2 as reference points, big melodic hooks — sung by a Black artist and produced by a hip-hop producer, at a moment when the American industry had no category for that. The album was reportedly shelved and delayed repeatedly. He has since released sporadically, worked as a photographer and climate activist, and become a genuine cult figure — the kind of artist other musicians name. What to listen f...

Twenty-three tracks from a New Orleans singer who has spent fifteen years being described as underrated, which by now is simply a description of his career. One of my favorites from Luke not on Spotify for some strange reason: Luke James Luke James is a genuinely puzzling case. He has the voice, the range and the writing ability of a major star, he has been nominated for a Grammy, he has toured with Beyoncé, and he has never had the hit that would have settled the argument. What he has instead is a catalogue that rewards people who go looking, and a parallel career as an actor — most visibly as Johnny Gill in The New Edition Story , a piece of casting that required him to sing convincingly in someone else's style and worked completely. His records are darker and stranger than his gifts would suggest. Where a singer with that instrument would normally make polished ballads, James makes something closer to rock-inflected R&B: distorted guitars, unresolv...

Thirty-seven tracks from a Toronto artist who started by posting anonymous mixtapes and became the most commercially dominant pop star of his era. The Weeknd Abel Tesfaye was born in Toronto to Ethiopian immigrant parents, dropped out of school, and in 2011 uploaded three songs to YouTube with no name attached. The House of Balloons mixtape that followed was unlike anything in R&B — drugged, bleak, built on Beach House and Siouxsie and the Banshees samples, and sung in a startlingly beautiful falsetto. What happened next is one of the more remarkable arcs in pop. He moved steadily from that position toward the absolute centre of the mainstream, without ever entirely abandoning the darkness — Starboy and After Hours are enormous pop records about self-destruction, and "Blinding Lights" became, by some measures, the biggest song in Billboard chart history. Dawn FM (2022) is the most conceptually ambitious: an album framed as a radio station bro...

Sixteen tracks from a Cincinnati vocal trio who made some of the most beautifully arranged R&B of the early 1990s and are barely remembered. After 7 After 7 were Kevon Edmonds , Melvin Edmonds and Keith Mitchell — and the family tree is the story. Kevon and Melvin are the older brothers of Babyface ; Keith Mitchell is a cousin of L.A. Reid . The group was therefore signed to Virgin with the two most successful writer-producers in R&B working on their behalf. What they brought was harmony. Where most of their contemporaries were built around a single lead, After 7 were a genuine three-part group in the older tradition, and the arrangements — largely by Babyface and L.A. Reid — are unusually sophisticated. Melvin Edmonds died in 2019. The group has continued in various forms. What to listen for "Ready Or Not" and "Can't Stop" are the two that made them — both from the 1989 debut, and both perfectly constructed. ...

Twelve tracks from a Houston pianist who co-founded one of the great jazz groups and spent his later years making duet records with two of the finest voices in soul. Joe Sample Joseph Leslie Sample was born in Houston in 1939 and, while still at high school, formed the group that became The Jazz Crusaders with Wilton Felder, Stix Hooper and Wayne Henderson. They moved to Los Angeles, dropped the "Jazz" in 1971, and as The Crusaders became one of the most commercially successful and musically serious jazz-funk groups ever. Sample was also among the most-recorded session pianists of the era — his playing appears on records by Steely Dan, Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Tina Turner and Miles Davis, among a great many others. His later career produced a body of duet work with Randy Crawford and Lalah Hathaway that is among the most satisfying jazz-soul vocal music anyone has made. He died in 2014. What to listen for "Street Life" is the monument. ...

Twenty-nine tracks from a Los Angeles saxophonist and producer who is one of the most important connectors between jazz and hip-hop working today. Terrace Martin Terrace Martin is from South Central Los Angeles, the son of a jazz drummer and a singer, and trained seriously on saxophone at Locke High School — the same institution that produced Patrice Rushen and a long line of Los Angeles musicians. His most consequential work is with Kendrick Lamar . Martin was central to To Pimp a Butterfly , playing, producing and helping assemble the cast of jazz musicians — Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Robert Glasper — that made that album what it is. It is difficult to overstate how much that record changed what mainstream rap could sound like. He also works constantly as a producer for West Coast rap, and his own records move fluidly between straight jazz, G-funk and soul. What to listen for The Dinner Party tracks — "Sleepless Nights" and...

Twenty tracks from a Chicago singer who is one of the most in-demand voices in rap and has never quite been given his own due. Jeremih Jeremy Felton is from Chicago and studied at the University of Illinois before "Birthday Sex" made him a star in 2009 — a record so immediately effective that it somewhat defined him for a decade. What that reputation obscures is how good a musician he is. Jeremih plays multiple instruments, writes and produces his own material, and has an unusually light, agile falsetto that he uses with real rhythmic sophistication — he sings around a beat rather than on it, which is why rappers want him. His 2015 album Late Nights and the earlier mixtape of the same name are held in genuinely high regard by people who follow R&B closely, and the MihTy project with Ty Dolla $ign is one of the most enjoyable records either has made. What to listen for "oui" is the best thing here and one of the loveliest R...