Seventy-three tracks distilled from a long-running series. This is the Chilled Soul project's greatest hits, and it doubles as a map of independent R&B. A series, condensed A greatest-hits volume drawn from a curator's own long-running series is a genuinely useful object. It tells you what survived — which records kept getting played after the initial enthusiasm faded — and that is a more reliable filter than any chart. The aesthetic is consistent: mid-tempo, warm, harmonically rich soul with a strong bias toward independent artists and toward production that leaves space. Seventy-three tracks is roughly four and a half hours, and it holds a single temperature throughout. What to listen for Cleo Sol's "Don't Let It Go to Your Head" and Childish Gambino's "Summertime Magic" are the two most recognisable names, and both sit at the softer end of their catalogues. Mereba's "Living on a Dream" with Doug E. Fresh ...

Ten tracks from the British band who made one of the most sampled records in soul history and never quite got the credit at home. Loose Ends Loose Ends — Carl McIntosh, Jane Eugene and Steve Nichol — formed in south London and became, in 1985, the first British Black group to reach number one on the US R&B chart. That is a genuinely significant milestone and it is remarkably little discussed. Their sound was a specific British thing: the sleek machine funk of the mid-1980s crossed with a jazz-funk sensibility that came out of the UK's rare groove and soul weekender culture. Working with producer Nick Martinelli in Philadelphia, they arrived at a hybrid that was polished enough for American radio and strange enough to stand apart from it. What to listen for "Hangin' On A String (Contemplating)" is the record. That number one R&B hit is built on a groove that has been sampled and interpolated endlessly, and the production — that dry ...

Fifty-six tracks of roots reggae with its faith fully in view. This is not a party mix — it is a devotional one, and it treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves. Rastafari, in its own music Roots reggae is inseparable from Rastafari , a religious and cultural movement that emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s following the coronation of Haile Selassie I as Emperor of Ethiopia. Its adherents drew on Marcus Garvey's pan-Africanism, on biblical prophecy, and on a reading of history in which Africa is Zion and the West is Babylon. The music that came out of it in the 1970s is among the most substantial devotional music of the twentieth century — and it is routinely reduced, in international listening, to a handful of songs about smoking. This mix corrects that. It spans the roots era, the digital period, and the current revival, and it holds a consistent focus on chant, prayer and praise. What to listen for Bob Marley's "Jah Live" is the essent...

A Swiss harpist who rebuilt the instrument to suit himself, won a Grammy, and made records with Bobby McFerrin, Milton Nascimento and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Fifteen tracks of Andreas Vollenweider. The man who electrified the harp Andreas Vollenweider was born in Thalwil, Switzerland in 1953, the son of an organist and composer and a painter. He found the traditional concert harp limiting for what he wanted to do and built his own electroacoustic version — modified, amplified, and capable of textures the acoustic instrument cannot produce. His 1984 album Down to the Moon won a Grammy in 1987, and he became one of the defining figures of what got filed as new age — a label he has never much liked and which undersells the music. The New York Times described his style as swirling atmospheric music evoking nature, magic and fairy tales, which is closer. He is also a committed pacifist and environmentalist who has worked with Greenpeace and Amnesty International...

Thirteen tracks from a Pasadena vocal group who were briefly enormous and are now remembered mostly by people who were there. Troop deserve the revisit. Total Respect Of Other People Troop formed in Pasadena, California in the late 1980s — the name is an acronym for Total Respect Of Other People — and became one of the most successful of the new jack swing-era vocal groups, with a run of R&B hits between 1988 and 1992. They occupy a specific place in the lineage. Coming after New Edition and before Jodeci, Troop sat between the clean teen-idol model and the harder, sexually explicit groups that followed. Their strength was harmony — five voices, arranged tightly, with real gospel training underneath — and their records hold up better than their profile suggests. What to listen for "All I Do Is Think of You" is their biggest and best. It is a Jackson 5 song — a 1975 album track that was never a single — and Troop's vers...

Eight tracks each, alternating one for one across sixteen. Two R&B supergroups, two decades apart, and the most evenly matched fight in the whole battle series. The tale of the tape LSG was Gerald Levert , Keith Sweat and Johnny Gill — three established solo stars who came together in 1997 and produced one of the most successful R&B albums of the decade. Between them they had Levert's gospel-weighted baritone, Sweat's distinctive whine and near-perfect ear for a hook, and Gill's enormous New Edition-trained power. The self-titled debut went double platinum. TGT was Tyrese , Ginuwine and Tank , formed in 2007 and releasing Three Kings in 2013. They came from a different tradition — smoother, more explicitly sexual, and shaped by producers like The Underdogs rather than by the Cleveland and New Jersey soul world LSG grew out of. Both groups were built on the same premise: three men who could each carry a record alone, agreeing to share one. Roun...

Twenty-three tracks from three women from the Bronx who could out-sing almost anyone and chose to do it over hip-hop beats. Sisters With Voices earned the name. SWV Cheryl "Coko" Gamble , Tamara "Taj" Johnson and Leanne "Lelee" Lyons came out of the Bronx with gospel backgrounds and a producer, Brian Alexander Morgan , who understood exactly what to do with them. It's About Time arrived in 1992 into the same moment as Mary J. Blige's debut, and the two records between them established hip-hop soul as the dominant mode. Coko's lead vocal is the group's defining asset — a bright, agile, heavily ornamented instrument with a distinctive break in it, and one of the most imitated voices of the decade. But the group's real strength is the blend: three voices that were recorded close and stacked, giving even their up-tempo records an unusual warmth. What to listen for "Weak" is the number one and the standard — wr...

He was a jazz-fusion drummer with the Mahavishnu Orchestra before he produced "I Wanna Dance with Somebody." Twenty-five tracks of Narada Michael Walden's improbable career. From Mahavishnu to Whitney Michael Walden — given the name Narada by the spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy — began as a drummer of formidable technical ability. He joined John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra in the 1970s, one of the most demanding gigs in jazz fusion, and played with Jeff Beck and Weather Report. Then he became a pop producer, and one of the most commercially dominant of the 1980s. His touch was a specific thing: enormous gated drums, bright synth textures, a chorus that hits hard, and an ability to get a career-defining vocal out of a singer. He produced Whitney Houston's biggest uptempo records, launched Mariah Carey with "Vision of Love," and won Producer of the Year at the Grammys. It is a genuinely odd trajectory and one very few musicians have...

Seventy tracks distilled from a long-running series. If you want one playlist that explains where African music went in the last decade, this is a strong candidate. The greatest hits of a whole project A greatest-hits volume from a curator's own series does something a chart cannot: it shows what kept getting played. Seventy tracks drawn from a decade of African ChillZone volumes is effectively a decade of listening, filtered twice. The geographic spread is genuinely continental — Nigeria and South Africa lead, as they do commercially, but Ghana, Tanzania, Angola and the diaspora are all present, and the mix moves between Afrobeats, amapiano, deep house, gqom and soul without treating any as the default. What to listen for Black Coffee and Nakhane's "We Dance Again" is the record to start with. Black Coffee is the most internationally significant South African producer, and Nakhane is a genuinely singular artist — queer, formerly evangelical, from...

Fifteen tracks from the soundtrack to a film about the Rwandan genocide. This is not background listening, and it should not be treated as such. Hotel Rwanda, 2004 Terry George's film tells the story of Paul Rusesabagina , the manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali, who sheltered over a thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu refugees during the 1994 genocide in which roughly 800,000 people were murdered in a hundred days while the international community declined to intervene. The soundtrack is unusually thoughtful for a film of this kind. Rather than scoring African tragedy with a Western orchestra, it foregrounds Rwandan and East African musicians alongside the score, and gives substantial space to Dorothee Munyaneza — a Rwandan singer who survived the genocide as a child and who both performed on and consulted for the film. That decision matters. It means the music is partly the testimony of a survivor rather than only an outsider's interpretation. W...

Forty-nine tracks from the keyboard player who is the connective tissue of neo-soul. If you love a record from that world, James Poyser is probably on it. The Soulquarian at the piano James Poyser was born in Sheffield, England to Jamaican parents and raised in Philadelphia, and he is one of the central figures in a scene that is usually described through its singers. As a keyboard player, producer and songwriter, he was part of the Soulquarians — the loose collective around Questlove, D'Angelo, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, Common and Bilal that gathered at Electric Lady Studios and produced an extraordinary run of albums around the turn of the century. He is also, since 2014, a member of The Roots and therefore of the house band on The Tonight Show , which means a great many people hear him nightly without knowing it. What he brings is harmony. Poyser's chord voicings — jazz-derived, unresolved, warm — are what give neo-soul its particular colour, and they...

Thirty-seven tracks, and the striking thing is how few of the obvious ones are here. This is a Rihanna playlist built from album cuts, and it makes a better case than the hits do. The most adaptable pop star of her generation Robyn Rihanna Fenty left Barbados at sixteen after auditioning for Evan Rogers in a hotel room, and spent her first few years being handed material — competent Caribbean-tinged pop that could have gone to anyone. What changed was Good Girl Gone Bad in 2007 and, more importantly, her own growing willingness to choose strange records over safe ones. What she developed is unusual: not a great technical voice, but an extraordinarily distinctive one, with a specific rasp and a phrasing that sits slightly behind the beat. She became the artist producers wanted to work with because she made unusual production sound like pop. She has since largely stopped releasing music in favour of Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty, which have made her a billionaire...

Thirteen tracks from a Philadelphia singer who arrived with one of the best debut singles of the 2000s and has been quietly excellent ever since. Vivian Green Vivian Green is from Philadelphia and came up the traditional way — church, then a girl group, then backing vocals for Jill Scott, then songwriting. She wrote for Boyz II Men before she released anything of her own. Her 2002 debut A Love Story arrived at the height of the neo-soul wave and stood out for two reasons: she is a genuinely capable pianist who writes at the instrument, and her songs deal with the unglamorous middle of relationships rather than their beginnings or ends. She has since released steadily, largely outside the major-label system, and her more recent work is arguably stronger than the early records that made her name. What to listen for "Emotional Rollercoaster" is the record everyone knows — a Grammy-nominated single and one of the most durable R&B songs of its dec...

Twenty-two tracks from an American house producer who made emotional, melodic dance music at a moment when the market wanted aggression. Kaskade Ryan Raddon is from Chicago, which matters — he grew up around the birthplace of house music, and his records retain a warmth and a song-orientation that most of the American EDM boom abandoned. He built his career through the 2000s on progressive and deep house releases, and became one of the biggest live draws in American dance music without ever really making the hard, drop-driven records that defined the festival era. He is also a practising Mormon, which made him an unusual figure in a scene not known for sobriety, and he has spoken about it candidly. His defining quality is melancholy. Kaskade records are frequently in minor keys, built around a vocal hook that sounds like a regret, and designed to work at four in the morning rather than at peak time. What to listen for "Move for Me" and "I Remembe...

Fifteen tracks from a Japanese producer whose piano-and-breakbeat records helped invent a genre that now soundtracks half the internet. DJ Okawari DJ Okawari emerged from Japan in the late 2000s making instrumental hip-hop built on live-sounding piano, jazz samples and soft, dusty drums. His track "Flower Dance" became one of the most-played instrumental pieces of its era, and his aesthetic — melancholy, unhurried, structurally simple — is a direct ancestor of what is now called lo-fi hip-hop. That lineage matters. The whole "beats to study to" phenomenon descends fairly directly from a Japanese scene built around Nujabes , whose Samurai Champloo soundtracks made jazz-hop a global taste before he died in 2010. Okawari is one of the most accomplished figures working in that tradition. What to listen for "Bounce" with Talib Kweli is the highest-profile track here and a genuinely well-matched pairing — Kweli's dense, rhythmi...

Ten tracks from a family band of French-born Romani musicians who took flamenco to the world's stadiums and were dismissed by purists for it. Play it loud anyway. The Gipsy Kings The Gipsy Kings are made up of members of two families — the Reyes and the Baliardo s — who are Gitanos : Spanish Romani whose parents fled Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and settled in Arles and Montpellier in the south of France. That history is the key to the music. They sing in Gitano , a Romani-inflected Andalusian Spanish, and they play a style that is rooted in flamenco — Nicolas Reyes is the son of the flamenco singer José Reyes, and lead guitarist Tonino Baliardo is a formidable player — but crossed with pop production and rumba rhythm. Flamenco purists have never fully accepted them. That is a real argument and worth understanding, but it should not obscure that these are genuine Gitano musicians playing their own tradition, not outsiders borr...

Fourteen tracks from a British band who had no guitarist and became enormous anyway. Keane's piano-led melancholy defined a particular mid-2000s mood. Keane Keane formed in Battle, East Sussex, and made a decision early on that shaped everything: they dropped their guitarist and never replaced him. Tim Rice-Oxley's piano, run through effects to fill the sonic space a guitar would occupy, carries the harmony, with Tom Chaplin's high, clear voice on top and Richard Hughes on drums. That arrangement is why they sound the way they do, and it put them at odds with a British scene then dominated by guitar bands. Hopes and Fears (2004) sold in enormous quantities anyway and made them, briefly, one of the biggest bands in the country. Chaplin has since been open about the addiction that nearly ended the band, and their later work is considerably darker for it. What to listen for "Somewhere Only We Know" is the one everybody knows, helped by a Lily ...

Sixty-eight tracks of music that was critically despised for thirty years and is now quietly beloved. Soft rock has had the last laugh. The rehabilitation of the seventies Soft rock — the melodic, immaculately produced, largely Los Angeles-made pop of roughly 1972 to 1984 — was for a long time the most sneered-at music in the rock canon. It was too clean, too commercial, too obviously the work of session professionals rather than tortured artists. The reassessment came from two directions. Musicians noticed the harmonic sophistication and the playing; hip-hop and modern-funk producers noticed the immaculate recordings and started sampling them. What was once called adult-oriented rock is now discussed as yacht rock, and the affection is genuine. Sixty-eight tracks is a proper survey, and it takes in the disco-adjacent, the country-adjacent and the straightforwardly strange. What to listen for Boz Scaggs' "JoJo" is the sophisticate's pick. Scaggs...

Sixteen tracks from one of the best-curated soundtracks in film. Love & Basketball uses music the way the film uses time — to mark exactly where you are. Love & Basketball, 2000 Gina Prince-Bythewood's debut feature tells the story of Monica and Quincy across four "quarters," from childhood in 1981 to adulthood in the 1990s, and the soundtrack is structured to match. Each era of the film gets its era's music, which means the record functions as both a soundtrack and a compressed history of Black popular music across two decades. It was produced by Spike Lee's 40 Acres and a Mule, and the music supervision is unusually intelligent — the songs are chosen for what they meant at the time rather than for what sounds good now, which is a harder and more rewarding standard. What to listen for Al Green's "Love And Happiness" opens and is close to a shorthand for the whole film: joy and difficulty in the same song, with that organ...