The only artist to win Grammys in jazz, pop and R&B. Al Jarreau could use his voice as a rhythm section, a horn line, or simply as a voice, and thirty-one tracks show all three. The instrument nobody else had Al Jarreau was born in Milwaukee in 1940, the son of a minister, and had a master's degree in vocational rehabilitation and a career as a counsellor before committing to music in his thirties. That late start is worth knowing; he arrived fully formed because he had spent years developing something entirely his own. What he developed was a vocal technique with almost no precedent: a percussive, elastic approach that used the voice to imitate instruments — not novelty scat, but genuine rhythmic and timbral invention, with clicks, pops and glottal effects deployed as musical elements. He is the only person to have won Grammy Awards in the jazz, pop and R&B categories, which is less a trivia fact than an accurate description of where he sat. He died in 2017...

A classically trained jazz pianist who wrote pop hits, scored films, and ended up as one of the most sampled musicians in hip-hop. Patrice Rushen has had at least four careers. The musician's musician who happened to have hits Patrice Rushen was a serious jazz pianist first. Born in Los Angeles in 1954, she was leading her own trio as a teenager, recorded three well-regarded jazz albums for Prestige before she turned twenty-three, and worked as a sideperson with Jean-Luc Ponty, Sonny Rollins and Donald Byrd. The turn toward R&B in the late 1970s was not a compromise so much as an expansion, and it produced a run of records that were commercially successful and harmonically far more sophisticated than the chart around them. She wrote, arranged, produced and played, which was rare for anyone in that era and almost unheard of for a woman. She later became the first woman to serve as musical director for the Grammy Awards, worked extensively in film and television ...

A white singer from Manhattan whose label deliberately hid his face because the record was working on Black radio. Bobby Caldwell died in March 2023; sixteen tracks are the appropriate way to mark it. Bobby Caldwell, 1951–2023 Bobby Caldwell was born in Manhattan and raised largely in Miami, and in 1978 released "What You Won't Do for Love" — a record so completely at home in the soul idiom that TK Records marketed it without his photograph, using a silhouette on the sleeve, so that Black radio would play it without hesitation. It worked. A great many listeners assumed for years that he was Black. That story has been told often enough to become the headline, which slightly obscures the more interesting fact: he was a genuinely excellent singer and songwriter whose catalogue holds up entirely on its own terms. He wrote for Boz Scaggs, Chicago and Peter Cetera, and later in life made several albums of Great American Songbook material. His influence ...

(More rare footage from this masterful jam session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KFMLNop0_g )

Twenty-two tracks spanning forty years of the most persistently reinvented career in pop. Whatever you think of Madonna, the records are the argument. The professional survivor Madonna Louise Ciccone arrived from Michigan into downtown New York at the tail end of the disco era, absorbed the club culture around her — particularly the Black and Latino, largely queer dance scene that would later give her "Vogue" — and built a career on the principle that a pop star could change completely every few years and survive it. The reinvention is the usual headline, and it is real: the club singer, the Catholic provocateur, the Erotica-era transgressor, the Evita-era respectability, the electronica turn, the disco revival. What gets discussed less is her ear for collaborators. Madonna has consistently found producers at the exact moment they were doing their best work — Nile Rodgers, Patrick Leonard, Shep Pettibone, Nellee Hooper, William Orbit, Mirwais,...

He has won Song of the Year twice and Album of the Year once, and most people could not pick him out of a lineup. Thirty-nine tracks of D'Mile, the most decorated producer of his generation. Dernst "D'Mile" Emile II D'Mile is the son of Dernst Emile Sr., a Haitian-American musician, and grew up in Brooklyn surrounded by instruments. He spent years as a working producer — credits with Kelly Rowland, Janet Jackson and others — before the run that made him unavoidable. That run: Lucky Daye's Painted , H.E.R.'s "I Can't Breathe" (Song of the Year, 2021), Silk Sonic's An Evening with Silk Sonic (Record and Song of the Year, 2022), and Victoria Monét's Jaguar II . Four consecutive years at the centre of the Grammys, for records that sound nothing like each other except in one respect: they are all played rather than programmed. That is the D'Mile signature. Live bass, real drums, horn and string arrangements, chord...

Sixty-three pieces of solo piano and small-ensemble music for reading, thinking, and — as the title cheerfully admits — taking a nap. No apologies required. Music that gets out of the way There is a large and growing world of contemporary piano music made for exactly this purpose: gentle, largely tonal, mostly short pieces, played on close-miked pianos with the mechanism audible — you can often hear the felt of the hammers and the release of the sustain pedal. It descends from Erik Satie by way of minimalism, and it exists because a great many people want music that occupies the room without occupying the mind. It gets dismissed fairly often, and the dismissal misses something. Writing music that holds attention loosely without becoming irritating is a real skill, and the best of this material has genuine harmonic interest for anyone who chooses to listen closely. What to listen for The titles tell you the intended use, and they are unusually honest ab...

Eleven Bread, nine America. Two soft-rock bands from the same moment, matched almost track for track, and a genuinely close fight once you stop laughing at the premise. The tale of the tape The dream battle format needs two contenders who are actually comparable, and these two are almost uncomfortably so. Both arrived around 1970. Both built their sound on acoustic guitars, close harmony and unhurried tempos. Both sold enormously, were dismissed as soft, and have since been quietly reassessed by musicians who noticed how carefully the records are made. Bread was David Gates , James Griffin , Robb Royer and drummer Mike Botts , later joined by Larry Knechtel — a Wrecking Crew veteran who played the piano on "Bridge Over Troubled Water." That is a serious band. Gates was a Tulsa-born arranger and session player, and Bread records are built with a precision their gentleness disguises. America was Dewey Bunnell , Gerry Beckley and Dan Peek — three s...

Thirty-six tracks from the Toronto producer who has been on more consequential rap records than almost anyone of his generation, without ever developing a house style. Boi-1da, and the producer as chameleon Matthew Samuels — Boi-1da — was born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in Ajax, Ontario. He met Drake through an online beat-making forum, which is a very 2007 origin story, and became one of the defining producers of the following fifteen years. What is unusual about him is the absence of a signature. Where most producers of his stature are identifiable within a few bars, Boi-1da's records sound like whatever the artist needed — the airy dancehall bounce of "Controlla," the grinding menace of "The Blacker The Berry," the sparse piano of "Real Friends." He is a producer in the older sense: someone who serves the song rather than stamping it. He has won multiple Grammys and has an enormous number of platinum records, and r...

She sings in isiXhosa over contemporary production and has one of the most powerful voices in African music. Eleven tracks of Amanda Black. Eastern Cape soul Amanda Benedicta Antony , who records as Amanda Black, comes from the Eastern Cape of South Africa and emerged through a television talent competition before releasing Amazulu in 2016 — an album that went platinum in South Africa within weeks and established her as one of the country's most significant voices. The important thing about her is linguistic. Much of her work is in isiXhosa , and she has been explicit about that as a choice rather than a default — a decision to make music that speaks directly to the people it is about rather than reaching first for English and an international audience. That the songs travel anyway is the point. Her voice is enormous and gospel-trained, but she uses it with restraint, and her records combine Afro-soul, traditional Xhosa musical elements and contemporary South ...

Sixteen tracks of Trinidadian soca from a singer who has been at the top of the form for twenty years. If your only Carnival reference is a beach advert, start here. Patrice Roberts and the business of Carnival Patrice Roberts is from Tobago and has been a major figure in soca since her teens, when she was singing with Machel Montano's band. She has since built one of the most consistent careers in the genre — a run of Carnival-season hits, Road March contention, and a body of work that has broadened well beyond the party record. Soca deserves better framing than it usually gets. It emerged in Trinidad in the 1970s as calypso absorbed Indian and American influences, and it operates on an annual cycle: songs are written for Carnival, released in the season, competed over, and then either enter the canon or vanish. That structure produces an extraordinary rate of output and a genuinely competitive songwriting culture. Roberts' particular skill is writing soca that ...

A songwriter, producer and singer from Port Elizabeth who does all three at a level almost nobody in her scene matches. Fifteen tracks of Zonke. Zonke Dikana Zonke Dikana was born in KwaZakhele, Port Elizabeth in 1979, into a musical family — her father Vuyisile was a drummer, and her late stepmother Anneline Malebo sang with the band Joy. Her sister Lulu Dikana was also a recording artist, and died in 2014. She took a degree in human resource management from the University of the Free State before committing to music, started in house, and moved toward Afro-soul and neo-soul. The breakthrough was Ina Ethe (2011), which went double platinum in South Africa and established her as one of the country's major artists. She signed with Sony in 2013 and has since released Work of Heart , L.O.V.E , Enigma and Embo . She names Sade , Miriam Makeba and Brenda Fassie as her influences, and you can hear all three — Sade in the restraint, Makeba in the linguistic com...

A singer signed to Death Row Records who sounds uncannily like Marvin Gaye, making an album that says so in the title. Eleven tracks that somehow avoid every trap in that sentence. The Rebirth of Marvin October London is from South Bend, Indiana, and was signed by Snoop Dogg to the revived Death Row Records — a label whose name carries an enormous amount of history and almost none of it about smooth soul singing. That is the first surprise. The second is the voice. The Marvin Gaye comparison is not a marketing angle; it is simply what he sounds like — the same light, slightly nasal upper register, the same tendency to stack his own harmonies, the same habit of sliding into a note rather than hitting it. Naming the album The Rebirth of Marvin is a considerable act of nerve, because it invites exactly the comparison an artist in his position would normally try to avoid. It works because he does not attempt a museum reconstruction. The production is contempora...

Twenty-two tracks from Louisville's biggest export since the Ali era. Jack Harlow is a genuinely divisive figure, and the records are more interesting than the discourse. Louisville, and the charisma question Jack Harlow came up in Louisville, Kentucky, releasing mixtapes through his teens and building a local following long before "WHATS POPPIN" broke nationally in 2020. He is signed to Generation Now, the Atlantic imprint run by DJ Drama and Don Cannon. He is also the subject of a genuine and ongoing argument. His detractors say he is a competent rapper elevated by charisma and by being a white artist in a Black genre; his defenders point to the consistency of the mixtapes, the ear for a beat and the willingness to be funny on record, which is rarer than it should be. Both cases have merit, and the records are worth hearing on their own terms rather than through the argument. What is not in dispute is that he is a very good technical rapper with an unusu...

Half of EPMD, leader of the Def Squad, and the producer who put Marvin Gaye on a rap record and made it a hit. Twenty-two tracks of Erick Sermon. The Green-Eyed Bandit Erick Sermon , from Brentwood, Long Island, formed EPMD with Parrish Smith in 1987, and the group's first four albums — all with "Business" in the title — are foundational documents of East Coast rap. Their sound was built on heavy funk samples, particularly Zapp and Roger Troutman, played at a deliberately unhurried tempo, and it stood apart from the faster, denser New York records around it. As a producer, Sermon developed one of the most identifiable styles in rap: thick, slightly murky, bass-forward, with samples looped rather than chopped. He led the Def Squad with Redman and Keith Murray , and worked extensively as a remixer — a role that in the 1990s often meant building an entirely new record around an existing vocal. What to listen for "Music" is the landma...

The most successful duo in chart history, dismissed for decades as lightweight, and now revered by exactly the musicians whose opinion counts. Eleven tracks of Hall & Oates. Philadelphia soul in a rock band's clothes Daryl Hall and John Oates met at Temple University in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, and the city is the key to everything they did. Hall in particular worked around the Philadelphia soul scene, recording with Gamble and Huff's operation as a session singer, and the vocal approach he developed there — light, agile, heavily gospel-inflected — is what makes their records sound the way they do. They spent the 1970s finding their footing and the 1980s essentially owning the American charts, becoming the best-selling duo in history. The critical reception at the time was condescending; the reassessment since has been thorough, largely driven by musicians and hip-hop producers who noticed how sophisticated the arrangements are and how much soul i...

Eleven tracks, two interludes, and a band operating at the outer limit of what a pop group can be. All 'n All is Earth, Wind & Fire's most ambitious record. All 'n All, 1977 By 1977 Earth, Wind & Fire had already had enormous success, and Maurice White responded by making the band's most complicated album. He travelled to Brazil and Argentina before recording it, and the South American influence runs through everything — not as decoration but as structure. The record was released with an elaborate Egyptian-and-cosmology-themed sleeve by Japanese artist Shusei Nagaoka, which was entirely in keeping with White's project. Earth, Wind & Fire were a funk band that took spirituality, Egyptology and self-improvement seriously, and the mysticism was never a costume. Musically it is a band with a horn section, a string arranger, multiple lead vocalists, and a willingness to put a two-minute Brazilian interlude in the middle of a commercial albu...

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...

Forty-two tracks from the most consequential producer in the history of rap, and one of the very few whose reputation rests almost entirely on how records sound rather than what they say. Compton, and the sound of everything after Andre Young has had three distinct careers. With N.W.A he built the sonic template for gangsta rap — dense, siren-heavy, Bomb Squad-adjacent chaos. At Death Row he invented G-funk : slow tempos, Parliament and Zapp interpolations, live bass, that high whining synth line, and enough space for a rapper to sound relaxed. And from the late 1990s onward he became a discoverer, signing and developing Eminem , 50 Cent , The Game and Kendrick Lamar . The obsessive part is the mixing. Dre is famous for spending months on drum sounds and for re-recording samples with live players rather than lifting them, and the result is that his records still sound enormous on systems that did not exist when they were made. What to listen for "Nuthin' ...

Forty-four tracks assembled for the specific pleasure of staring out of a window. Slow, spacious, and completely indifferent to genre. A mix built on one quality What holds this together is not style but weightlessness . Everything here is arranged with air in it: piano and voice, acoustic guitar, the occasional string section, and almost no percussion doing anything assertive. Coldplay sits next to Prince sits next to a Czech pianist, and the transitions are seamless because the criterion is atmosphere rather than category. It is also, quietly, a covers playlist. A remarkable number of these are reinterpretations, and hearing familiar songs slowed down and stripped back is a large part of the effect. What to listen for k.d. lang's "Hallelujah" is the definitive version of the Leonard Cohen song for many people — Cohen himself said as much — and it is worth hearing next to the hundreds of lesser ones. Michael Bublé's "God Only Knows...