The album that closed out the greatest R&B band of its generation, made by three people who were barely speaking. Eleven tracks, and not a wasted second. House of Music, 1996 Tony! Toni! Toné! — brothers Raphael Saadiq and D'wayne Wiggins with cousin Timothy Christian Riley — came out of Oakland and spent the early 1990s doing something almost nobody else in R&B was doing: playing their own instruments, writing their own songs, and treating the album as the unit of work. House of Music was their fourth and final album, released in 1996 amid the tensions that would break the group up shortly afterward. It is also comfortably their best — a record that moves between gospel, funk, doo-wop, hip-hop and straight soul without ever sounding like a genre exercise, because the band could actually play all of it. Its influence is out of proportion to its sales. A great deal of what neo-soul became was worked out here first. What to listen f...

Eight songs, five hit singles, and roughly twenty million copies sold. Can't Slow Down is the sound of a man who had already conquered country radio deciding to take everything else. Can't Slow Down, 1983 Lionel Richie had spent the 1970s as the frontman and principal songwriter of The Commodores , writing "Easy," "Three Times a Lady" and "Sail On" — ballads so successful that they arguably obscured how good a funk band the Commodores actually were. He went solo in 1982, and in 1983 released this. Can't Slow Down won the Grammy for Album of the Year and sold on a scale that puts it among the biggest records of the decade. What is striking about it now is the range: eight tracks that take in Caribbean-influenced pop, a country-leaning ballad, a synth-driven rocker and one of the most-played love songs ever written, all in under forty minutes. Richie's particular gift was writing songs that sounded like standards on first...

He invented the sound of 1990s R&B, ran a house full of teenage artists, and then largely vanished. Twenty-one tracks of DeVante Swing's strange, brilliant, difficult legacy. The architect of the bad-boy R&B group Donald DeGrate Jr. — DeVante Swing — was the producer, multi-instrumentalist and creative director of Jodeci , the group that arrived in 1991 and immediately made every other R&B act look overdressed. Where Boyz II Men wore matching suits and sang about commitment, Jodeci wore leather and combat boots and sang about everything else, and the production underneath was harder, sparser and more gospel-derived than anything else on radio. DeVante's influence runs much wider than his own group. His Swing Mob collective — the artists living and working in his New York house, sometimes called Da Bassment — included Timbaland , Missy Elliott , Ginuwine , Static Major and Playa . Essentially every major innovation in late-1990s R&B ...

Cleo Sol does not do interviews, rarely tours, and has made some of the most beautiful soul records of the last decade. Sixteen tracks of an artist who lets the music do all of it. The quietest great singer in Britain Cleo Sol — Cleopatra Nikolic — is from north-west London, of Serbian, Spanish and Jamaican heritage. Her career has been built almost entirely without conventional promotion: minimal press, few live shows, no attempt to construct a persona. She is central to SAULT , the anonymous collective whose albums arrived without warning, without artist photographs, and occasionally with a limited window before being withdrawn from streaming. SAULT's records — produced by Inflo , Sol's frequent collaborator and partner — are among the most acclaimed and least explained bodies of work in recent music. Her own albums, Rose in the Dark , Mother , Heaven and Gold , are gentler and more direct: warm, gospel-inflected soul about motherhood, grief...

Yebba sings like the last thirty years of R&B did not happen and she is still working from the source material. Eighteen tracks of a genuinely extraordinary instrument. West Memphis to everywhere Abbey Smith — Yebba, her first name reversed — is from West Memphis, Arkansas, and came up singing in church. She became known through a live performance of "My Mind" at Sofar Sounds in 2016: an entirely improvised, unaccompanied song, recorded on a phone camera, that circulated among musicians until essentially everyone in the industry had seen it. What people responded to was not just the range, considerable as it is, but the control — the ability to move between a whisper and a full belt within a phrase, and to place notes with the precision of a jazz singer. Her mother died by suicide shortly before that period, and a great deal of her subsequent work has dealt with grief directly. Her debut album Dawn arrived in 2021, produced largely wi...

Seventy-six twelve-inch mixes, extended versions and re-edits. This is the format at its purest: records built to keep a floor moving rather than to fit on the radio. Why the twelve-inch changed everything The twelve-inch single was a technical accident that became an art form. Cutting a record at 45rpm across a twelve-inch disc allowed wider grooves, which meant more bass and more volume — essential for club sound systems. It also meant room for longer versions, and DJs and producers in New York in the mid-1970s immediately worked out what to do with that room. The result was a whole vocabulary: the extended intro built for mixing, the long instrumental breakdown, the dub section where the vocal drops out and the rhythm carries alone. Tom Moulton is generally credited with inventing the disco mix; what followed shaped house, hip-hop and essentially all modern dance music. This playlist is that tradition in practice, running from 1979 to the present. What to liste...

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...