George Duke played with Frank Zappa and Miles Davis, produced Deniece Williams and Jeffrey Osborne, and wrote some of the most joyful funk of the 1970s. Twenty-nine tracks of a musician who genuinely did everything. The keyboardist who refused to specialise George Duke was born in San Rafael, California in 1946 and decided to be a musician after seeing Duke Ellington perform when he was four. He trained seriously in jazz, then spent formative years in Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention — an education in precision, humour and genre indifference that shaped everything after. From there: work with Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis , the long partnership with bassist Stanley Clarke , a run of solo funk and fusion albums, and a second career as one of the most in-demand producers in Black music. He was among the earliest serious adopters of synthesizers in jazz, and he used them like a jazz musician — for colour and voicing rather than novelty. He died in 2013....

A Tony, an Emmy, a Grammy, and Oscar nominations — Cynthia Erivo can do anything with a song. Fifteen tracks showing what she does when nobody has handed her a script. The stage voice, out of the theatre Cynthia Erivo was born in London to Nigerian parents, trained at RADA, and became internationally known through the 2015 Broadway revival of The Color Purple , for which she won the Tony, the Grammy for the cast recording, and later an Emmy — leaving her one Academy Award short of the EGOT, with two Oscar nominations already logged for Harriet and subsequent work. What that résumé can obscure is that she is a genuinely distinctive recording artist. Erivo has enormous technical capacity — the range, the breath control, the ability to sustain a note past the point where most singers would need to breathe — and the interesting thing about her records is how often she declines to use it. Her best performances are the restrained one...

Twenty-eight tracks from a producer whose taste was so consistent that you can identify his records without knowing his name. Tommy LiPuma made beautiful things for fifty years. The last of the great record men Tommy LiPuma was born in Cleveland in 1936 to Sicilian immigrant parents, worked as a barber, and talked his way into the record business. Over the following half-century he produced more than thirty gold and platinum albums and won multiple Grammys, working across jazz, soul, Brazilian music and adult pop with a consistency that is genuinely rare. His approach was old-fashioned in the best sense: pick great musicians, choose great songs, get out of the way. LiPuma records are warm, uncluttered and beautifully engineered, and they almost never sound like the year they were made. He also co-founded Blue Thumb Records and later ran GRP and the Verve Music Group. What to listen for George Benson's "Breezin'" is the landmark. The 1976 album was t...

Savannah Cristina makes R&B that sounds like advice from a friend who has already been through it. Twenty-four tracks of soul music with its feet on the ground. South Florida's plain-speaking soul singer Savannah Cristina is from South Florida and has built her audience largely independently, with a body of work organised around a theme that most R&B treats as an afterthought: taking care of yourself. Her most-played songs are literally called "Self Love," "Self Care" and "Healing." That could easily be trite, and mostly it is not, because she writes with enough specificity to keep it grounded. Her records deal in practical detail — money, time, effort, the actual work of leaving somebody — and her voice has a conversational, slightly raspy quality that suits it. There is no melisma-for-its-own-sake here. The production leans toward warm, live-feeling soul with a Southern edge, and the whole catalogue has the coherence of...

Fifteen tracks from a producer with one of the strangest career shapes in pop: an Atlanta rapper who became a hitmaker, then a talent scout, then largely disappeared from the credits. Polow da Don's decade Jamal Jones — Polow da Don — came up as a member of the Atlanta rap group Jim Crow before turning to production, and for roughly five years in the mid-2000s he was among the most commercially potent producers in American music. His records are immediately identifiable: loud, synth-heavy, built on a hook that arrives early and repeats without apology, with a sense of maximalism that fits the ringtone era he dominated. He also had a genuine ear for artists. He is credited with discovering and developing Fergie as a solo act and worked closely with Lloyd , and his Zone 4 imprint was a significant conduit for new talent. What to listen for Usher's "Love In This Club" with Jeezy is the biggest — a number one built on a synth line that sounds l...

Tems has one of the most recognisable voices in the world after roughly five years of making records. Thirty-one tracks explain how a Lagos singer with a low, smoky alto rearranged global pop. The voice that made everyone else adjust Temilade Openiyi grew up between Lagos and Ilesha, taught herself production, and released her earliest singles independently. The voice was the whole argument from the start: a dark, unhurried alto with an unusual amount of air in it, phrased so far behind the beat that it can take a bar to work out where the downbeat is. The international breakthrough came through features. "Essence" with Wizkid became the first Nigerian song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 and effectively opened American radio to Afrobeats. Then came "Fountains" with Drake, a writing credit on Beyoncé's "Move," a Grammy for "WAIT FOR U" with Future and Drake, and an Oscar nomination for "Lift Me Up" from Black Pa...

Two Danes who moved to Los Angeles and spent twenty years writing American R&B better than most Americans. Twenty-five tracks from a partnership almost nobody outside the industry can name. Soulshock & Karlin: Copenhagen to Hollywood Carsten Schäck (Soulshock) and Kenneth Karlin met in Denmark's hip-hop scene — Soulshock was a battle DJ — and relocated to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. What followed is one of the more improbable runs in R&B: two Scandinavians becoming trusted hands for Toni Braxton, Monica, 2Pac, TLC, Whitney Houston and Fantasia. Their signature is a certain kind of dramatic, minor-key ballad — heavy on strings and piano, structurally closer to European pop than to American soul, and built for a big vocal performance. That outsider's ear is arguably why the records stand out: they were writing R&B as people who had learned it from records rather than from a scene, and the slight formality that produces gives their ...

The first woman to win a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, the Ruff Ryders' first lady, and a genuine movie star. Eighteen tracks of Eve doing all of it at once. Philadelphia's first lady Eve Jihan Cooper, from Philadelphia, arrived through the Ruff Ryders camp in 1999 and immediately did something unusual: her debut, Let There Be Eve...Ruff Ryders' First Lady , went straight to number one on the Billboard 200 — only the third album by a woman rapper to do so. She was never the most technically dazzling rapper of her era, and she did not need to be. Eve's assets were presence, timing and an unusual ear for a hook — she understood before most of her peers that the right sung chorus could carry a rap record onto pop radio without diluting the verses. Her career since has spanned film ( Barbershop ), television, a sitcom in her own name, and a long stint as a host in the UK. What to listen for "Let Me Blow Ya Mind" with Gwen Stefani is the...

One hundred tracks, no genre discipline, and a through-line you can feel rather than name. This is a year of listening, not a chart. What a year of paying attention sounds like Year-end lists usually reflect what was promoted. This one reflects what was played — which is a different and more interesting document. It moves between contemporary R&B, South African soul, neo-soul reissues, indie rock and jazz-adjacent material without signposting the transitions, because the criterion is not genre but whether a record earned its place in rotation. The result is a set that works as a portrait of a listener as much as of a year. Records from 1995 sit next to records from last month; a Coldplay album track sits next to a Kelela deconstruction. That is honest, and it is how most people actually listen. What to listen for The South African contingent is the most rewarding surprise. Mpho Sebina's "Dikeledi," Amanda Black's "ndandihleli," and Shek...

Fifty-five tracks pitched at the tempo of a long evening. Nothing here is trying to get your attention; it has already assumed it. Slow music, seriously made The downtempo half of a two-part set, this is R&B built for the hours after midnight — slow tempos, soft drums, and vocals that stay conversational rather than reaching for a big moment. What separates it from ordinary chill-out compilation fare is the quality of the songwriting; these are proper songs played quietly, not ambience with a voice on top. It also functions as a survey of the independent and adjacent-to-major R&B world, where a great deal of the genre's most interesting work has migrated. Very few of these artists get radio play. Almost all of them are worth following. What to listen for Christión's "Face Like Yours" is the historical anchor — the Bay Area duo signed to Roc-A-Fella in the 1990s, whose one album has become a cult object among R&B obsessives. Its pr...

Fifty-six tracks with the brakes off. The uptempo half of the set, and a reminder that pop music at full volume can still be genuinely adventurous. Big records, wide net If the downtempo companion is about restraint, this one is about scale — and about how thoroughly the borders between pop, rap, dancehall, Afrobeats and reggaeton have dissolved. The playlist moves between languages, continents and genres in consecutive tracks, and the joins barely show, because the common element is simply energy . What makes it more than a party mix is the choice of big records. These are largely tracks that were commercially enormous and formally interesting — a combination that is rarer than it should be. What to listen for The Carters' "APESHIT" is the statement piece — Beyoncé and Jay-Z, filmed in the Louvre, and a record whose swagger is inseparable from where the video was shot. Kendrick Lamar and SZA's "All The Stars" from Black Pa...

Nellee Hooper produced Soul II Soul, Björk, Massive Attack, Madonna and No Doubt. Twenty-six tracks from a man who quietly built the sound of British music for two decades. Bristol, London, and the invention of a certain kind of cool Nellee Hooper came out of Bristol's Wild Bunch — the sound system collective that also produced Massive Attack and Tricky, and from which the whole trip-hop genre eventually emerged. He moved to London and joined Soul II Soul , Jazzie B's collective, at exactly the right moment. What Soul II Soul did in 1989 was genuinely new: a slow, heavy breakbeat, a warm bassline, strings, and a soulful female lead. That template — sometimes called the "funki dred" sound — travelled everywhere, and it is not a stretch to say a great deal of the 1990s is downstream of it. Hooper then became one of the most sought-after producers in the world, working across genres with an ear that stayed identifiably his: spacious, rhythm-...

Remixing Bob Marley is a good way to make enemies. Twenty-one tracks argue that, done by the right hands, it can also honour him. The most argued-over catalogue in music Few bodies of work are as fiercely guarded as Bob Marley's, and remix projects have drawn genuine criticism over the years — the charge being that they smooth a revolutionary catalogue into background music for people who have not listened to the words. Sometimes that charge lands. What makes this selection interesting is that it includes several remixes that clearly do not deserve it — particularly the ones handled by people with a real relationship to the music, and the ones by producers with the nerve to actually change something rather than just add a beat. What to listen for The Bill Laswell remixes are the essential ones. Laswell — the bassist and producer behind Material and countless dub-adjacent projects — approached the Marley catalogue in his Dreams of Freedom project ...

One track. Trinidadian trumpeter, a band called BadJohn Republic, and a title that names a whole national art form. Picong: the art of the insult, played on a trumpet Picong is a Trinidadian word — from the French piquant — for a specific cultural practice: the exchange of witty, cutting, improvised insults, traditionally between calypsonians competing in extempo. It is combat conducted entirely through cleverness, and the rules are strict: you must be funny, you must be quick, and you must not actually cross into cruelty. Getting picong'd well is a compliment. Naming an instrumental after it is a statement of intent. Etienne Charles is a Trinidadian trumpeter, composer and scholar whose entire career has been about excavating Caribbean musical traditions and placing them inside contemporary jazz — calypso, kaiso, steelpan, folk masquerade traditions, Haitian and Cuban forms. He has built projects around Carnival, around folklore, and around the Gullah ...

A monotone that could carry any beat ever made, and the man who first took rap into a room full of jazz musicians. Thirty-three tracks remembering Guru. Keith Elam, 1961–2010 Guru — born Keith Edward Elam in Boston, the son of a judge, and a Morehouse graduate — was one half of Gang Starr with DJ Premier, and one of the most distinctive voices rap has produced. It was not a technically flashy delivery. It was flat, unhurried and completely unmistakable, and it sat on top of Premier's chopped, dusty production like the two had been designed for each other. His other great contribution was Jazzmatazz , launched in 1993: a series that put him in the studio with actual jazz musicians — Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers, Branford Marsalis, Courtney Pine — rather than sampling them. At the time this was close to heretical in both camps. It is now the obvious ancestor of everything from The Roots to Robert Glasper's Black Radio . He died of cancer in April 20...

An eight-track record by a singer who went viral for a song about wanting to leave the planet. It is funnier, sadder and better made than the internet moment suggested. These Songs Are For Anyone Sick Of Earth Aliah Sheffield broke through with "Earth Is Ghetto" — a song that took off on TikTok on the strength of a sentiment a great many people apparently shared, expressed in a chorus about wanting to go home to a planet she does not come from. What got lost in the virality is that it is a genuinely well-made record. The joke is real, but so is the melancholy underneath it, and the vocal arrangement — layered, gospel-inflected, harmonically ambitious — is the work of someone with serious training and taste. This project builds an entire short album around that combination of humour and exhaustion. What to listen for Read the tracklist as a sequence and the concept becomes clear: "Earth Is Ghetto," "Some Of Your People," ...