In 1963, one of the great musical decades kicks into high gear - you could barely drop a hi-fi needle or crank the dial on your transistor radio without landing on a masterpiece, from the Kingsmen's al …

Of course, we have to begin our Afrobeat playlist with the music's founder, Fela Kuti. Fela recorded more than 40 albums during his career, but in 1999 they were distilled onto The Best Best  …

The claves. The timbales. The congas. The horns. Afro-Cuban music is more than a combination of instruments and sounds. It's more than the mixture of epochal rhythms from Africa and sinuous melodies fr …

Many folks' initial encounter with Afropop came via David Byrne or Paul Simon (or, for an earlier generation, via The Tokens' adaptation of "Wimoweh"). Not bad for a start, but it spurs the question, i …

Before reggae, ska was the sound of Jamaica. It was born in the '60s when a new breed of Jamaican visionaries turned American R&B inside out and spiced it up with an island flavor, giving the world a n …

Ska never fades away - it evolves in new directions with each passing generation. By the '90s, a third wave had taken hold when a fresh crop of American - mostly Californian - kids who came up on the h …

One day, when your inquisitive kids ask, "Mommy, Daddy - what's `downtempo'?" you won't have to break down the details of dance music history. Instead, you can simply say, "It's a state of mind." Mello …

Downtempo comes out of club culture, but it's about much more than just beats. Bands who base their sounds around singers and pop-schooled song structures dive into the downtempo pool all the time, and …

When Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson started their independent label back in 1947, could they have envisioned the soul-music powerhouse that would emerge? Guided in the studio by producer Jerry Wexler  …