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Straddling the late Sixties and early Seventies, the "progressive" label was pretty much everywhere. There was progressive rock (albeit in a somewhat different sense from today's), progressive folk (from Tim Buckley to Pentangle), progressive jazz (where, incidentally, the adjective first gained musical currency), progressive blues, progressive pop... And there was progressive soul. This term was used for many of the era's most celebrated black music artists: Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, the Isley Brothers, Funkadelic, the early Earth Wind & Fire, and Kool And The Gang. An article from the time put it this way:

There's a significant market of young, sophisticated Black consumers who are either in college or in their late teens […] This market wants product that has the exciting, funky element of traditional r&b bands. But they also demand the high production quality that's been developed for rock records

(Nat Freedland, Billboard, 1974)

A fairly broad field, then, one that narrowed as styles like disco became more clearly defined. After peaking in the first half of the Seventies, “progressive soul” became a rarely invoked pairing, to the point that today – at least here in Italy – it's practically been forgotten. In recent times, however, several American critics have revived the phrase, seeing it as a useful common thread linking some of the most adventurous soul/r&b artists of past and present. The subgenre now has its own Wikipedia page and has even been the subject of academic study. This playlist will attempt to trace its evolution.

Another kind of “prog”?

Before following this story, one essential point needs to be made: “progressive soul” is not simply a Black-music calque of “progressive rock”, and the label shouldn't be understood as a transposition of symphonic prog-rock's defining traits into a Black musical context. Rather, both terms are late-Sixties declensions of the then-dominant idea of “progressive music”: a fairly vague and undeniably trendy notion that broadly identified the segment of popular music trying to move beyond established formulas, blending styles, embracing new technologies, using the album format to build coherent artistic statements, and pushing musicians beyond the role of “puppets of the record industry” to which they'd previously been confined.

The first artists to be routinely described as “progressive soul” were those riding the auteur-driven, in some ways symphonic wave of the early Seventies: chief among them was undoubtedly Curtis Mayfield. Alongside him, other names frequently linked to the term were Funkadelic and, above all, War: expanded lineups with a musically open horizon and – crucially – an unprecedentedly rock-oriented edge (although, in interviews from the period, War themselves said they felt “insulted” by the comparison to rock music). Another recurring trait is the political and social weight of the music, “progressive” not only in its compositional choices but also, in some cases, quite radical in the message of racial emancipation it so consciously carried.

As the years went on, however, “progressive soul” increasingly came to mean the instrumentally sophisticated funk of Earth Wind & Fire, The O'Jays, Ohio Players, Isley Brothers – less charged on the social front. It would take somewhat longer for the term to become associated, more prominently later on, with complete artists like Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. The latter, with his four-album run of “Talking Book”/“Innervisions”/“Fulfillingness’ First Finale”/“Songs In The Key Of Life”, is often cited today as the genre's chief symbol, but at the time the perception seems to have been different.

Looking back, one can see just how much overlap there was with the “psychedelic soul” of Sly & The Family Stone, the Temptations or Rotary Connection. Arranger and Rotary Connection member Charles Stepney is in fact an essential figure for understanding the progressive leanings of soul music at the turn of the Seventies. Besides shaping the lush symphonic reworkings of rock classics for which Rotary Connection are remembered, Stepney launched the solo career of another band member, Minnie Riperton, and handled production, arrangements and keyboard parts on Terry Callier's unforgettable “What Color Is Love”, an album in which even the most skeptical listeners will have little trouble spotting common ground with progressive music as it's commonly understood.

For those wishing to dig deeper into the more explicit connections between funk/soul and prog proper, the compilation includes a few more esoteric references: Detroit's own Rare Earth (among the few white acts signed to Tamla/Motown), the rock-leaning Demon Fuzz and Mandrill, Peter Brown's eclectic pomp-rock/proto-disco blend, and the emphatic smooth soul of Billy Paul and Lamont Dozier.

Decline and revival

With the second half of the Seventies and the consolidation of disco music – largely born of the same artists, but stylistically more cohesive and more expressly aimed at the dancefloor – the phrase “progressive soul” gradually fell out of use. It resurfaces sporadically throughout the Eighties, mostly in reference to formulas perceived as “arty” and compositionally ambitious: most of these mentions concern two names, Prince (especially around the colorful “Around The World In A Day”) and Sade.

During the Nineties, the rise of neo-soul prompted critics to dust off the label, highlighting its resonance with the auteur-driven, musically eclectic approach of artists like D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Maxwell, Lauryn Hill, Me'Shell NdegéOcello. If the progressive undercurrents in the music of ex-Fugees member Hill may seem less obvious, the same can't be said for the ever-shifting evolutions of NdegéOcello, whose albums have featured fusion masters of every era, from Jack DeJohnette and David Torn to Pat Metheny, Robert Glasper, Marcus Miller, Mino Cinelu and David Fiuczynski.

The relative prog-soul revival found its most committed champion in Washington Post journalist Geoffrey Himes: he used the term in 1988 to discuss the British strand led by Sade (“U.S. Soul, Reborn In Britain”), put it in the title of his 1994 piece on Seal and Des'ree (“Two Who Revive Progressive Soul”), and returned to it again in 2001 in reference to Bilal's debut (“Bilal ‘1st Born Second’”). Himes' perspective did much to redefine the genre's “canon”, centering it on the figures of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.

Once past the turn of the millennium, the amount of music that fits neatly under this label grows considerably. Progressive traits and nods to the classic funk/soul of the Seventies – already conspicuous in certain acid jazz offshoots (think Jamiroquai) – become evident in a variety of broken beat artists (Mark De Clive-Lowe above all) and nu jazz acts. The same holds true for the hyperkinetic fusion of Esperanza Spalding or the many musicians signed to Brainfeeder (from Thundercat to Hiatus Kaiyote), whose wonky sound owes as much to D'Angelo's rhythmic insight as to the passion for unquantized beats shared by J Dilla and label boss Flying Lotus.

Geoffrey Himes also returned in 2013 to weigh in on post-2000 developments (with the piece “The Curmudgeon: Black Bohemian Music from Sly to Prince to Janelle Monáe”, published in Paste). On that occasion, the journalist traced a line running from Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and Sun Ra through Prince, Tracy Chapman and the Roots, arriving at last, via Janelle Monáe, in the present day. The risk of creating spurious groupings is real, and Himes himself seems to sense it, proposing a shift from “progressive soul” to the broader phrase “black bohemian music”, meant to emphasize the strong expressive drive of the sounds it would categorize. Either way, plenty of observers detect a close progressive kinship in the inventive retro-futurist formula of “The ArchAndroid”.

New perspectives

In more recent times, a study by musicologist Jay Keister has helped further reframe the terms of the debate. “Black Prog: Soul, Funk, Intellect and the Progressive Side of Black Music of the 1970s”, published in 2021 in the American Music Research Center Journal at the University of Colorado Boulder, points out that in the 1970s the term “progressive” didn't solely designate the “white”, British-rooted prog-rock, but included on equal footing music with a strong African-American identity. Alongside Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Lee, Keister also cites Miles Davis, George Clinton and Sun Ra. The complex musical universes of the latter two artists, united by an influential Afro-futurist perspective, are at the heart of the article, which, drawing on the case studies examined, identifies a few key characteristics of “black progressive” music.

The first of these is the assertion of the musician's artistic individuality. In “black prog”, this is free not only from the demands of record labels, but also from the aesthetics of the 1960s “Black Arts Movement”, whose intellectuals were explicitly hostile to the idea of an “art for art's sake” that wasn't a direct expression of the community and its social struggles. The activist drive that characterized part of early prog-soul, then, wouldn't be an essential element of progressive black music. Another distinctive trait, for Keister, is the move beyond the song format through extended structures; unlike in symphonic prog-rock, however, this expansion isn't achieved by breaking the track into partially unrelated sections on a rhythmic, melodic and harmonic level. Instead, the music tends to ride an unbroken groove, over which instrumental developments and repetitions unfold, marked by shifting timbres, textures and degrees of intensity. Finally, the extensive use of stylistic hybridization and the construction of elaborate sonic worlds are traits shared with progressive rock in the conventional sense, though in “black prog” artists they take on a specific inflection (tied to jazz, psychedelia and Afro-futurist aesthetics in the two cases examined).

Although Keister's focus is on the 1970s, and the artists he discusses aren't representative of the entire “progressive soul” spectrum, his analysis maps effectively onto a good portion of the other artists featured in the compilation.

A label with a checkered fortune, “progressive soul” is less a genre than a cross-cutting lens, useful for revealing connections between seemingly distant artists and offering food for thought to listeners. It can also be seen as an additional tile in the prog mosaic, a contribution toward reconsidering the accusations of “white chauvinism” that have been disingenuously leveled at progressive music over the decades. However one chooses to approach it, the playlist's forty tracks offer a rich, ever-shifting cross-section of more than fifty years of black music. Whether the term is headed for further currency in the near future or for a new phase of obscurity, only time will tell.

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15/01/2026