VMP Magazine
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The 10 Best Soul Jazz Records to Own on Vinyl
Jazz began life as social music (but not #SOCIALMUSIC… sorry, Don Cheadle). The advent of bebop had drawn some chin-strokers into the audience, but dancing was still most of jazz's raison d'être until the late 1950s, when intrepid early explorers of the music's harshest angles — John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler — began to delve into music that, while still intended for collective uplift, was hardly conducive to rug-cutting. Meanwhile, another set of largely Black musicians were making inroads in mainstream pop by adding increasingly sleek flourishes to more dancefloor-friendly R&B, in a stylistic amalgam we've all come to know as soul music.
