A few weeks before school starts, I find myself thinking about music class. Not the usual things—repertoire, instrumentation, performances, projects, or what I want students to accomplish by the end of the year. Those things are always somewhere in the back of my mind. Lately, I have been thinking about something a little different: Which artists should my students know? The question came to me while listening to Cannonball, Wesley Morris’s podcast, and an episode about Anita Baker. As I listened, I started thinking about how many artists have had remarkable careers, shaped the sound of American music, and influenced generations of musicians, yet don’t necessarily make their way into our school music classrooms. Anita Baker may be one of those artists. And then I started making a mental list: Sade, Sweetback, Maxwell, Corinne Bailey Rae, Erykah Badu. How many more musicians have we overlooked simply because their music doesn’t fit neatly into the categories we use at school?
This is where I find myself thinking about R&B. I’m not sure I want to define an “R&B artist” too narrowly. For me, there is something more interesting happening with musicians who use R&B as a foundation while borrowing from jazz, funk, gospel, hip-hop, soul, and pop when those musical languages help them tell their story or connect with a wider audience. And then I started thinking about hip-hop. What about A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock, J Dilla, or DJ Premier? Their music is deeply connected to jazz, R&B, funk, and soul—not simply because they were influenced by those traditions, but because they actively listened to them, sampled them, transformed them, and built something new. These artists complicate the way we think about genre. They also remind us that listening itself is a form of musicianship. A producer can be an artist. A sample can become a doorway into music history. A beat can connect generations of musicians who may never have shared the same stage.
I’ve seen some of this happen in my own classroom. I once taught a unit on Grover Washington Jr., and I included a George Benson recording. The unit went surprisingly well. We talked about smooth jazz, explored what made that music appealing to a wide audience, and eventually worked our way backward toward bebop. That backward movement was important. Instead of treating musical history like a straight line, students began to see connections. Smooth jazz could become a doorway into jazz history rather than a dead end. It makes me wonder what could happen if I expanded that approach. What if Sade became part of a conversation about jazz and soul? What if Erykah Badu opened a door into improvisation, hip-hop, and Black musical traditions? What if J Dilla became a way to talk about rhythm and groove? What if George Benson, the Crusaders, the Yellowjackets, and Weather Report helped students hear the spaces between jazz, funk, R&B, and fusion? The possibilities are much bigger than simply adding more artists to a curriculum.
Maybe that is what I am really looking for. Not another list of artists students should know, but artists who can help students understand that the music they hear today didn’t appear out of nowhere. It comes from somewhere. It is connected to something. And sometimes the most interesting connections happen between the categories we have created to organize the music. What are these artists listening to? What are they borrowing? What are they transforming? And what are they giving back to the musical conversation? Those questions might be more valuable than simply asking which genre an artist belongs to. So, a few weeks before the school year begins, these are the ideas bouncing around in my head. I’m thinking about Anita Baker, Sade, Maxwell, Erykah Badu, A Tribe Called Quest, J Dilla, George Benson, Grover Washington Jr., and a dozen other artists who might find their way into my classroom. Maybe part of my job as a music teacher isn’t just to teach students the music we have decided is important. Maybe it is to help them discover why it is important—and to make room for the artists who have been part of the conversation all along.
Ed Castro's Blog 