Kevin Le Gendre's splendid Soul Unsung is not the first book of popular scholarship on black music, and it will certainly not be the last; like the sweeping repertory it covers, the literature on soul, funk, R&B and related genres ranges far and wide, deep and high. Although Le Gendre's broad topic is not novel, his well-chosen focus on instrumentalists in a music long analysed with respect to vocal eminence marks the work as uniquely valuable. What's more, Le Gendre's writing is energetic and rich without being cloying: tight, authoritative, satisfying in its descriptive breadth, and frankly groovy. If the body of black music journalism and scholarship is an old standard, Soul Unsung is a tasty solo played on a honey-smooth horn, soaring over those familiar changes with dazzling creativity and unimpeachable chops.

Le Gendre has laid down a compelling, original line with which to trace the history of black popular music. His decision to organise chapters according to saxophonist King Curtis's spoken-word call-out of bass, drums, guitar, keys and horn on ‘Memphis Soul Stew’ (1967) is as charming as it is useful, creating dedicated space for close examination of each instrument's contributions in turn, even as the text as a whole traces cross-cutting themes, personalities and aesthetics (sampled breakbeats, for instance, make appearances well before their chronological time in central chapters on the major soul instruments). Without erasing the colossal presence of singers, Soul Unsung valorises players famous and obscure, from Motown's bass hero James Jamerson and funky favourite-son Maceo Parker to session players and sidemen few remember, highlighting individual talents and group dynamics in equal measure. Where would funk be, Le Gendre asks, without bassists slamming down that all-important ‘one’? Could soul be soul absent those bright horns, those swelling strings? The band, we come to understand, is the ready bed when James Brown feels like being a sex machine; it's the ‘propers’ Aretha needs so bad, the flowing river giving faith to Sam Cooke that a change gon’ come.

This story of instruments, players and bands, although it has been told less often than the story of vocal triumphs, is not at all a move away from the music itself, its history and meaning. From the start the author emphasises from the start that African-American musical expression has always been vocal, instrumental and communal, from field hollers incorporating percussive body slaps to orchestral jazz. Soul Unsung shines light on black music's generative dialectic between the strength of the group and the pride of the talented black individual in a demoralising world. In this respect, the author's approach is a right-on nod to black popular music as a sociopolitical as well as aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, what Le Gendre writes of keyboardist George Duke's playing is equally true of his own approach, despite its relative lack of explicit attention to social context: ‘He still had to tap into the foundations of African American folk expression. He still had to obey a fundamental cultural as well as musical impulse’ (p. 154).

A lot of books concerned with black music and musicianship stop somewhere in the 1980s, at the vaguely defined point when many players laid down their instruments; synthetic sounds have been largely dismissed from scholarship on soul, funk, R&B and jazz and transferred into the discourse around hip hop and ‘club music’. This split is not complete or static, yet its salience is undeniable and, I think, to the detriment of the historical record. Happily, Soul Unsung avoids sycophantic reverence for the acoustic or analogue over the digital and electronic, instead elucidating the uniquely black expressive potential of synths, sampling and programmed beats in the second half of the book. For this author, continuities between soul and hip hop, funk and disco or breakbeat are as real and relevant as the soul-jazz, soul-funk and soul-rock nexuses he painstakingly details in Chapters 4–6.

Le Gendre's ‘big ears’, it seems, shut nothing out, no matter how musically controversial or ambiguously ‘black’: alien synths, the folksy turn in neo-soul, black rockers and white funksters, French-language soul music, melody-free rap tracks, even hyper-produced R&B radio fluff are all gathered into the fold, and receive a broad-minded listening. The driving impetus here is Le Gendre's faith in what Amiri Baraka (Reference Baraka1968) might term the ‘changing same’: a perseverance of African-American expressive aesthetics through time and space and across modalities.

Because Le Gendre's work is so smart, it is occasionally disappointing that Soul Unsung is short on formal references to other texts. The author's own take would hardly be undermined if he engaged, for instance, with Ingrid Monson's work on jazz rhythm sections (Reference Monson1996), Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky's reflections on Afro-rhythmic sensibility in electronic dance music (Reference Miller2008), or even Baraka's excursus on ‘the blues’ as a black musico-cultural value. Yet while a few missed opportunities to help bridge the longstanding divide between academic and journalistic musicology aren't really disruptive to Le Gendre's narrative, Soul Unsung hits a more jarring wrong note in its generally scant treatment of women musicians. Granted, Le Gendre is focused on players, and more of those have been men than women. Yet the author could have devoted additional space to the female performers he does include, and concurrently toned down the masculinist language with which he frames talents, soundscapes and player ideologies throughout the narrative. While I could almost number on my fingers the women who appear in this book, I gave up counting instances of ‘muscular’ as a musical descriptor. Curiously, nuanced discussions of bassist and singer Meshell Ndegeocello in several places reveal that Le Gendre is well up to the task of giving thorough treatment to a female musician when he chooses. Surely, this work could only be enriched by similar R-E-S-P-E-C-T to more women players.

Soul Unsung is not just an expert work of musicology but also a celebration, the kind of really great party that makes you wish everybody you know were there, ‘grooving together’ (p. 295), even if it meant the place was packed to bursting. Given this history's overabundance of personages, Le Gendre has done an admirable job of curating, and we can only hope that any gaps mean more book-length studies will be forthcoming from this sho 'nuff funky author.