When singer-songwriter Erykah Badu’s debut album, Baduizm, hit the airways in 1997, she introduced a new musical style that captivated audiences. Motown Records’s Kedar Massenburg marketed it as neo soul, describing its uniquely blended elements of soul, R&B, jazz and funk. A few years earlier, the sound of Tony! Toni! Toné!’s Sons of Soul (1993) and D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar (1995), reverberated the 1970 soul sensibility that some critics identify as the first recordings of neo soul. The prototype for neo soul as a distinctive genre, however, appears to be Me’Shell NdegéOcello’s Plantation Lullabies (1993), in which the spoken word tradition is delivered over soul, funk, hip-hop and jazz-derived tracks in a variety of tempos.

In the new millennium, artists continue to identify with and celebrate the 1960s/1970s soul legacy. Retaining the soulful vibe (“Couldn’t Hear Me,” 2003) in the competitive music industry, Eric Roberson refers to himself as a “soul survivor.” Newcomer Leela James describes her singing as “back porch soul,” which is evident in her covers of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (2005), Al Green’s “Simply Beautiful” (2009) and James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” (2009). Although John Legend keeps alive the acoustic sound in “All of Me” (2013) and other songs, by the second decade of the 2000s, the 1990s contemporary soul aesthetic had begun to transform, moving in a different direction as artists crossed many new genres and experimented with advanced technologies.

The core features of neo soul combine the spoken word with aspects of jazz and soul. The signature singing style is characterized by a cross between speech and song. Its subdued delivery favors slow and moderate tempos, and the rhythmic flow “lags behind the beat,” an approach unique to Billie Holiday and emulated by Dinah Washington and many jazz singers. This speech-derived aesthetic juxtaposes percussive and melodic qualities. It gives preference to a narrow pitch range that uses one note per syllable (syllabic text setting), unlike soul which favors melismatic melodies with several notes per syllable. Recordings such as “Higher” (D’Angelo), “Booty” (Erykah Badu), and “It’s Love” (Jill Scott) retain the organic flavor of soul through the use of live musicians (rather than, or in conjunction with, synthesizers, computers, and samplers) playing instruments of the soul era: drums, percussion, acoustic piano and guitar, Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer pianos, Hammond B-3 organ, trumpet, trombone, and saxophone.

In the new millennium, the neo soul aesthetic morphed into new and different sounds with the incorporation and even the domination of synthesized instruments. Marsha Ambrosius’s “Late Nights & Early Mornings” (2011), for example, blends synthesized strings, an acoustic piano, and electronic drums with the sound effects produced by the Auto-Tune, a digital device used to manipulate vocal and instrumental timbres. Erykah Badu fully exploits the Auto-Tune technology in P-funk-influenced “Love” (2010). Furthermore, artists began producing entire projects on laptops using music software as did Erykah Badu on New Amerykah (2008). Despite these changes, the vocal stylings and sparse and sometimes live instrumentation of 1990s neo soul pioneers lingers in the creations of several R&B artists of the new millennium, such as John Legend.