John Legend

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• Top 6 Contemporary R&B Artists of All Time

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• Usher

  Usher's 2004 album Confessions sold more than 10 million copies in the United States alone, becoming one of the best-selling R&B albums of the 21st century and establishing him as the defining male R&B star of the early 2000s. His combination of technically precise dancing, drawing directly on Michael Jackson's influence, and his smooth, emotionally expressive vocal delivery made Usher one of the most complete R&B performers of his generation, equally regarded for his live performance ability and his studio recordings. Usher's mentorship of younger artists through his own record label, including his early discovery and development of Justin Bieber, extended his industry influence well beyond his own recording career into shaping the subsequent generation of pop and R&B stars. His sustained commercial relevance across more than two decades, adapting his sound across R&B, dance-pop, and hip-hop-influenced production trends while maintaining his core vocal and performance identity, has made Usher one of the most consistently successful R&B artists of the contemporary era.

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• Alicia Keys

  Alicia Keys's 2001 debut album Songs in A Minor combined classical piano training with contemporary R&B and hip-hop-influenced production, and her formal musical education, including years of classical piano study, gave her songwriting an instrumental sophistication distinct from many R&B contemporaries. Her 2009 single "Empire State of Mind," a collaboration with Jay-Z, became one of the most enduringly popular songs specifically associated with New York City, frequently played at the city's major sporting events and public celebrations well beyond its original chart run. Keys has won 17 Grammy Awards across her career, reflecting sustained critical recognition alongside her commercial success, and her combination of genuine piano virtuosity and soulful vocal delivery distinguished her from R&B contemporaries relying more heavily on outside production and songwriting collaborators. Her continued advocacy work, including co-founding Keep a Child Alive to support children affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa, has extended her public influence beyond music into sustained humanitarian activism throughout her career.

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• Frank Ocean

  Frank Ocean's 2012 album Channel Orange, released alongside his personal essay revealing his first love had been a man, made him one of the first major mainstream R&B artists to openly discuss same-sex attraction, a significant moment for LGBTQ visibility within a genre that had historically offered limited space for that openness. His atmospheric, genre-blending production, incorporating elements of psychedelic rock and ambient music alongside traditional R&B songwriting, distinguished Ocean's sound from more straightforwardly commercial contemporary R&B, and his work is frequently cited as foundational to the subsequent "alternative R&B" movement. Ocean's extended, unexplained absences from public releases and touring, including a four-year gap between Channel Orange and 2016's Blonde, became a defining feature of his public persona, reflecting a deliberate rejection of the conventional album-cycle promotional schedule most major artists follow. His combination of genuine artistic ambition, his significant role in LGBTQ visibility within R&B, and his unconventional relationship to the traditional music industry release cycle have made Ocean one of the most critically influential R&B artists of the 2010s, despite a relatively modest total recorded output.

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• SZA

  SZA's 2017 debut album Ctrl became a critical and commercial breakthrough, blending R&B with alternative and indie influences, and its unusually candid, anxious lyrical exploration of insecurity and romantic uncertainty distinguished her songwriting from more conventionally confident R&B lyrical themes. Her 2022 follow-up album SOS spent multiple weeks atop the Billboard 200 and became one of the best-selling R&B albums of the decade, reflecting SZA's growth from a critically acclaimed but commercially modest debut into one of the genre's most dominant contemporary stars. SZA's willingness to publicly discuss anxiety about her own musical output and perfectionism, including lengthy delays between album releases driven by her own self-critical process, gave her a relatable, less polished public persona distinct from more tightly managed pop star images. Her combination of genre-blending production, unusually vulnerable songwriting, and sustained commercial dominance in the early 2020s has made SZA one of the most significant and influential R&B artists of her generation, shaping the sound of numerous subsequent younger artists in the genre.

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• The Weeknd

  The Weeknd, born Abel Tesfaye, built his early career through a series of free mixtapes released with minimal promotional information, deliberately maintaining anonymity and mystery around his identity during his earliest rise, a marketing approach that became central to his initial cult following before his mainstream breakthrough. His atmospheric, darkly themed R&B, addressing drug use and toxic relationships with a deliberately bleak emotional tone, established a distinctly moodier alternative to more straightforwardly romantic mainstream R&B, and his sound significantly influenced the broader "alternative R&B" movement of the 2010s. His 2020 album After Hours and its accompanying visual aesthetic, including a recurring bloodied-suit persona across music videos and public appearances, reflected The Weeknd's continued interest in cinematic, conceptually unified visual presentation extending well beyond the music itself. His performance at the Super Bowl LV Halftime Show in 2021, reportedly self-funded at significant personal cost to achieve his specific creative vision, reflected The Weeknd's continued insistence on artistic control, and his combination of atmospheric genre-blending and massive commercial success has made him one of the most significant R&B artists of the 2010s and 2020s.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.