The Quiet Storm

Quiet storm is a radio format and genre of R&B, performed in a smooth, romantic, jazz-influenced style. It was named after the title song on Smokey Robinsons’s 1975 album A quiet storm.

Quiet storm was most popular as a programming niche with baby boomers from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. During this era, it promoted a noticeable shift in the sound of R&B of the time. Quiet storm songs were in most cases devoid of any significant political commentary and maintained a strict aesthetic and narrative distance from issues relating to black urban life. Quiet storm appropriates R&B and soul “slow jams” and recontextualizes them into rotations with their peers and predecessors.

Music journalist Jason King wrote, “Sensuous and pensive, quiet storm is seductive R&B, marked by jazz flourishes, ‘smooth grooves,’ and tasteful lyrics about intimate subjects. As disco gave way to the ‘urban contemporary’ format at the outset of the 1980s, quiet storm expanded beyond radio to emerge as a broad catchall super-genre. Ben Fong-Torres of Rolling Stone called quiet storm a “blend of pop, jazz fusion, and R&B ballads—all elegant and easy-flowing, like a flute of Veuve Clicquot champagne.

Top artists: Con Funk Shun, Al Jarreau, Anita Baker, Dionne Warwick, Luther Vandross, Maze, Natalie Cole, The Valentine Brothers and many more…