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Acid Jazz was party music born in the mid-80s mostly out of London with a more improv feeling mixing jazz, soul, and hip-hop with a stylish feel. Neo-soul, OTOH, came out of Philly in the mid-90s and was/is less about dancefloor moves and a lot about personal, intimate songwriting with  serious influence from hip-hop's lyrical stylings and rhythm. Racist attitudes from corporate moneymakers is a whole other thing tho and a continuing "nadir" when it comes to the music biz. Genre labels are kind of like old trail signs in a forest. When the paths were simple, a sign pointing "Jazz" or "Rock" made perfect sense. Now the forest has exploded into thickets and hybrid gardens, and everyone’s building weird new paths, so yeah, the signs are messier. But if you’re inside one of those new trails, the sign matters a lot. It tells your little corner of the world where you are. The explosion of styles isn’t just noise - it’s culture evolving in real time.

Why isn't the 1963 Julliard set currently on American (and hardly any!) CD? Sony Classical, WTF?!?!?!?!?!

I mean, when did "Acid Jazz" become "Neo-Soul". like....just like that, boom. That is totally illogical on the face of the evidence. It seems like a pretty clear case of a logical, linear multicultural evolution. But the word "Soul" brings it out of the global realm and into a very specific American frame of reference. Them Damn Dumb Americans at it again. Now we can has marketing and now we can has things to be ok that weren't so much before. There was a Monday interview online long ago (and long ago lost) where she said that when she was trying to get Verve to handle her releases in America that a BIG obstacle was that she considered her music Soul and Verve told her point blank no, you can't have Soul, Yellow don't have Soul. Call it something else.  And that's as close to an exact quote as I can muster these days. So you know, everybody all yeahyeahyeah one world coming together and all that shit, but the obstacles are deeply entrenched and incentivized to dumb down EVERY fucking thing. And so they do.    

I remember jazz acts a-plenty that I'd read about in the British papers, so I looked it up: so maybe you missed them on the nights you went (?) Well, they're meaningful to some folks out there - mainly because the crossover influences make the styles stray out of tight genres that some folks want.

Increasingly meaningless labels, oth, seem to be exponentially thriving!