Lyon has a jazz pedigree that runs deeper than most French cities ever bother to advertise, and buried inside its most established station is a channel built entirely for people who want their soul music uncut. Soul Food by DJ Philgood is one of the dedicated webradios spun off from Jazz Radio, and it plays like a late-night crate-digging session rather than a playlist assembled by algorithm.
Born from France's First All-Jazz Station
The story starts on 10 January 1996, when Christophe Mahé launched Fréquence Jazz on 97.3 MHz in Lyon, becoming the first station in France to broadcast jazz around the clock. The bet worked. Within a year a Paris edition followed, and the network kept growing city by city until it rebranded as Jazz Radio in June 2008, a name that better captured what had become the country's reference point for the genre. Soul, funk, blues and gospel were folded into the schedule early on, since jazz has never really existed in isolation from those neighboring sounds, and the network eventually split many of those threads into their own dedicated webradios so listeners could tune straight into the style they wanted instead of waiting for a segment to come around.
DJ Philgood's Saturday Night Slot
Soul Food began as a live show on Jazz Radio's airwaves, with DJ Philgood holding down Saturday nights from 10pm to midnight, a slot that practically demands deep, unhurried selections rather than radio-friendly edits. That mix philosophy carried over into the webradio version, which runs the same soul-and-groove identity nonstop rather than confining it to a weekly window. Expect the kind of names that build a real soul education: Bilal, Dr John, Marvin Holmes, Barbara Acklin, Tower of Power and Madeline Bell all turn up in rotation, alongside heavier funk and rare groove selections that reward listeners who stick around for more than one track.
A City That Takes Its Groove Seriously
Lyon rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as Paris when people talk about French soul and jazz culture, but its scene has quietly outlasted plenty of louder ones, anchored by venues, record shops and a station that has now been broadcasting jazz-adjacent music for close to three decades. Soul Food fits that lineage exactly: unpretentious, well-dug, and built for listeners who already know the difference between a soul cut and a soul sample.
Tune In
Whether it is a slow Sunday afternoon or a proper Saturday night, Soul Food by DJ Philgood offers a steady stream of soul and funk pulled from a station with real jazz credentials behind it. Hit play on Radio Shuffle and let Lyon's soul side do the rest.