This week we’re listening to jazz and its many fusions. Each album has a strong atmosphere, both grounded and expansive, laced with groove and fluidity, making for a collection that’s swimming in mood and texture.
We begin with Grant Green’s Visions, an album that compiles a handful of Blue Note performances from 1971. Disregarded somewhat when it came out as being too “overly commercial,” the album ages well, with its electrifying, piano-heavy arrangements and light-touch atmosphere. The vibraphone on “We’ve Only Just Begun” (a song originally by The Carpenters) juxtaposes the melody and occasionally echos it — there’s a nice metaphor hiding in there somewhere. Next, we have Bobbi Humphrey, a female jazz flautist and first female musician signed by Blue Note (and fellow Texan), and her album Blacks and Blues, which is dense with “grooves…lots of vintage synths, wah-wah guitars and rhythmic interplay.” Not strictly jazz, the album features R&B-influenced vocals and pop-soul sensibility, with a “cumulative effect…like a soft summer breeze.” We move into something softer, yet still potent, with Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness, an ambient jazz album that came out last year that shape-shifts with each listen, at once casual and complex. On an album titled “Endlessness,” it’s interesting that each track is titled using the word “continuum.” Similar, yes, though not the same, yet both still evoke something central to the core of the album, which is, at once, moving through continuous sequences with slightly altered parts while illuminating a sense of expansiveness — that endlessness quality at the center of each track. We take that expansiveness and apply it outward with Berlin-based RAS. Shalosh takes cues from greek, turkish and arabic music and balances their sound between “psychedelic soul, Mediterranean disco and…globally appreciative funk.” This is a very fun one, boogie-forward and hypnotic, eternally evocative of the Mediterranean coastline. We end with early acid jazz album Two Headed Freap from the acclaimed organist Ronnie Foster. A cherry at the end of the week.
Enjoy.
Paid subscribers have access to the full Dinner Music archive (via Spotify and Apple Music), an after hours playlist, a “New York Grooves” playlist and more — hundreds of hours of groove, soul, jazz, folk, samba, hi-life, disco, electro, post-punk, funk and more, lovingly selected.
Visions – Grant Green (1971)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Blacks and Blues – Bobbi Humphrey (1973)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Endlessness – Nala Sinephro (2024)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Shalosh – RAS (2021)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Two Headed Freap – Ronnie Foster (1972)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Pair with
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Cajun garlic butter shrimp with pesto pasta. Cajun! Garlic! Butter! I think you could apply these to any particular piece of food and it would be very good.
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Lambrusco rosé. Depending on where I am, people will occasionally look at me like I have five heads when I try to order a ‘dark rosé.’ Luckily, that didn’t happen at Flos and I was directed to this very good, and affordable, one.
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Essay: How Susan Sontag taught me to think. From 2019. “Sontag was also aware of living in emergency conditions, in a world menaced by violence, environmental disaster, political polarization and corruption. But the art she valued most didn’t soothe the anguish of modern life so much as refract and magnify its agonies. She didn’t read — or go to movies, plays, museums or dance performances — to retreat from that world but to bring herself closer to it.”
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What on Earth Is Eusexua? “The trancelike feeling she [FKA Twigs] is celebrating may well be music’s evolutionary purpose, and is in particular need lately.”
Thank you, thank you. Have a great week.
