This week we’re listening to sounds to sweep us into fall. Good feeling, uptempo, a little mysterious, these albums are good company as the light starts to change and the nights grow darker.
We begin with Claude Fontaine, an “American girl with a French name,” whose soft, sweet, ye-ye inspired tracks float underneath her breathy vocals. The album seems to ask: what do reggae, bossa nova, tropicalia and Jane Birkin have in common? This record is exactly what you want playing while you’re sipping a martini. We move into an album that would pull us out of our chairs and onto the dance floor. Uta Bella is a singer from Cameroon who worked in the sixties and seventies and Nassa Nassa, as far as I can tell, is a compilation of her tracks across eras. We keep the breathy vocals and pair them with decadent, sexploitation-esque sounds—these tracks glitter and shimmer. We strip away vocals entirely for Earmeal and keep the decadence. Janne Schaffer, ABBA’s session guitarist, gives us groovy, guitar-forward tracks, the kind of music your cool uncle would love. We move into warm, golden jazz with a dash of funk from Robin Kenyatta, an alto saxophonist who played with folks like Paul Simon and The Isley Brothers. With Stompin’ at the Savoy, Kenyatta clearly wanted to bring sounds together. He’s experimenting across genre lines, throwing disco into funk and pop into disco and calling it something like jazz. We end with a favorite of mine, FR David’s Words. You might recognize the title track. Plus, if you haven’t watched the music video for “Words,” watch it now. Thank me later.
Enjoy.
Monday
La Mer - Claude Fontaine (2024)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Tuesday
Nassa Nassa - Uta Bella (1970s)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Wednesday
Earmeal - Janne Schaffer (1974)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Thursday
Stompin’ at the Savoy - Robin Kenyatta (1974)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Friday
Words - FR David (1983)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Pair with
Posole. A delicious, warm New Mexican soup for the upcoming chilly fall days (will they ever arrive?).
This Muscat Blanc. “A dry white wine with the hue of a golden kiss.” :)
This nice essay on walking without an aim. “Just as silences make music more beautiful and pauses make conversations richer in meaning, it is inactivity- that is the moving beyond doing into being- that makes life human.”
“Maybe I am not very human. What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house.” - Edward Hopper, 1962
Thank you, thank you. Have a great week.