Dinner Music 105: The weekly lineup
pysch-soul, pioneering japanese jazz piano, cosmic whisperings
This week’s selection is inspired by the intense urge against cooking. A baffling feeling for me always, I love to cook, then sometimes, I don’t. I’m sure many of you can relate. The sonic quality of the music this week is light and airy, three of the five albums are instrumental (not intentionally, though it makes sense why they might end up there), a soundtrack for doing something you don’t want to do, but must.
We begin with Chris Cohen’s album Paint a Room, which makes good on its promise. The album continually paints, and repaints, space, creating “these types of frozen-in-time vignettes” (from a Pitchfork review). The hazy and warm vocals thread with a seventies sensibility — a little of psych, a little bit of rock, a little bit of jazz, a little bit of folk. It’s “sunlit and sublime” (from his Bandcamp). We move into Ashra’s dynamic, uneven, fun, psychedelic album that walks the progressive line between new age and disco. Some tracks are heaters, others are soft, gentler. One thing I love about this album is that the prog rock community hates it. There are many complaints about disco and “infernal electro beats,” which are very much my thing, and probably yours as well. We move into Hirth from Earth, maybe the album I’m most excited about this week, an album full of “UFOs as well as loneliness and self-doubt.” The cosmic melodies pair with surf-leaning guitar and Hirth Martinez’s mid-range timbre, his singing style verges on speaking, and you do get the sense he’s trying to tell you something. Next, we have mid-century Japanese-American pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi, a pioneering female jazz musician who paired her American training with her Japanese heritage to build a sound uniquely her own. One review from 2000 said her work had a “level of compositional and orchestral ingenuity that made her one of perhaps two or three composer-arrangers in jazz whose name could seriously be mentioned in the company of Duke Ellington, Eddie Sauter, and Gil Evans.” We end with Ironsides, a psych-soul project with orchestral kinks from the Bay Area.
Enjoy.
Monday
Paint A Room - Chris Cohen (2024)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / Other streaming services
Tuesday
Correlations - Ashra (1979)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Wednesday
Hirth from Earth - Hirth Martinez (1975)
Spotify / Other streaming services
Thursday
Toshiko's Piano - Toshiko Akiyoshi (1958)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Friday
Changing Light - Ironside (2023)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Pair with
Balsamic Chicken Thighs With Burst Tomatoes. This is a very easy thing to make when you don’t want to make anything. Plus, tomatoes somehow feel like they are also a fall food. To me, at least.
The Marigny Mixed Emotions chillable red. I don’t like red wine but I like this one!
This interview between Merve Emre and Sally Rooney. “When I feel full of life, full of this fictitious life that doesn’t happen in our world, but in a world very close at hand, I want to be able to bring that to somebody who picks the book up, even if it’s just one person.”
A trip to see Chris Cohen. He’s halfway through his tour! If you’re in Austin, he’ll be at Radio/East on Friday.
Thank you, thank you. Have a great week.