Dinner Music 107: The weekly lineup
mid-century space race, ethereal jazz, post-exotica
This week we’re listening to very nice music. Think: mid-century space race, shag carpet, Walter Cronkite on the TV, smoking cigarettes inside and ashing into a crystal bowl, sipping a martini, the tang of an olive on your tongue. I love those fun little sounds, the blips and boops and whoooos of the theramin, distorted warbles of a chord progression on an organ, the zipzang of the Flex-A-Tone. The albums and playlist this week should put you in a very good mood.
If this newsletter had a halloween costume, it might be something like a Pan-Am flight attendant, mid-century alien, eames chair, 1950s housewife, Carmen Miranda.
We begin with a very charming album released in the mid-nineties from Japanese group 800 cherries, an album with an ethereal texture made of whispering vocals and tinkly keys. This feels like bedroom pop before we had a name for it (their debut album was released first on cassette). We move into Barney Kessel “playing the standards,” the sound here is perhaps the textbook definition of very nice music, in the best way. Kessel, an American jazz guitarist with deep chops, plays with an ease and lightness, but also with an exactitude that makes me think this album would sound incredible on a hifi stereo system (this also feels like something Murakami would have certainly put on in his jazz club). If you’d like to look wistfully out of a window, put this on right away. If you’re looking for something a bit more upbeat, but no less jazz-forward, we have Fievel Is Glauque’s fresh album Rong Weiknes, a “giddily hyperkinetic, vividly colored, unabashedly maximalist record.”1 This is shaping up to be a favorite of the year for me, don’t miss it. We move into a Ghanian record from the mid-seventies from The Sweet Talks, whose sound blends highlife, funk and afrobeat, with a touch of softness, a bit of romanticism runs through each track, as if an ode. A wildly great record, reissued by Soundway Records in 2010, and thank god, can you imagine if you never got to hear this? We end with a very nice, post-exotica instrumental album from Texas-raised, Brooklyn-based artist Kolumbo. Plus, a bonus record from a Pearl & The Oysters, who were featured a few weeks ago, but I saw them last night and the show was too wonderful for me to not bring them up again.
Enjoy.