Dinner Music 134: The weekly lineup
lush jazz improvisation, exotica, dream-like sounds
This week we’re slowing down. A little bit jazz, a little bit exotica, a little bit lounge. Lots of newer music, though not all. I could spend years in this sound space, to be quite honest, especially the sweeping piano.
Speaking of that piano, we begin with Entrance Music by Okonski, an “invitation to early hours, where songs linger in the doorway, announcing their presence before returning to the air, in a meticulous drift into the next.”1 The album came together after five days of sessions, recorded onto tape, at Portage Lounge in Ohio. Pastoral, yes, but also empty city streets at three in the morning. At once deeply introspective and imminent, the album feels transcendental, in the most rustic of ways. Next, we have A Study of Losses, an album recorded for Swedish circus Kompani Giraff by the band Beirut. The album, characterized as wide-ranging chamber folk, was deeply inspired by a book titled (in English) An Inventory of Losses by German writer Judith Schalansky. Here’s an excerpt:
The world, though, only grieves for what it knows, and has no inkling of what it lost with that tiny islet, even though, given the spherical form of the Earth, this vanished dot could just as easily have been its navel, even if it was not the sturdy ropes of war and commerce that bound them one to the other, but the incomparably finer-spun thread of a dream. For myth is the highest of all realities and—so it struck me—the library the true theater of world events.
This feel is woven into the texture of the music, like an emotional scraping of innards, viewed both with a cold remove and with the warmth of a kind-of nostalgia. We move into enigmatic figure Eden Ahbez, best known for composing the song “Nature Boy,” popularized by Nat King Cole (I first heard it in Moulin Rogue). Around the same time, Ahbez was found to be living underneath one of the L’s of the Hollywood sign, studying mysticism. He said that “Nature Boy” came to him via “the mist of the California mountains.” A documentary is on its way, apparently in a licensing phase, but the trailer is here and very intriguing. We maintain a bit of that mystery with Jamael Dean’s Oriki Duuru, which translates to “piano poems” in Yoruba. The album is the result of Dean’s stream of consciousness, played from the piano bench, with echoes of Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, Wayne Shorter, and others. Dream-like, in its way, there’s an urgency to the way Dean plays on each track, an unfolding that remains cloaked until its revealed. We end with a favorite of mine from last year, Days As Echoes by Misha Panfilov. I was listening to this album a lot while I read Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, and I highly recommend the pairing.
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, jazz, folk, samba, hi-life, disco, funk and more, lovingly selected.
Plus, paid subscribers get a monthly playlist (here's April’s), albums recs for new music, and access to the “for consideration” weekly playlists (2-5 hours of additional music!).