Dinner Music 93: The weekly lineup
the soul of mid-summer, poolside grooves, afro-funk
This week we’re exploring summer sounds — albums we’d put on by the pool, tracks we listen to again and again. I wasn’t intentionally selecting for genre, but the playlist naturally shifted into a more soulful mood, with lots of late-sixties and seventies tracks. It’s a feel good kind of week.
We begin with a classic, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. Is summer the key of life? Vox doesn’t seem to think so, but I whole-heartedly disagree. Summer is a season for tenderness and passion, for languidity, hazy happiness, erupting sadness — the spirit of these feelings are at the heart of Wonder’s album, which goes “beyond mere words, into pure expression.”1 The album is full of complexity of life and of the world, much as we are. It’s an album for being in the thick of things. We move into an album that is pure embodiment, like the anticipation of an arrival. Let The Festivities Begin! is a tour de psychedelic groove; a feel-good frolic through fields of pleasure. The all-female, instrumental quartet blends genre into a frozen swirl of summer sounds, with cumbia, jazz-fusion, funk, global groove and psychedelia inducing you into a gentle buzz, sans hangover. We stay with guitar-forward, nostalgia-laden vibes with Jorge Santana, Carlos Santana’s younger brother. This collection of his solo recordings from the seventies is exactly as it sounds — an intensely vibrant, kaleidoscopic collection of disco-adjacent, larger-than-life tracks. “Picture Blood Sweat & Tears fused with Chicago fused with Afro-Cuban rhythms and guitar-driven rock. It was Santana on steroids.”2 Next, we have a snapshot of a particular time in South African music history: the era bubblegum. Bubblegum is synth-heavy, distinct by the homage paid to traditions of mbaqanga, marabi and kwela, and was a direct clap-back to the popularity of American music in the previous decades. Ntombi Ndaba’s soulful voice juxtaposes the eighties kitsch of instrumentation on Tomorrow, a collection of tracks from her short-lived career. If you are a fan of afro-synth, start here. We end with a distinctly UK-sounding electronic record from Swimming Paul. If you’re looking for dance-floor-epiphany-montage sounds, this is for you (also for fans of Fred Again).
Enjoy.
The playlist
Monday
Let The Festivities Begin! - Los Bitchos (2022)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Tuesday
Songs in the Key of Life - Stevie Wonder (1976)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Wednesday
Love The Way - Jorge Santana (1970s)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Thursday
Tomorrow - Ntombi Ndaba (1980s)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Friday
Smiling Through the Pain - Swimming Paul (2024)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Pair with
Hasselback teriyaki tofu with cucumber. This looks easy but also delicious — I’ve never made tofu this way, but I’m deeply intrigued. Seems very simple for a weekend afternoon meal.
Frozen cherry aperol spritz. Can I think of a more perfect poolside drink? No? This is the one.
This review of an Andy Warhol exhibit in West Texas. Written by yours truly. Where does living authentically end and fetishization begin?
The third issue of music mag Wax Poetic. Featuring a big a profile of Patrice Rushen and another on Detroit techno!
Love Injection Lot Radio. This duo has unbelievable taste and the grooves they’re throwing down on their Lot Radio session are worthy of a listen.
“I remembered what someone said once about traveling, that sometimes the body moves somewhere too quickly for the soul and the soul is taking its sweet-ass time to catch up because the soul is not on speaking terms with the body but regardless, the body is a lonely animal without the soul, so I thought, maybe it is time for me to sit very still and wait for the soul and I u understood how melodramatic that was but I decided not to care because, after all, someone else had said it first and even though I couldn’t remember exactly who it seemed that they were very old or European or both—someone somehow trustworthy.”
From Nobody is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey
I’ll be DJing the W Hotel pool this coming Sunday in Austin, TX. Grab a pass here and come say hi :)
Have a great week.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/songs-in-the-key-of-life-186350/
https://www.npr.org/sections/altlatino/2020/05/19/857397725/jorge-santana-malo-guitarist-and-latin-rock-maestro-dead-at-68