Dinner Music #192: The weekly lineup

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This week we’re listening to weirdo new age, funk, and jazz, with a little bit of pop and a lot of 80s. I was driving around Memphis last week and I heard a Paul Davis song on the radio, which led me into this funny, wandering world of related sounds. I took a poetry class last weekend in Sewanee at the writers conference and the instructor, Ananda Lima, had us do this exercise where we free wrote based on the simple prompt “we arrived.” Then she had us go through the individual words and great unexpected pairs. Here’s a few of mine:

Worse mountain
Bob Dylan edge
Big see
Freshly person
Looking up birds
Mountain means

I think music can be like this. A song can get better when its placed next to this song, or that song. It can also get worse, to be fair. A question I ask of myself a lot is: what is playlisting for? Is it bad? Are the albums better? I don’t have answers, not yet. I’ll write more about this later, I think. But I think these unexpected pairs or groups of songs can create new worlds out of music.

We start with Celebration by Sally Oldfield. I think one of these songs appeared in the movie The Drama, which I haven’t seen. Oldfield is from a family of music. Her brother, at age 19, recorded the early prog-rock album, Tubular Bells, and people liked it, but what really set it off was that the opening theme was used in the soundtrack for The Exorcist. Oldfield became friends with Marianne Faithfull (DM #120) in school and went on to record over a dozen albums. Her voice floats over modulated synths and plucked piano keys like a angel at times, dipping in and out of a high register. The song “Blue Water” alone is a journey worth going on. We move into The Oimels by Wolfgang Dauner, a German jazz musician who experimented widely, across genre, across instrumentation, to achieve an over six-decade career of never staying the same. This album feels like an record The Beatles might’ve made if they’d all went to jazz school, especially the second track, “Take Off Your Clothes And Feel The Setting Sun,” while there are other tracks, like “Come on in on in,” which calls back to Indian ragas (DM #191). Next, we have Sons of Ethiopia from Admas, an album recorded from the community of Ethiopian exiles who left their country and decamped to Washington DC during the Derg, a period of military dictatorship; this is one of the few Ethiopian recordings to have been produced outside of Ethiopia at this time. Of the album, critic Chris Richards wrote: “Summoning traditional Ethiopian melodies from the newest instruments within reach (synthesizers, drum machines, electric guitars), Admas specialized in paradox, generating exquisite new grooves that felt high-tech and low-budget, worldly and local, futuristic and nostalgic, funky and delicate.” We stay with the afro-sound in Ka Rica-Tar from Hector & The Malcouns, a group based in Munich. This record feels a bit birthed out of the previous two, with the hands of Western jazz players moving toward musical traditions abroad, especially African and Middle Eastern rhythms. This is kind of like if Khruangbin were funkier, dancier, with a little more of a nightlife pulse. You can feel how much of a good time the musicians were having when you listen to the songs. We end with Cool Night from Paul Davis, a successful singer and songwriter in the 70s and 80s and native Mississippian, who also, wildly, survived being shot in the torso in the late 80s. I’m a little bit obsessed with this album. It’s perfectly 80s, while delivering a gilded melancholy that hits right in the soft part of your gut. (I lied, I’m really obsessed with this album). Brad Kyle has a detailed account of Paul Davis’s entire career.

Enjoy.