Skip to main content

Chilled Soul Vol. 7

Fifty-six tracks and the most genre-indifferent volume in the series — jazz vocals, Persian classical, Icelandic folk, gospel and British soul in one sitting.

Related image

ChilledSoul 7

The seventh volume is where the series' definition of soul music stops being a genre and becomes a temperature. Nothing here is filed under the same heading and everything belongs.

The connective tissue is a preference for acoustic space, unhurried tempos and voices used at conversational volume. Once that is the rule, an Ella Fitzgerald recording and an Icelandic songwriter's debut turn out to be doing very similar things.

What to listen for

Axiom Of Choice's "Valeh" is the most unusual thing here — an ensemble working in Persian classical tradition with Mamak Khadem singing, placed in the middle of a soul playlist without comment.

Sweetback appears twice, which is a knowing choice: they are Sade's band recording without her, and their instrumental records are the missing link between her catalogue and instrumental trip-hop.

Ella Fitzgerald's "Azure" is the oldest recording on the list and the one that makes the case for the whole exercise — a Duke Ellington song sung so lightly it barely disturbs the air.

Herbie Hancock's "Don't Give Up" with P!nk and John Legend comes from The Imagine Project and is a far better record than that description suggests.

Ásgeir's "Going Home" is the Icelandic entry, Pamberi's "Calypso Do Lite" is the Trinidadian one, and Somi's "Ginger Me Slowly" is the jazz-African one.

The Emotions' "God Will Take Care of You" and The Stylistics' "Children of the Night" are the classic-soul anchors, both Charles Stepney and Philadelphia productions respectively.

London Grammar's "Hell To The Liars" and Rachael Yamagata's "I'll Find a Way" are the best-sung contemporary tracks.

Robert Glasper's "Open Mind" is the instrumental centre, and Sade's "It's Only Love That Gets You Through" is the record everything else here is arranged around.

Go deeper

Sweetback's self-titled debut is the essential find from this set and one of the best instrumental soul records of the nineties.

Axiom Of Choice's Niya Yesh is worth hearing in full, and Somi's The Lagos Music Salon is the album this volume most clearly recommends.

What holds it together: not genre but volume. Every track here is sung or played at conversational level, with acoustic space around it, and once that is the rule a 1950s jazz vocal and a Persian classical ensemble turn out to be doing very similar work. The set is the strongest argument in the series that soul is a temperature rather than a category.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more