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Chilled Soul 27: A Jazzy Affair

Thirty-nine tracks where soul and jazz stop being separate things. Volume twenty-seven leans toward the piano, the standard and the late hour.

LeonZernitskyArt

A jazzy affair

The jazz end of a soul series is where curation gets hardest, because the two audiences have different tolerances — soul listeners want a groove, jazz listeners want harmonic movement, and a mix that satisfies both has to find records doing both at once.

This one solves it largely through singers. Most of the selections here are vocal, and the jazz content sits in the arrangements and the chord choices rather than in extended soloing.

What to listen for

Ahmad Jamal's "Dolphin Dance" is the most serious jazz on the list. Jamal is one of the most influential pianists in the music's history — Miles Davis reorganised his own quintet partly around Jamal's use of space — and hearing him play Herbie Hancock's composition is a genuine treat.

Melody Gardot's "Over The Rainbow" and Diana Krall's "California Dreamin'" are the contemporary jazz vocal entries, and Gardot's story — she began singing as part of recovery from a serious cycling accident — is worth knowing.

Gretchen Parlato's "Holding Back the Years" is the best track here. Parlato is a jazz singer of extraordinary rhythmic subtlety, and her Simply Red cover removes almost everything and finds something genuinely melancholy underneath.

Lizz Wright's "Speak Your Heart" and Laura Mvula's "Little Girl Blue" are the two most affecting vocals.

Maysa's "Love Is A Battlefield" is the unexpected one — the Pat Benatar song, remade as slow soul, and it works.

Alicia Keys' "Jill Scott" featuring Jill Scott is exactly what the title says, and Alan Pasqua's "Wichita Lineman" takes on the Jimmy Webb song — one of the most harmonically peculiar things ever to be a country hit.

Janita's reading of "Enjoy the Silence" reworks Depeche Mode.

Go deeper

Ahmad Jamal's At the Pershing: But Not for Me (1958) is the album that changed how jazz pianists thought about space, and it was a genuine commercial hit.

Gretchen Parlato's The Lost and Found is the record to hear from one of the most distinctive singers in contemporary jazz.

And Lizz Wright's Salt is the entry point to a singer who moves between jazz, gospel and folk without any obvious seams.

How to use it: this is dinner-and-conversation music that survives being listened to properly. Put it on for the room and it does its job; sit down with it and the harmonic detail underneath the calm surface turns out to be doing far more work than the mood suggests.

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