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Alexander Zonjic VibeZ

Eleven tracks of flute-led smooth jazz from a man who has been part of Detroit's musical furniture for four decades. Unfashionable, beautifully played, and better than its genre's reputation.

Detroit's flute

Alexander Zonjic is a Canadian-born flautist based in Detroit, and his career is a useful reminder that in some cities a musician can matter enormously without ever registering nationally. As a broadcaster on Detroit radio and the long-time host of major jazz festivals along the Detroit River, he has been one of the region's most important musical advocates as well as one of its most recorded players.

His musical home is smooth jazz — a genre routinely dismissed, and not always unfairly. But the criticism misses what the best of it does: it is functional music of a high order, played by musicians with real chops, aimed at a particular kind of unhurried listening. Zonjic is a genuinely excellent flute player, with a clean tone and a gospel-inflected sense of phrasing, and this playlist shows him at his most substantial.

What to listen for

The covers reveal the taste. "People Get Ready" — the Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions hymn — is treated with real reverence. "People Make the World Go Round," the Stylistics' most cynical and beautiful song, keeps its melancholy. "Amazing Grace" opens the set with no accompaniment tricks at all.

"Undun" is the highlight: the Guess Who song, with Maysa — the voice of Incognito, and one of the great British soul singers — on vocals. It is worth the price of the whole playlist.

The collaborations map his position in the music. Bob James appears on "Passion (Tadzio)"; James is the pianist whose "Nautilus" became one of the most sampled records in hip-hop history, and a founding figure of this entire genre. Guitarist Dwight Sills features throughout.

"Adagio" closes on the classical borrowing that smooth jazz has always been fond of.

Go deeper

The flute has a richer jazz history than it gets credit for. Hubert Laws is the virtuoso — his CTI records bridge classical technique and jazz feel. Bobbi Humphrey's Blacks and Blues, produced by the Mizell Brothers, is the funkiest flute record ever made and a crate-digger's staple. Herbie Mann is the populariser; Yusef Lateef the most adventurous.

For the Detroit thread, the city's jazz lineage runs extraordinarily deep — Barry Harris, Donald Byrd, Elvin Jones, Geri Allen. Zonjic's festivals have kept a lot of that visible.

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