The Musik Lounge

As I was contemplating this piece, sitting with the three albums being inspected, I was struck with a lot of thoughts around my journey to Jazz. Recently I mentioned my first hearing Kind of Blue and my inability to grasp the beauty of it at the time. I was a high schooler who was consumed with rap just beginning to step away from the stars of the era and digging into an underground that was vibrant and diverse. I had more digesting to do. This is a repeated pattern throughout my sonic history. I find some music that strikes a chord and I dig in. The napster fueled download era was a dream. Then came the blog era which also rewarded this kind of deep dive. I was trapped in a purgatory of my own making as streaming took rise and was fairly tuned out from anything that wasn’t equally dark and hopeless. As I emerged from that darkness and began hearing names I hadn’t heard of before, exploring this world of modern Jazz became the new quest. Initially it seemed too vast, too much. But I ...

  What led me to this social music I find myself so enraptured by today? I grew up a fiend for hiphop, I found my way into working with rappers as a member of the media and as an aspiring label owner . I found my way to being a fiend for substances and in the process let my love for the art form slip away. Recently a question was posed on a jazz subreddit I lurk on about what was your doorway into the music. I was instantly flooded with a memory of my High School student chemistry teacher Ms. Simmons sharing a burned copy of Kind of Blue with me. The fuse was lit, and I didn’t dislike that record - but it would take some years to get me back to it and to dig deeper. When I started exploring dollar bins at an assortment of record stores as a Freshman in Seattle and picked the brains of diggers I’d begun to cross paths with my interest in this distinctly American artform started to enlarge. At this point it was all about the samples, although at times I would find things that I enjo...

As I’ve dove back into musical exploration (and specifically record collecting) it has been a focus to dig into the modern Jazz movements happening throughout the world. Today you can hear vast styles being created, evolved and examined from countless places. In this music you will hear influences from new and old sonic architects, young cats who grew up on hiphop and are incorporating reinvigorated rhythms, modern production techniques and elevating the ideas of swing and groove into a sound that is equally modern and classic. In this exploration I’ve come across scenes in cities I hadn’t been aware of prior. Paris has long been a space for expats from the Jazz scene to land and yet I generally associated it with haute couture rather than anything new musical. That was until I stumbled upon Favorite Recordings .  When I hit upon their discography it was ear opening. Styles upon styles abound if you dig into their catalog. The first one to catch my ear was a forthcoming release fro...