Compliments of KTNT, Oklahoma City's Smooth Jazz Authority


When i say Smooth Jazz you think Kenny G. Sure, but what actually is Smooth Jazz? Well, historically speaking it's the soft, polished, mass-market Muzak form of Jazz Fusion that rose to prominence in the 80s and 90s. It's Adult Contemporary Jazz, so meticulously designed to be inoffensively non-confrontational that it was simply called "smooth radio" in the 70s. Which of course means that by the 90s it was so aurally offensive as to be a joke. 

For our purposes, let's say it's the melding of Jazz, Light Funk, R&B, and Pop into the audio equivalent of shea butter based moisturizing skin cream. Shea butter is totally edible, so we're going to suspend any trepidations and proceed without any cultural assumptions at all. Well, maybe a couple. It will be groove based, rather than impovisation driven. It will be sappy, but we're going to think of it in terms of Marty Friedman's crossover into New Age. Last, we will accept that sounding like the mainstream, acceptable version of sensual is the goal. We're not traveling in blind, though. We're going to take the trail marked on your father's map, and even if we emerge sixpence none the richer, at least we should still have all our appendages. So join me in a little adventure i'm calling Compliments of KTNT, Oklahoma City's Smooth Jazz Authority.

Part 1

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

Eyrth - Meridian

Image
A terrible sadness accompanies the release of Meridian by Latvian Ambient Metal band EYRTH. Since their debut Fracture in early 2019 the band, and indeed the whole world has suffered a global pandemic, intense ideo-political turmoil, the death of friend and bandmate Igor Golovin, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The war in Ukraine still wages on, even though we in the Western hemisphere seem to have largely forgotten. These are turbulent times, and Alex and Andrey are rightfully entering an extended break. We may not see or hear new music from them for a while, if ever, and that is completely understandable. The music they've created, however, is truly breathtaking. Self-described as "Uranium wreckage in audio," the music of Eyrth is every bit as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutally crushing. Close your eyes and you'll quickly find yourself in the achingly cold and desolate wasteland of human technological atrophy. Slow, ponderously heavy, at times rabidly ragi
Read more

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Hit & Run Holiday

Image
I noticed today that the strange part of the world who actually knows about My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult has finally accepted that they are in fact "industrial disco." The history of Wax Trax and Chicago industrial music is a subject worthy of an entire library, but MLWTTK is my favorite band to emerge from those humble record store beginnings. They are an unpredictable band for sure, and i definitely don't like all of their albums, but Hit & Run Holiday is an album i think every human being on the planet should hear at least once. This album is simply impossible to describe, because it doesn't actually belong to a musical genre as we understand them. It's actually a movie. I know that sounds weird, but the band is actually a movie. My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was the name of the movie they were trying to make, but composing the soundtrack led them so far afield that they just shrugged and kept going as a band instead. All of their albums come f
Read more