When Smooth jazz works
Smooth jazz is a punchline, and most of the catalogue earns it. Somewhere around 1986 the genre discovered the digital saxophone patch and spent fifteen years not recovering.
The decade before that is a different story. Between roughly 1974 and 1984 a handful of players took soul-jazz, cut the solos down to something a radio could carry, and made records that are harmonically far more interesting than their reputation allows. Winelight has a Marcus Miller bass line on nearly every track. That is not background music, it only agrees to behave like it.
This is the morning station because it's the one music that tolerates being half-ignored without punishing you for it. Put it on at nine, notice it again at eleven.
Where it came from
Two things made this music and then one of them ruined it. The first was CTI and its sister label Kudu, where Grover Washington Jr. recorded Inner City Blues in 1971 — a soul-jazz record with the solos cut to radio length and the arrangements kept lush.
The second was radio itself. KTWV in Los Angeles launched as The Wave in February 1987 and gave the format its name and its rules: no vocals to speak of, no sharp edges, nothing that makes a listener reach for the dial. Washington's Just the Two of Us had already shown that the formula could sell; the format spent the next fifteen years proving it could be followed by anyone.
There is an earlier and better-tempered version of the same idea: quiet storm, which Melvin Lindsey started at WHUR in Washington in 1976 and which kept the singers.
Smooth jazz: five records
- Grover Washington Jr., 1980Winelight.
The genre's best record and the reason the genre exists. Just the Two of Us took a Grammy for its songwriters and left the rest in its shadow. Washington recorded it as a session leader with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, and the Bill Withers vocal on Just the Two of Us was added almost as an afterthought.
- George Benson, 1976Breezin'.
A serious guitarist deciding to sell records. The album went to number one with one vocal on it. Benson's guitar and voice track the same line in unison throughout, a trick he took from scat singing and which half the next decade's guitarists copied.
- Bob James, 1974One.
Where the whole sound starts. Also, improbably, where a large share of hip-hop's drum breaks come from. Nautilus, the closing track, flopped on release and then became one of the most sampled recordings in hip-hop; Bob James has said he has lost count.
- Spyro Gyra, 1979Morning Dance.
Steel drums on a jazz-fusion record in 1979. Sounds like a terrible idea and isn't. The steel drums are played by Dave Samuels on vibraphone and marimba doubling, not by a pan player, and they sit oddly in the mix because of it.
- Sade, 1984Diamond Life.
Not a jazz record, but it sits in exactly this room. Stuart Matthewman's saxophone is the whole argument for restraint. Sade Adu wrote or co-wrote every song, and the band had been playing them live for two years before anyone offered them a contract.
The honest objection
David Sanborn's Voyeur has a better claim to a place here than Spyro Gyra, and it's a better album. I left it off because three saxophone-led records out of five turns the page into a single instrument's highlight reel. That is an editorial reason, not a musical one, and you may reasonably think it's the wrong call.
The faces on the records
William Gottlieb photographed the New York clubs between 1938 and 1948 for Down Beat and the Washington Post. The Library of Congress holds the negatives; the pictures are in the public domain.
