BLOG 03/11/2020
The Jan Diaries — Future Classic: Byron The Aquarius, ‘Ambrosia’
Scratch the surface of electronic music, Jan Kinčl argues, and techno, house and jazz turn out to be one family — a relationship that has rarely been in better health than it was in 2020. This entry in The Jan Diaries makes the case through one record: Ambrosia, a double 12-inch by the Atlanta keyboardist and producer Byron Blaylock, who records as Byron The Aquarius, released on Jeff Mills’ Axis. Underground Resistance’s Galaxy 2 Galaxy from 1993 is the historical marker Kinčl uses for the same intersection.
How the record came about
The backstory is a small chain of coincidences. Byron was best known for the High Life EP he made with Kai Alcé, another Atlanta producer, and Kinčl had hosted Alcé in Zagreb before a Berlin booking. During that stay Alcé mentioned a Byron collaboration with Jeff Mills he could not talk about; a month later a phone photo arrived showing Kai, Byron and Jeff together in a studio. The obvious guess was that it would surface through Spiral Deluxe, Mills’ band project. It did not. Six months on, Axis announced a Byron album; six months after that, the Ambrosia double 12-inch landed.
It was cut in Atlanta over several days as a band record, with Byron as bandleader — Lil’ John Roberts on drums, Sheldon Ferguson on guitar, Dashill Smith on trumpet, Rasheeda Ali on flute and the Brazilian Chocolat Costa on bass, with Mills producing and supervising from Detroit. Byron wrote everything and played all the keyboard parts. Kinčl owns and loves every Spiral Deluxe release, but argues that on those records the seams between compositional elements are visible, often underlined by Mills’ 909 parts. On Ambrosia the joins disappear: written, arranged, played, recorded and mixed with an unusual amount of feeling.
The part that stayed
What the album most reminded him of was New York house of the early nineties — specifically Mondo Grosso’s Shelter Vocal Mix of Star Suite by Shinichi Osawa. The opener New Beginning, piano and Rasheeda Ali’s flute, sits squarely in that lineage; Edgewood Ave runs from Herbie Hancock through early Quincy Jones; Space & Time is a jazz-house banger whose trumpet sections were built for a dancefloor; and Timeless carries Byron’s own narrative vocal over a dominant bassline. The vinyl adds a dub mix of Timeless and a jam-session version of Space & Time, the digital three instrumentals, and Kinčl defends the alternate versions as classic jazz practice — separate pieces, not variants. His only regret in November 2020 was not being able to hear any of it on a dancefloor.
Read the full piece
The full review, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Four minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Budući klasik: Byron The Aquarius Ambrosia → redbull.com