The Jan Diaries — Contemporary Californian Soul for Sunny Days

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 7 June 2019

The June 2019 entry of The Jan Diaries is a seasonal listening list: three albums from the American West Coast released that spring, chosen for the weather, plus one older record that had worked its way back into Jan Kinčl’s rotation. The common thread is contemporary soul that keeps one hand on classic funk and jazz while the production looks forward.

What the piece covers

First is Ventura, the fourth album by Anderson .Paak, which Kinčl rates as the best thing to have crossed into the pop domain in years. It sits on the axis between seventies soul and R&B and the golden age of hip hop: Reachin’ 2 Much turns Moodymann-adjacent after about ninety seconds, Yada Yada opens on a moog bassline built for open-air parties, Twilight lands somewhere near Peven Everett, and Jet Black is singled out as the winner. Dr. Dre’s production gives it a deliberately crunchy finish, and the guest list — André 3000, Smokey Robinson, Lalah Hathaway, Jazmine Sullivan, Sonyae Elise, Brandy, Nate Dogg — speaks for itself. Second is The Loop by Shafiq Husayn, a fourth solo album reportedly five years in the making, out on Eglo Records alongside Fatima, Floating Points, Steve Spacek, Henry Wu and Dego. Husayn is one third of Sa-Ra Creative Partners with Om’Mas Keith and Taz Arnold, a name taken from Sun Ra, and the record sits between Flying Lotus and the Parliament-Funkadelic camp, with J. Dilla, Earth, Wind & Fire and Brides Of Funkenstein audible underneath. Erykah Badu, Bilal, Hiatus Kaiyote, Robert Glasper and Anderson .Paak all appear.

Third is Flamagra, the sixth album by Flying Lotus, released on Warp. “Šesti studijski album jednog od rijetkih artista koji su uspjeli izgraditi svoj potpis do razine da je postao žanr za sebe”, Kinčl writes of a producer whose signature became a genre of its own, and who through Brainfeeder pushed a whole strain of jazz-literate electronics into the mainstream. Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, George Clinton, Little Dragon, David Lynch, Thundercat and Solange all pass through. Many tracks run only a minute or a minute and a half, functioning as miniature stylistic exercises rather than finished pieces; the album began life as a collection of beats and kept some of that sketchbook character. Kinčl warns it takes several listens and then becomes hard to put down. The bonus recommendation is 4hero’s Play With The Changes, thirteen years old at the time and still undated.

The part that stayed

The three albums are arranged along a line: Ventura looks back toward Philadelphia soul of the seventies, The Loop injects futurism into the same tradition, and Flamagra pushes the paradigm further forward still. What Kinčl values most is what all three leave out — the reflexes of contemporary pop, hip hop and trap. That absence, he argues, is exactly what will let these records still sound good in a decade.

Read the full piece

The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Six minutes.

The Jan Diaries | Suvremeni kalifornijski soul za sunčane dane → redbull.com