Listening Session Vol. 4

There's a specific quality to late night that music either understands or doesn't. The air is different. Time moves at a different rate. The things that mattered at seven o'clock have receded. What remains is just the present hour, and however you're choosing to spend it.

Vol. 4 understands late night. Karate Boogaloo open it with Eyes on the Prize — not the civil rights anthem, a Melbourne funk track that uses the same title to entirely different ends, and sounds better for the comparison. Ikebe Shakedown follow with Dram, which does something unusual: it sounds cinematic without sounding like a film score. Like a scene that hasn't been filmed yet.

Surprise Chef are a band that could appear on every Smoothmix playlist without ever feeling overused — they have that rare quality of fitting inside whatever context you put them in while still sounding unmistakably themselves. Have You Fed Baby Huey Today and Money Music bookend the session's middle section with the same ease.

Nubya Garcia's Together Is a Beautiful Place to Be is the emotional center of Vol. 4. Garcia is one of the most important voices in contemporary British jazz, and this track earns that description without working for it. It's simply, obviously, undeniably beautiful. Matthew Halsall brings spiritual weight with Mountains, Trees and Seas — his label Gondwana is one of the most consistently excellent things in jazz right now. Vincent Peirani and Emile Parisien bring something more European and formal with Egyptian Fantasy, which works as a counterpoint to everything around it.

Karate Boogaloo close with Space Language. By that point in the night, the name makes complete sense.

Long nights are good when they're chosen. When you decided to stay up, when there was no particular reason to go to bed, when the session extended itself naturally because nothing wanted to end. Vol. 4 is the soundtrack for that kind of night.

The jazz here isn't background music — it's company. It has opinions and feelings. It asks something of you, which is just to be present while it plays. That's a reasonable ask. Roll a smoothmix blend somewhere between Nubya Garcia and Matthew Halsall and you'll see what we mean by the magic of long nights.