🟧 Spring jazz

Albums & playlists for the season.

the Etto patio / you must romanticize your life (photo by me)

Kyle Chayka: The weather in DC has been absolutely beautiful the last few days. The disappointment of this city is that there are two or three months a year, in spring and fall, when it feels like the most lush, perfect, accessible place with streets of flowering trees and a southern air of unhurried complacency. But then there’s the actual summer, when the swamp is stifling and the city reveals itself to not have been remotely designed for its current climate. (That would require the architectural vernacular of New Orleans.) Yesterday afternoon, Jess and I and some friends (including OT contributor Eliza Brooke) spent a long afternoon sitting at the streetcorner patio of Etto (we could say terrasse), a lovely Italian place, chatting, drinking pale beer, eating braised artichokes and fava beans with fresh ricotta, and watching the sun set through the leaves. “I feel like I’m an ex-pat in Spain,” one of our group said. She was right, and it should be like that more often.

At any rate there is a mood in the air, and really the only music for it is jazz: bright, fast-paced, syncopated music that captures the energy and the transitional state. Here are three playlists and albums I’ve been turning to to bring some of the spring inside. (All linked on Spotify, but find them where you will.)

Jazz Spring: I have no idea where I found this playlist originally, perhaps just searching on Spotify. But it’s made by a user named downcharlestonblvd who somehow updates a perfect playlist of jazz for each season, changing the name when the season changes. Somehow it only has 269 likes; I almost want to gatekeep this. But everyone should be on it. “2024 Spring edition! Uniquely curated seasonally,” says the description. Not false advertising: It is truly curated. The playlist mixes classic names — always enough Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Coltrane — with some more unusual musicians. It’s like a perfect radio DJ set, I play it all season long.

Bill Evans — You Must Believe in Spring: Spring can be depressing, too, or at least elegiac. The temperature isn’t changing fast enough, the bad weather drags on, cold snaps happen. This collection is late Bill Evans, recorded in 1977 and released a few years later after Evans’s death. It’s a little bit electric in a way it took me a while to get used to (it’s not the peak era, or what’s usually seen as such). But it’s a perfect journey as an album, from the slow, bittersweet builds of “B Minor Waltz” and the title track to a careening take of “Suicide is Painless” from MASH. You have to believe that spring eventually gets here, but then it ends quickly, too.

Count Basie — April in Paris: Is this actually too literal? Nah. Listening is like sitting at a Montmartre cafe table with a cappuccino and a cigarette on a sunny morning. It’s Count Basie and His Orchestra from 1955, so it has a little more big-band flair than usual. But that gives it more energy, boosted by the blaring horn section. There’s nothing not to like. Another nice thing with these reissues is that they come with outtakes, filling a full hour-plus. So you can put it on for work background and just let it run.

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