Samora Pinderhughes – Venus Smiles Not in the House of Tears (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 42:11 minutes | 490 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Good Cloud Day
Can you call someone a “niche artist” when they have so many niches? Samora Pinderhughes came up as a jazz pianist, studying at Juilliard under Kenny Barron and working with Chief Adjuah and Herbie Hancock. But he’s also an Emmy Award–winning composer, lyricist, vocalist, filmmaker, social-political activist, and scholar (working on a PhD at Harvard University) who’s also worked with Common, Lalah Hathaway, Sara Bareilles, and Emily King—and that’s just on the music side. A synthesis from such a wide yet distinctive palette of influences and collaborators must be too idiosyncratic to be anything but a niche product. But I’ll be damned if I can tell you what that niche is.
Venus Smiles Not in the House of Tears, the first half of a promised album duology from Pinderhughes, reflects that wide-ranging background. He has a firm connection to the singer-songwriter movement, and guitar-driven pieces like “Inertia,” “Gatsby,” and “Drown” bear traces of the folk/rock origins of that movement. Yet in each case, there’s a hearty wedge of 21st-century electronic production and, on “Inertia,” dancefloor polyrhythms and broken beats.
Tracklist:
1-1. Samora Pinderhughes – Better (03:37)
1-2. Samora Pinderhughes – Inertia (04:40)
1-3. Samora Pinderhughes – Gatsby (04:17)
1-4. Samora Pinderhughes – Hands (03:48)
1-5. Samora Pinderhughes – Slow Time (04:59)
1-6. Samora Pinderhughes – Versus (02:03)
1-7. Samora Pinderhughes – Storm (02:31)
1-8. Samora Pinderhughes – Drown (04:59)
1-9. Samora Pinderhughes – Erased (00:47)
1-10. Samora Pinderhughes – WCID (06:29)
1-11. Samora Pinderhughes – Forgive Yourself (03:58)
