Taste

Taste · Sound · No. 10 Silence Is Expensive Now Quiet used to be the background condition of the world, free and everywhere. It has become a product with a... Read more...

Van Gelder's Living Room

An optometrist by day recorded the golden decade of Blue Note in his parents' living room. On Rudy Van Gelder, microphone placement as signature, and the room as instrument. Read more...

Nujabes, in Full

Jun Seba, the Tokyo record shop owner who married jazz samples to hip hop melancholy, scored Samurai Champloo, and quietly founded the sound half the internet works to. Read more...

Crates of vinyl records in a record store

The Cover Was the Second Album

Reid Miles art-directed nearly five hundred Blue Note sleeves and barely listened to jazz. How the look of the music got made, and why it still outsells its imitators. Read more...

Yoko Kanno Out-Jazzed the Jazzmen

The Cowboy Bebop score as a real hard bop record: how a Japanese composer and a band called the Seatbelts made the best jazz album of 1998 for a cartoon. Read more...

A grayscale photograph of a person playing piano

Ahmad Jamal, Master of Space

The pianist who taught Miles Davis to leave notes out, building drama from silence and one sudden chord. The jazz lesson closest to the house's own craft. Read more...

Vintage cassette tapes arranged on a retro player

The Algorithm Found Hiroshi Yoshimura

Japanese ambient records that sold nothing in 1986 now play forever, because a recommendation engine decided they were calm. The strangest afterlife in music. Read more...