Three pieces for every day

In 1987 the group put on a showcase for gospel label executives. Most of them stayed away, unsure how you would sell a thing like this. The one who did turn up was uninvited, from Warner Bros., and he had already heard the tape; the deal with Reprise followed that year, and the name Alliance had to go, because another group already had it.

The release states that the only instruments on this album are human voices. Six singers, and the single non-vocal credit is for finger snaps and sound effects, with a name attached to it: David Humphries. Recorded and mixed at Digital Recorders, Don Cobb engineering; McKnight, Kibble and Warren wrote and produced the song between them, and the credits never quite settle on who arranged it.

Three minutes twenty-nine, second in the running order. WhoSampled says "What the World Needs Now Is Love" is in there, which on a record with no instruments can only mean a quotation sung out loud. The song won a Grammy in the jazz vocal category, and even the award comes with two dates: the group's own site says 1988, the reference books say 1989.

Edu Lobo wrote it, but he was not the first to record it — Sérgio Mendes and Brasil '66 got there in 1968. Elis Regina took it the following year. Lobo sat down with his own tune only in 1970, third in line.

The recording comes from “Elis, Como & Porquê” (Philips, Brazil, 1969), arranged by Roberto Menescal and produced by Armando Pittigliani. Antônio Adolfo on piano, Wilson das Neves on drums, Hermes Contesini on percussion — except the release credits no players at all, and those names were pieced together from the sleeve and the back cover.

Two minutes and forty-seven seconds, and not one word in them: the lyric catalogue simply records that “Casa Forte” has no text. At home Elis Regina was called the hurricane, and what she was known for was how she read a line. Here she is handed none.

Nala Sinephro grew up on the edge of Brussels next to a forest — her mother a classical piano teacher, her father a jazz saxophonist. She was headed for biochemistry until she moved to an arts school with a jazz programme and met the harp there. She lasted a year at Berklee and left to work as a sound engineer.

Space 1.8 was composed and recorded across 2018 and 2019, and came out on Warp on 3 September 2021, produced by Sinephro herself. She has said she was after minimalism and intentionality. Nine musicians play on the second track.

Four minutes and fifty-four seconds, and three of those nine are saxophonists: James Mollison, Nubya Garcia and Ahnansé. Sinephro herself is on pedal harp and modular synths. Metacritic put the album at 85 out of 100; Pitchfork placed it 24th on its albums of 2021.

24 January 1975, the Cologne opera house, some thirteen hundred people. The concert was put on by Vera Brandes, then seventeen. She had ordered a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial; what was wheeled onto the stage was something else entirely — a small rehearsal grand, in poor condition and out of tune.

Jarrett had gone several nights without sleep because of back pain, and had just driven three hundred and fifty miles from Zurich. Told there would be no replacement instrument, he threatened to cancel. He played anyway, and ECM recorded all of it.

The double album released that same year became the best-selling piano record ever made — around four million copies. Everything you hear was improvised that evening, on an instrument the pianist did not want.

In 2019 the band travelled to Rio de Janeiro to work with Arthur Verocai, who added strings and horns to "Get Sun." That session, and the trip itself, prompted two more pieces for the album.

"Red Room" grew out of a bass and drum groove that Bender and Perrin came up with; the band turned it into a song on the spot, in an act of spontaneous composition. On Mood Valiant it is track nine; the labels are Brainfeeder and Ninja Tune, the year 2021.

The album is bookended by Verocai's strings. "Red Room" is neither at the start nor at the end — it exists because of that trip to Rio, yet sits in the middle without its signature on it.

"Boomerang" was written by Yebba with Tommy Brenneck and Ilsey Juber, and produced by Brenneck and Mark Ronson. It comes from her debut album, Dawn.

Dawn was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York and released on 10 September 2021. A live version of "Boomerang" came out as its own single the same year.

A concert release, Live at Electric Lady, later came out of the same address. A song with both a studio and a live version made in the same room lets you compare what usually stays incomparable.

Kaira was Toumani Diabaté's first album, recorded in October 1987 at Firehouse Studio in London when he was twenty-two. Hannibal released it in 1988.

It was the first international release to feature solo kora without voice. Recorded live: no double-tracking, no second kora. The kora itself is a West African harp with twenty-one strings.

The whole album was recorded in a couple of hours. Twenty-one strings, one man and no second track to hide inside — a debut that doubles as a statement of technique.

The sonata was finished on 20 November 1901 and premiered in Moscow on 2 December: Anatoliy Brandukov, its dedicatee, on cello, with Rachmaninoff himself at the piano. He completed the final version ten days after that.

Rachmaninoff regarded the piano part not as accompaniment but as the cello's equal. Sources note that most of the themes are introduced by the piano, with the cello then expanding and embellishing them.

The third movement, Andante, is held to be one of Rachmaninoff's most passionate melodies, close in spirit to the Second Piano Concerto written the same year. The comparison does the sonata no favours: everyone knows the concerto and almost nobody knows this.

Recorded in New York on 21 December 1950. It was Norman Granz's first attempt to fuse modern jazz with Cuban rhythm — with Machito's orchestra and with Chico O'Farrill, who composed, arranged and conducted it.

Both sides of the music sat in the room at once: Charlie Parker on alto, Flip Phillips on tenor, Harry "Sweets" Edison on trumpet, Buddy Rich on drums, Mario Bauzá, René Hernández on piano, José Mangual on bongó and Ubaldo Nieto on timbales.

Machito plays the maracas on this recording. A bandleader who hands the solo space to his guests and keeps for himself an instrument nobody will hear as a soloist says more about the session than any review.

"Spanish Joint" was co-written by D'Angelo and Roy Hargrove. It comes from Voodoo, released in 2000. Hargrove appears courtesy of Verve Records, Charlie Hunter courtesy of Blue Note.

On this track the guitarist Charlie Hunter plays the guitar and the bass parts at the same time, on a custom eight-string instrument that combines the two. Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is among the album's producers.

One man's hands are doing the work of two, and that is the line-up rather than a studio effect. Once you know the bass and the guitar come from the same instrument and the same fingers, you stop waiting for them to drift apart.

Nocturne was conceived by Charlie Haden and Gonzalo Rubalcaba, tethered lightly to the Cuban bolero tradition. It was recorded in Miami from 27 to 31 August 2000 at Criteria and the Hit Factory, and released by Verve on 17 April 2001.

The line-up: Haden on bass, Rubalcaba on piano, the Uruguayan Federico Britos on violin and the Cuban Ignacio Berroa on drums. Joe Lovano, David Sánchez and Pat Metheny also appear on the record. This piece is credited to Martín Rojas and runs five minutes and fourteen seconds.

In 2002 the album won the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album. The bolero tradition it is tied to is a singing tradition — and this record walks into it carrying a double bass and a piano.

Dancer in Nowhere came out on 8 February 2019 on Sunnyside Records. It was nominated for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album at the 62nd Grammy Awards.

m_unit is a thirteen-piece. Alongside the horns and the rhythm section there is a string quartet — two violins, viola and cello — plus French horn and vibraphone. Miho Hazama conducts.

The guests are Lionel Loueke, Kavita Shah and Nate Wood. Thirteen is too many for a chamber group and too few for a classic big band — which is why the sources call it both.

Quatuor pour la fin du Temps was first performed on 15 January 1941 in Stalag VIII-A at Görlitz. Four prisoners played it: Messiaen at the piano, Étienne Pasquier on cello, Jean Le Boulaire on violin, Henri Akoka on clarinet. The audience was largely other prisoners of war.

The fifth movement, "Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus," needs only two of the four instruments: cello and piano. Descriptions call it a sustained cello cantilena over piano chords that keep deviating from any expected tonal and harmonic direction.

The title translates as "Praise to the eternity of Jesus." It is a piece about eternity written by a man who did not know what the next day held. And it needed only two of the four instruments the camp had produced.

"Take a Chance" came out as a single on 6 July 2022, and the album NOT TiGHT on 29 July. Anderson .Paak features on the track, and directed the video for it as well.

The album came out on Apeshit Inc. together with Blue Note. DOMi and JD Beck were the first act signed to .Paak's Blue Note imprint, APESHIT. The band itself is two people: keyboards and drums.

NOT TiGHT was nominated for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album at the 65th Grammy Awards. An instrumental nomination for a record with guest singers on it is a small comedy of categories — though the duo really is instrumental.

Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell made the original. In 1982 Cheryl Lynn sang it again as a duet with Luther Vandross — the same man who produced her whole album.

Instant Love came out on 11 June 1982 on Columbia. Luther Vandross produced it; the arrangements are by Vandross, Marcus Miller and Nat Adderley Jr. The duet became the album's biggest hit.

It reached number four on the Billboard R&B chart. The producer is singing the second part on a record he is producing himself — a position in which it is hard to disagree with anyone.

Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli wrote it, and recorded it in Paris on 25 November 1937. It came out on the Swing label as number 23, with Charles Delaunay running the session. It has been Reinhardt’s signature ever since.

The Quintette du Hot Club de France that day was five men: Reinhardt on guitar, Grappelli on violin, Joseph Reinhardt and Eugène Vées on rhythm guitars, Louis Vola on double bass. Three of the five are guitarists. There is no drummer on the list at all.

About a tune half the world’s guitarists play, the encyclopedia says something odd: there is no discernible melody, only a repeated sequence of chord changes in A minor — Am, Dm, E7 — for the players to improvise over. Wynton Marsalis calls it essential listening.

The same Jobim piece carries three titles, and it confuses people to this day: “Children’s Games,” “Chovendo na Roseira” and “Double Rainbow.” It first surfaced in March 1970, in the score for the film The Adventurers. That July, Jobim recorded it for his own album.

Stone Flower was recorded in March, April and May 1970 at Van Gelder Studios and released by CTI on 7 July. Creed Taylor produced, Rudy Van Gelder engineered, Eumir Deodato arranged and conducted. Ron Carter on bass, Hubert Laws on flute, Airto Moreira on percussion.

On the album the track is called “Children’s Games,” sits second, and runs three and a half minutes. There are no words in it. On Terra Brasilis in 1980 the same music was arranged by Claus Ogerman instead — so whose strings you are hearing depends on which recording you opened.

The 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Freebody Park in Rhode Island. Mahalia Jackson sang on the Sunday, introduced as the world’s greatest gospel singer. Somewhere in those forty-five minutes came this one — a hymn about forty days of rain.

The recording was issued by Columbia as the album Newport 1958. The credits put three people beside her: Mildred Falls at the piano, Linton Mitchel at the organ, Tom Bryant on double bass. Sources disagree on the date — some say 3 July, others 6 July.

The same set included “Keep Your Hand on the Plow” and “I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing About in My Song.” One account has it that she began this one just as the weather over the festival turned. The coincidence is too neat to forget.

Partita for 8 Voices was written across three consecutive summers, 2009 to 2011, with the ensemble Roomful of Teeth during their residencies at MASS MoCA. Caroline Shaw is a founding member of that ensemble. The recording came out on 30 October 2012.

Passacaglia means variations over a repeated chord progression. The programme note says it first experiments with vowel timbre alone, then opens into a fuller texture as the Sol LeWitt text returns. Eight voices, no instruments at all.

On 15 April 2013 the piece won the Pulitzer Prize, making Shaw the youngest recipient of it. It is the only Pulitzer ever given to an a cappella vocal work. At the time exactly one ensemble in the world had performed it — the one it was written with.

Promises is a single forty-six-minute composition divided into nine movements, written by Sam Shepherd. Luaka Bop released it on 26 March 2021.

It was recorded across 2019 and 2020: the main sessions at Sargent Recorders in Los Angeles in the summer of 2019, and the London Symphony Orchestra strings at AIR Studios in London in the summer of 2020, during the pandemic. Sally Herbert conducted the strings.

The whole thing is held by one brief pattern of notes that Shepherd plays on synthesiser, piano and harpsichord; it recurs through all nine movements, altered each time. In the sixth, orchestral crescendos arrive on top of it. Metacritic put the album at 86 out of 100.

Earl DeRouen and Edward Howard wrote the song. Jerry Wexler proposed that Hathaway make a live record and picked two clubs for it: the Troubadour in Hollywood and the Bitter End in New York. This recording is from side two — the New York night, 7 October 1971.

Atlantic released the album Live in February 1972. Side two was produced by Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin. Hathaway sings and plays electric piano, piano and organ across the record; beside him are Willie Weeks on bass, Fred White on drums, Earl DeRouen on congas, Phil Upchurch and Cornell Dupree on guitars.

The track runs four minutes and twenty-nine seconds and opens side two. One of its writers, DeRouen, is sitting behind the congas on the same recording. It is not often that an author plays on his own song and stays entirely in the background.

"Kara Toprak" is a song by Aşık Veysel (1891–1973) about the black earth; Veysel came from Sivas. In 1997 Fazıl Say wrote a piano piece on its theme, Black Earth, his Op. 8. Schott Music publishes it, and there is a version for two pianos as well.

In the introduction and the epilogue Say mutes the piano to imitate the saz, the Turkish lute. For the central sections the publisher's note lists three things at once — folklore, Romantic piano writing and jazz — with improvisatory freedom left to the player. The whole piece runs about six minutes.

The interesting thing here is the border. The instrument never changes, yet at the start and at the close it is pretending to be a saz, so the opening and the ending belong to a different musical culture than the middle. The theme stays Veysel's throughout.

Ghost Song was Cécile McLorin Salvant's first album for Nonesuch, released on 4 March 2022. Most of it is other people's songs. "Obligation" is one of her own, fourth in the running order.

The track runs one minute and thirty-three seconds. The album credits list eleven people and an unusual set of instruments: alongside piano and Fender Rhodes there is banjo, lute, flute and pipe organ.

Which of those play on this particular track the credits do not say — they are given for the album as a whole. So you have a minute and a half of music and a list that does not explain it. A rare case of the credits telling you less than your ears do.

Mathilde Wesendonck (1828–1902) wrote the poem, and Wagner set it for voice and piano in May 1858. It is one of five of her texts he took up while working on Tristan und Isolde. The hothouse in the poem is a real one: plants under glass, brought from far away.

The subtitle is Wagner's own — "Studie zu Tristan und Isolde," a study for Tristan und Isolde. Of the five songs in the set he gave that label to two: this one and "Träume." So it is not a song that happens to resemble the opera; it is groundwork for it, and the composer said so out loud.

The set was written across 1857 and 1858, alongside the opera itself. So you are hearing material that does not yet know what it will become: a room-sized song for voice and piano, holding what will later be carried by a stage.