Midnight Jazz Club, Vol. 2 Album

Eleven late-hours tracks weighted heavily toward one thing: six of them are solo piano, with no rhythm section, no bass and no second instrument anywhere in the mix. That is the largest block of unaccompanied piano released under this name, and it is the reason to come here rather than to Volume 1. Around it sit four soul jazz grooves and a single Hammond organ cut. The number that organises the record is tempo, or the absence of it: five tracks have no measurable beat at all, and all five are piano. Of the six that do, a hundred and twelve is the fastest and the only figure that turns up twice — the two Midnight Club tracks share it — and eighty-nine, on the slow piano piece, is the slowest thing here. Keys fall into an unusually tidy pattern: F major, E minor, D minor and G minor each appear exactly twice, and three more appear once. Seven of the eleven are in a minor key. The longest track runs three minutes forty-nine and the shortest two minutes ten, so the whole album fits inside a hundred-second spread.

All 320 kbps, no vocals, released under CC BY 4.0. Use them for piano bars and hotel lounges, upmarket restaurants and private dining, late-night bars and closing-time scenes, rainy-window and film-noir footage, reflective narration and interview beds, and any dialogue-heavy edit where a drum kit would fight the voice — the six solo piano tracks are the most speech-friendly recordings in this entire collection. Credit Alex Morgan and you are done.