Midnight Jazz Club, Vol. 3 Album

Eleven tracks built from two instruments and almost nothing else: five stride piano pieces, five vibraphone pieces, and one soul jazz cut that is the only recording here with a full rhythm section behind it. Everything else is a single instrument keeping its own time. Two things separate this from the first two volumes. It is the first mostly-major record in the series — eight of the eleven are in a major key, where Volume 1 was nine-of-eleven minor and Volume 2 seven-of-eleven, so the whole album sits brighter without getting louder. And it is by far the shortest: four tracks run under two minutes and the closer is sixty-eight seconds, which makes this the place to look for intros, stings and transitions rather than long beds. The tempo spread is tidy. A hundred and thirty-six is the fastest and it happens twice, once on piano and once on mallets. A hundred and three is the slowest measured and happens three times, more than any other figure. One track has no pulse at all and simply drifts for three minutes. The stride five are the period material — no bass, no drums, the left hand doing the work — and the vibraphone five are the softest attack in the entire collection.

All 320 kbps, no vocals, released under CC BY 4.0. Use them for prohibition and 1920s-themed bars, period drama and silent-film pastiche, heritage venues and museum floors, cocktail lounges and hotel lobbies, spa and treatment rooms, gallery openings, and any edit that needs a sixty-second vintage intro instead of a three-minute bed. Credit Alex Morgan and you are done.