Dinner Party offers incontrovertible proof that great music requires great restraint. The group comprises three of the most highly rated jazz musicians of modern times—saxophonist Kamasi Washington, pianist Robert Glasper and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin—plus North Carolina producer 9th Wonder, who all hide their collective light under a band name that is bland to the point of ridicule. The instrumentation on Enigmatic Society, meanwhile, is exquisitely sparse, stripped back to passing glances and musical breeze.
Their third album is a small step forward from their self-titled 2020 debut. The group’s roots still lie in ’70s soul, ’90s hip-hop and R&B, and jazz but they have further refined this mixture on Enigmatic Society, dampening down their sound to an airy velvet exhalation. If the album has anything as vulgar as a declaration of intent, it would be the intro to “Breathe,” in which singer Arin Ray invites us to come in and chill and “Don’t worry about it/You’ve had a long day/Just don’t say nothing/I’ve got your shift today” in what may be the most seductively functional 20 seconds of music you will hear all year.
Enigmatic Society shows that small, concentrated voices can resonate loudest. Album highlight “For Granted” uses a fragment of Glasper’s piano, a tiny lick of marine melancholy whose slender strokes draw the audience closer in. Elsewhere, the piano chord sequence on “Answered Prayer” is punctured by the slightest suggestion of soprano saxophone melody, and “Watts Renaissance” employs subtle modulations in the song’s bassline to tickle the listener’s senses, the power, in each case, drawn from masterful understatement.
For all of the group’s backgrounds in jazz, this is far from a jazz album. The subtle but passionate experimentalism of Blonde-era Frank Ocean feels like a point of reference on “Secure,” where a warped and rather murky clip of piano and voice plays off against a crisp vocal line, creating the refracted emotional tug of a singer baring his soul to a display of funhouse mirrors. “Can’t Go” samples Hall and Oates’ much misused “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” and the wobbling funk of “Watts Renaissance” resembles a G-funk era track zoned out on valium and swimming-pool chlorine. It’s an ostensibly unusual set of references held together by a lightness of touch and fantastically disciplined songwriting. “Love Love”—essentially early D’Angelo in the suggestion of silk pajamas—manages to convey the redemptive purity of being in love in just five lines of lyrics, brushed drums, and a gently unwinding chord progression.
That Dinner Party can subsume their collective technique and knowledge is a sign of the group’s ego-free dedication. There are moments on Enigmatic Society when the individual instruments shine—the ecstatic saxophone trills on “Watts Renaissance,” or the oceanic sweep of the piano chords that roll open “Answered Prayer”—but they have the wisdom to put the good of the song first, to the extent that Washington and Glasper sometimes feel like absent friends on their own album. (The versatile Martin is ever present, with production credits on all nine of the album’s songs, while 9th Wonder contributes to four.) This makes Dinner Party land in the top percentile of supergroups, where the whole is stronger than the sum of its parts.
