Dark jazz: a canon for the last hour of the night

Adamson left Magazine and Nick Cave's Bad Seeds to write soundtracks for films that don't exist. His 1989 debut for Mute imagines a noir thriller set in his native Manchester, all walking bass, brushed drums and a menace that never quite explains itself. Everything the Germans and the Dutch would later formalize is here in embryo: jazz used as suspense music, mood standing in for plot. Start the family tree here.

The Twin Peaks series score gave the world its slow, syrupy idea of small-town dread, but the 1992 prequel film is where Badalamenti went fully into the black. "The Pink Room" is a smeared, drunken blues that sounds like it's melting off the tape. Half the bands below name David Lynch and this exact palette as the thing they were chasing.

Four Germans who started in the early 1990s as a doom and hardcore band, then slowed down until the metal fell away and only the dread was left. Sunset Mission (2000) is where the change completed: saxophone, Rhodes and drums played at the tempo of a heartbeat winding down. This is the record that gave dark jazz a fixed address.

The one most people mean when they say Bohren. Black Earth (2002) is even slower and heavier than Sunset Mission, a set of pieces that barely move and never resolve, saxophone hanging in the dark like cigarette smoke in a shut room. If a single album defines the genre, it's this one. Play it at 3am and it plays you back.

By Dolores (2008) Bohren had refined the formula to the edge of stillness. The playing is warmer here, closer to a lounge act performing for an empty bar long after everyone's gone home. Newcomers who find Black Earth punishing often start with this one, then work backward into the murk.

Proof the band hasn't run out of night. Patchouli Blue (2020) is quieter and more fragile than their early work, the saxophone brushed rather than blown, the silences longer. Two decades in, they've stopped trying to sound doom-laden and simply do. A late record with nothing left to prove.

The scene's other founding act, formed in Utrecht in 1999 by Jason Köhnen and Gideon Kiers to score silent films like Nosferatu and Metropolis. Their 2006 debut brought electronics, dub weight and sampled decay to the Bohren template, colder and more processed. Where Bohren sound like a live band at last call, Kilimanjaro sound like a haunted mixing desk.

Released on Planet Mu in 2009, Here Be Dragons pulls the group toward cinema: trumpet and cello over slow-collapsing beats and field recordings, the dread now widescreen. It's the most soundtrack-like of their albums, which is exactly the point for a band that started out scoring the dead.

Their 2011 farewell, and their richest. From the Stairwell adds strings and horns until the doom-jazz core turns almost orchestral, without losing the rot underneath. The ensemble dissolved after this and splintered into side projects, so it stands as a full stop few genres ever get.

The improvising, live-in-the-room half of the same crew. Where Kilimanjaro composed, The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation jam a single darkening idea into the ground for forty minutes at a stretch. Anthropomorphic (2011) is a good first plunge: fewer edits, more menace, the sound of a séance that won't end.

Egor (2012) is even more punishing, drone and doom pulling the jazz almost fully underwater. There are stretches here with no melody at all, just pressure. This is the point where dark jazz shakes hands with drone metal and neither side blinks.

The French wing, named for Twin Peaks' Agent Cooper and released on Denovali, the label that became the genre's home. Dale Cooper Quartet & the Dictaphones smear saxophone and whispered French vocals into a fog thick enough to lose the melody in. Noir jazz as sleep paralysis.

Metamanoir (2011) pushes further into electronic decay, the horns half-dissolved in reverb and tape hiss. It's the most abstract entry here, closer to dark ambient than to anything with a swing feel left in it. For listeners who want the jazz almost gone, this is your record.

Not actually a quartet, and only half jazz: Bersarin Quartett is the solo project of German producer Thomas Bücker. The 2008 debut on Denovali builds cinematic pieces from strings, piano and hiss that sit right on the border of the genre, warmer and prettier than the Bohren axis. The easiest way in for anyone who finds pure doom jazz too bleak.

A closing curio that's also a source. Under the name Thought Gang, Badalamenti and David Lynch recorded these deranged jazz experiments in 1992 and 1993, then shelved them until Sacred Bones finally put the album out in 2018. Skronking horns, spoken-word menace, grooves that lurch and stall. Hear it and half the records above stop sounding like a movement and start sounding like children of Lynch's basement.