Samora Pinderhughes - Venus Smiles Not in the House of Tears (2024) [Official Digital Download]

Can you call someone a “niche artist” when they have so many niches? Samora Pinderhughes came up as a jazz pianist, studying at Juilliard under Kenny Barron and working with Chief Adjuah and Herbie Hancock. But he’s also an Emmy Award–winning composer, lyricist, vocalist, filmmaker, social-political activist, and scholar (working on a PhD at Harvard University) who’s also worked with Common, Lalah Hathaway, Sara Bareilles, and Emily King—and that’s just on the music side. A synthesis from such a wide yet distinctive palette of influences and collaborators must be too idiosyncratic to be anything but a niche product. But I’ll be damned if I can tell you what that niche is.

Venus Smiles Not in the House of Tears, the first half of a promised album duology from Pinderhughes, reflects that wide-ranging background. He has a firm connection to the singer-songwriter movement, and guitar-driven pieces like “Inertia,” “Gatsby,” and “Drown” bear traces of the folk/rock origins of that movement. Yet in each case, there’s a hearty wedge of 21st-century electronic production and, on “Inertia,” dancefloor polyrhythms and broken beats.

TRACKLIST

1. Samora Pinderhughes - Better
2. Samora Pinderhughes - Inertia
3. Samora Pinderhughes - Gatsby
4. Samora Pinderhughes - Hands
5. Samora Pinderhughes - Slow Time
6. Samora Pinderhughes - Versus
7. Samora Pinderhughes - Storm
8. Samora Pinderhughes - Drown
9. Samora Pinderhughes - Erased
10. Samora Pinderhughes - WCID
11. Samora Pinderhughes - Forgive Yourself



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