Jamael Dean - Black Space Tapes (LP)

Jamael Dean’s debut, Black Space Tapes, is one of those records that sneaks up on you, then sticks around. Released in November 2019 on Stones Throw, it introduced a Los Angeles pianist and producer who already felt uncannily sure of his footing. The pedigree is there. Dean is the grandson of drummer Donald Dean, whose beat on Les McCann and Eddie Harris’s Swiss Movement helped define a generation of soul-jazz. You can hear that lineage in the way Jamael lets rhythm breathe. He keeps the pocket loose, lets phrases hang, then snaps the groove back into focus with a sly left-hand figure or a splash of synth.

The title tells you plenty. These are tapes about space, but not the cold, distant kind. Dean’s space feels lived in. Keys chatter close to the mic, drum programming rustles like a room where someone just moved a chair, and the synths glow warm rather than icy. He’s drawing from two LA traditions that have always been closer than people think, the spiritual jazz of Leimert Park and the beat-scene minimalism that used to rattle the Low End Theory dance floor. He doesn’t fence sit between them, he braids them. One minute you’re in a meditative piano figure worthy of a late Alice Coltrane side, the next you’re nodding along to a head-nodding loop that would fit in a Knxwledge playlist. It works because the hands on the keys are the same in both moments, and the intent is the same too, a search for lift.

What makes Black Space Tapes stick is the sequencing. Dean thinks like a record maker, not just a track maker. The short interludes feel like scene changes, and the longer cuts let the band-in-a-room sensation come to the front. You can almost see him pivoting between piano and Fender Rhodes, then reaching for a small stack of analog synths to smear the edges. Even when a beat locks in, he resists the urge to overbuild. He’ll drop out layers to give the piano greater clarity, then slide a fragment of melody in the background that makes you lean closer. It’s unflashy, which is part of its charm. He trusts tone and touch more than tricks.

Dean had already spent time around heavy hitters by the time of this album, including work with Kamasi Washington and Thundercat. You can hear why they’d want him around. He plays with a listener’s ear, giving each line a conversational shape. When the harmony opens up into Phrygian shadows or Lydian lift, he doesn’t announce it, he just guides you there and watches the colors shift. That’s a skill you usually hear on records by older players who learned on long bandstands. Here it arrives wrapped in a bedroom-studio intimacy that keeps everything close.

Stones Throw pressed it with care, and Black Space Tapes vinyl became a talking point among crate diggers who like their jazz with a modern pulse. It’s the kind of album you pull for Sunday mornings and late nights, one of those knotted spines you slide off the shelf to reset the room. If you’re hunting for Jamael Dean vinyl, there is real pleasure in hearing these low-end currents on a turntable where the kick thump and the wood of the keys bloom together. And if you tend to buy Jamael Dean records online, do yourself a favor and track down a copy rather than streaming it forever. The sides play like chapters, and the noise floor between them matters.

What I love most is how human it feels. Even at its most heady, the music keeps reaching outward. There’s a generosity in the way themes return, as if Dean is saying, you liked that line, here it is again, now try it with a new light on it. The record doesn’t beg to be a manifesto, yet it ends up feeling like a small statement of purpose for the new LA, a place where a grandchild of a Montreux legend can turn a personal cosmology into a beat-driven piano suite and make it feel natural.

If you’re browsing in a Melbourne record store or scrolling through vinyl records Australia late at night, keep an eye out for Black Space Tapes vinyl in the bins. It’s a keeper, and it sits nicely alongside other Jamael Dean albums on vinyl as his catalog grows. However you find it, drop the needle and let it unspool. This one rewards patience, and it rewards volume, and it signals a young artist already playing from a deep well.