Debut album »Diamond Life«: Sade: Heal-heal-goose jazz

Things are in bad shape for the cocktail and its spartan cousin, the long drink. In particular, the gin and tonic and the caipirinha, which has been reduced to “caipi,” have become pub drinks. Alcoholic soda for people who find beer too bitter. That was different. Back in 1984, when Sade appeared out of nowhere. This was a celebration not only for music journalists, but also for the owners of cocktail bars.

The reviewers happily gave up the role of professional listeners and preferred to focus on Sade’s visual characteristics. »What a divine waste – marvel at the beauty of this woman! An aloof and yet vulnerable face, dominated by a flesh wound of lips from which song slowly bleeds out,” Martin Brem lamented in the “Musikexpress”. Of course, the hormonally intoxicated critic gave the debut album “Diamond Life” the highest score. The bar owners, on the other hand, were happy that Sade was reviving a music genre that was more local than any other: bar jazz.

Now that’s the thing with jazz. For the representatives of pure teaching, the musical sell-out begins beyond free jazz. The general public, on the other hand, can only tolerate jazz if it sounds reasonably harmonious and is liberally watered down with pop. Bar jazz meets both criteria. And yet, regardless of her “flesh wound of lips,” Sade would probably have failed to achieve a breakthrough if her songs had not perfectly captured the spirit of the times.

Nerve is to be understood literally. More and more people were annoyed by the chart hits of those days. Synthpop had lost its novelty appeal. He sounded increasingly arbitrary and template-like. The Thompson Twins represented a genre that had passed its creative peak. People suspected it would get even worse (and that’s what happened the following year with Modern Talking).

But every movement that has died out creates a countermovement. Bar jazz was to synth pop as punk was to art rock. Too many people had grown tired of the familiar sounds of the radio. At least in quieter moments of life, they wanted classical instruments played by real musicians instead of programmed sounds from the machine.

Were these sounds authentic? That’s exactly what many pop intellectuals doubted. They denied Sade’s veracity (just as they soon assumed that Simply Red had no soul) and pointed out that their music was just a copy of the bar jazz of decades past. Her biography was often brought into the field. Her Nigerian father had been a lecturer in economics. She herself had studied fashion design and worked as a photo model. That didn’t sound at all like a botched life that could only be endured while high on heroin, because sexual abuse and blatant injustice lurked around every corner.

No, Sade wasn’t a Billie Holiday who had to sob her heart out. Where the latter was crushed by pain, the former was just a little ouchy. Sade delivered hay-all-goose jazz. She lined the bars with the kind of sound carpet that made it possible to indulge in cultivated melancholy over an Old Fashioned. Melancholy that went well with the tailored suit and little black dress (which, by the way, is also called a cocktail dress).

And even when things got more existential, Sade got the hang of it in the end. There is the song about her deceased friend “Maureen”. But you look for despair in the song in vain. “It shouldn’t sound sad or complacent, but rather reflect the joy and good times we had together,” says Sade, describing her favorite piece on her second album “Promise.” The song therefore exudes a pleasantly tingling melancholy, as bittersweet as a Negroni. Life goes on, but: “You will never meet my new friends.”

Of course, that sounds more profound in English: “You’ll never meet my new friends.” There are always lines like this in Sade’s compositions that suggest emotional depths in just a few words. “But something in his smile made them feel like strangers” says “Clean heart” on their third album “Stronger Than Pride”.

But it remains just hints. The neon-cold 80s were not a good time for blues and soul, i.e. for music that delivers an emotional striptease. Ideal sang: “This is dangerous, life-threatening, too much emotion!” Nobody would have admitted that this over-the-top decade, full of unexpected twists and turns, was sometimes too much for them.

This is also why bars have made a comeback. They were a refuge. Here you could forget for a few cocktails that the world out there wasn’t as flawlessly perfect as advertisers and filmmakers (which amounted to the same thing, because many directors started out as commercial filmmakers) tried to make you believe.

And Sade will have felt the same way. There is a palpable vibration beneath the flawless surface of her songs. That’s why the accusation made at the time that their music wasn’t authentic is also nonsense. The opposite is true: no artist – not even Madonna – embodies the 80s as credibly as Sade. In a world that didn’t have time for big emotions (because you were either dedicated to your career or to the fight against nuclear weapons and power plants), she provided just the dose of emotion that you could handle after work without getting too upset or even to question his life.

Sade was not Hermann Hesse. An outstanding songwriter. It’s a pleasure to hear her three works from the 80s again. The coolness that she and her musicians display turns out to be a pretty hot affair. You can feel the dedication, even enthusiasm, that lies in the timeless pieces. And there is some consolation in the fact that this year – since cocktail culture has gone to waste – their songs also work without bars and mixed drinks.

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