Chairs I Have Known

Album Review

Jac Zinder's Stay Home was an instrumental band that would appear late at night at Zinder's Los Angeles club, Fuzzyland, while Bufadora was a more jam-oriented Zinder creation that played only a couple of shows before Zinder was killed by a drunk driver in November of 1994. This superlative posthumous collection includes music by both bands as well as extensive liner notes about what made Zinder tick and his major contribution to L.A.'s scene. Zinder's principal instrument was a Lowrey home organ, whose built-in drums and bass provide much of the bounce behind the band's successful pokes at a lot of diverse music. Far and away the best song on Chairs I Have Known is "Real Cool Moslems," an infectious sitar-driven number. "Please Don't Offend Me" starts out smooth and rises to the ridiculous, while "The Partial Elegance of Burnt Toast" is a extremely suave lounge tune. Though anyone outside of L.A.'s mid-'80s to early-'90s Silver Lake art music scene probably hasn't heard of Zinder, his music deserves a larger audience. Chairs I Have Known, like the music of Esquivel or Martin Denny, is also a can't-lose party soundtrack.