Columbia Nights

Columbia Nights, an alternative R&B outfit, applied a modern and mildly unconventional lens to crossover jazz from the late 1970s and early 1980s, weaving in relaxed hip-hop accents while fusing analog and electronic textures under the self-coined banner “soultronic.” Before the group existed, musicians and producers John E. Daise and Hayling Price had shared a Philadelphia-based band; after drifting apart they reconnected in Washington, D.C., and began shaping ideas inside a home studio. Sarai Abdul-Malik, a vocalist then enrolled in the jazz program at Howard University—the birthplace of the quiet storm radio format whose echoes surface in the trio’s work—joined next, and the three continued refining material. Their opening releases were two digital cover singles: Little Dragon’s “Stormy Weather” and George Duke’s “Feel.” Not long afterward they issued the seven-track EP Dawn | Dusk (2012) on Record Breakin’. Jason Edwards, who had previously performed with Daise and Price and supplied percussion on two of the EP’s tracks, soon became a full-time member. Following a remix EP and a series of collaborations and stray recordings—including covers of Sade’s “Make Some Room” and I-Level’s “Heart Aglow”—the trio delivered the 2015 album In All Things, which drew vocal and instrumental contributions from Abdul-Malik, Diggs Duke, Aaron “AB” Abernathy, Vaughan Octavia, and others.