I’ve stopped commenting about album covers but I really should pick that thread again. Just look at Andrew Annenberg’s glorious artwork for Steve Kindler and Teja Bell’s Dolphin Smiles. It’s rare that an album cover captures entirely the mood within an album, and wouldn’t you know it, it perfectly encapsulates what you’ll hear here. A fascinating work of visionary realism, both the artwork and the watery music are married together in style, pulled by the gentle playfulness inspired by actual dolphins, their habitat, and a curiously different, subaquatic sound.
I hate to classify Dolphin Smiles as New Age, jazz, or balearic, since it’s quite simply a product of two musicians deeply intune with the rhythms of the marina lifestyle that might encapsulate them all. Originally released in 1988 on the aptly named Global Pacific Records label, Dolphin Smiles was the collaborative work of talented violinist Steve Kindler (ex-Mahavishnu Orchestra and sometime Jeff Beck Group member) and guitarist Teja Bell (long-time qigong practitioner, aikido and martial arts black belt, zen master, session guitarist to artist like Ahmad Jamal, Suzanne Ciani and more).
Both decamping to the coastal California city of Petaluma to bring together field recordings of actual dolphins (and other, assorted marine life) from Hawaii captured in situ by themselves and their own musical arrangements, which spoke of influences from tropical Latin America, Pan-Asia, and carnatic music. Dolphin Smiles was the product of two musicians deeply intune with their unique status in life.
Hovering from deeply romantic, how can one resist Steve Kindler’s suave lead violin tone, and slightly groovy, thanks in huge part to Teja Bell’s inspired, South American-styled guitar technique, Dolphin Smiles was a match made in some New Age heaven. These two were simply meant to play together. Much like Seaside Lovers (it’s parallel world twin), two obviously accomplished Jazz musicians took umbrage in their own lifestyle — windsurfing, deep sea diving, sailing, and hiking — as a means to dive deeper into what actually would trigger a listener to want to meet them in their environment.
On songs like the epic “The Dolphin Suite”, dreamy, watery, tones (a mishmash of purposely smeared sonic experiments, synthesizers, and floating musical parts) perfectly try to recreate the refreshing feeling of striking out in the deep blue. It’s a mood that permeates throughout the album. Harmonizing violin and guitar, some of the melodic play reaches a complexity unheard of in most “New Age” music.
On songs like “Sounding” actual dolphin sound (real and synthesized) recalls the otherworldly music of video games like Ecco the Dolphin, where floating ambiance is taken underwater. In some slightly perfect world, this album actually was a small hit at the time.
Stuffed to the gills, no pun intended, with entertaining and quite shifty sonic ideas, Dolphin Smiles is an impressive display of two musicians stepping back from their usual roles and taking advantage of both electronic and acoustic dimensions to accentuate what could have been simple aquatic-styled BGM.
Milton Nascimento, a decade ago, in his Milagre Dos Peixes tried to verbalise, sonically, the pains of environs attached to that horizon, attaching some deeper feeling to our binds with it. Here, the duo of Steve Kindler and Teja Bell, tries to project the beauty of an environment we tend to forget the mystery of, as we take that next step into it.