Parking Lot Symphony is the fourth studio album by American musician Trombone Shorty. It was released on April 28, 2017 via Blue Note Records. Recorded at Esplanade Studios in New Orleans with additional recording at Gnu Gnome in Los Angeles, it was produced by Chris Seefried.
In the United States, the album peaked at number 148 on the Billboard 200, atop both the Jazz Albums and Contemporary Jazz Albums, and number 39 on the Top Current Album Sales charts. It also reached number 73 on the Swiss Hitparade, number 103 in the Netherlands, number 140 in France, and number-one on the Official Jazz & Blues Albums chart in the UK.
Parking Lot Symphony was met with generally favourable reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 70 based on five reviews.[1]
AllMusic's Matt Collar praised the album, calling it "one of Trombone Shorty's most balanced productions, equal parts New Orleans R&B sophistication and loose, block party fun".[3] Josh Hurst of Slant wrote: "if there's a weakness here, it's that Shorty's lyrics feel like placeholders. ... The same could certainly not be said of the music, which is as rich and as complex as any he's made".[6]
In mixed reviews, Will Layman of PopMatters described the album as "fine document of Shorty's blend of New Orleans funk, modernized brass band fire, and old school soul. Four albums into the journey, though, the formula has been varied, repeated, and--perhaps--exhausted".[4] Charles Waring of Record Collector complemented the artist's "allusive, crossover style is a piquant marinade that blends Crescent City jazz with blues, pop, funk, R&B, hip-hop, and rock flavours".[5] John Lewis of The Guardian stated: "the venerable label throwing everything at him in the hope that something sticks. But the horny retro soul of "No Good Time" and "It Ain't No Use" sound antiseptic when they should be down and dirty; the R&B; slugging on "Familiar" falls a little flat; while a version of "Here Come the Girls" works only because it's a note-for-note copy of the Allen Toussaint/Ernie K-Doe original".[8]
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