In kaleidoscopic R&B, Melo Green reinvents himself

In the kaleidoscopic world of Melo Green, every song is bound to lead you to a dozen others.

Take “One Year Stand,” a sizzling lament about the demise of a relationship. The vocals enter in a dense, plaintive stack, much like the prophetic chorus that opens Prince’s “7.” The first verse contains a wry reference to Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” the line “you are the apple of my eye” subverted to mean its opposite. (“You’ll never be more than/ the apple of my eye, a metaphor for love.”) Its churning, guitar-drenched conclusion was inspired by the looping outro of “Strawberry Letter 23” — the original Shuggie Otis version, not the more famous Quincy Jones-produced joint by the Johnson Brothers.

That dramatic ending is its creator’s favorite part. “This is a very familiar thing to most musicians,” said Chris Kazarian, who performs as Melo Green. “It's the part we're all waiting for in this song.”

Kazarian was sitting in his apartment in Providence, in the small room where he writes and produces all his music. The mixing session for “One Year Stand” was open on his computer. “You’re in this kind of chill hip-hop world, and then it just moves to what I think the feeling of breaking up is,” he explained. He clicked to the end of the song, where the drum track drops out to make way for spiraling synths beneath anguished vocals. “It’s kind of coming to terms with what’s happening, and [then] it’s like, the reality hits,” he said, as the song crashed into a blown-out guitar solo. “It's just the wave, the rushes of emotion that come when you experience rejection and loss and grief.”

“One Year Stand” appears on Kazarian’s debut album as Melo Green. “Laminar Flow” is a breakup album of sorts, with several songs unpacking a relationship that “felt casual way longer than it needed to,” Kazarian said. (He will perform the songs on “Laminar Flow” with a full band at Club Passim on Nov. 26, the album’s release day.) It also touches on grief and mortality, and revels in the awe of a blossoming new love. The album’s production style is similarly multitudinous, its many musical references metabolized and remixed, its gaze so deeply interior that it becomes expansive, a universe unto itself.

Kazarian, who is 34, grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. He got an early taste of producing in the home recording studio of his father, a rapper and filmmaker who goes by Kaz Supernova. Kazarian studied music at UMass Amherst and Berklee College of Music, and after college played in a series of R&B-ish bands. He even made it through several rounds of auditions to appear on “The Voice,” though ultimately he didn’t make the cut.

The pandemic brought Kazarian’s musical collaborations to a halt. From his parents’ home in Worcester, he began to record his own music, releasing an EP called “Ghosts” in the summer of 2020, followed by a full-length LP, “The Bed I Made,” in 2021. “The Bed I Made,” which he released under the moniker Chris Kaz, bore the trademarks of what would ultimately become Melo Green: stacked vocals, an expansive palette, tender melodies, jazz-inflected harmonies.

A cease-and-desist letter from another musician named Chris Kaz precipitated a reinvention. Kazarian decided to adopt the moniker “Melo Green” — the idea came from an astrology book — liking that it had resonances with other R&B artists, like CeeLo Green and Al Green. In looking for a title for the album, he became captivated by the concept of “laminar flow,” a term in fluid dynamics in which moving water appears to be frozen. Being a musician during the pandemic had felt a bit like that — stuck in suspended animation, even as life moved at its usual pace. But “Laminar Flow” felt fitting in other ways, too. It could describe any situation in which a person’s external identity masked or flattened the dynamic, contradictory, mysterious truth of their inner life.

“I think ‘Laminar Flow’ was like, ‘Okay, I know who I am,’” Kazarian said. “I'm going to just be my most vulnerable self, and I'm going to say exactly how I feel, and I’m not going to filter myself.”

The songs on “Laminar Flow” are raw and personal, rife with musical references close to Kazarian’s heart. Take “New,” an eccentric earworm in which the drums and bass play a wobbly game of tag and the guitar is almost comically distorted. Kazarian was inspired by Thundercat and Reggie Watts, but also by those closest to him. “It's hip-hop because of my dad. It's funky because of a good friend of mine, Aaron Bellamy from the A-Beez,” he said. The guitar solo is an imitation of another friend, the New York musician Vicious Clay. “Musically, it's trying to say ‘thank you’ to a different person that I love and appreciate.”

Kazarian remembered the day he wrote “New.” It was the result of a peculiar confluence of emotions. His aunt was sick with cancer, and he wondered what might happen to himself as he aged. What if he lost his memory? “I was just thinking about how temporary everything is and how easily people can be snatched up by death,” he recalled. At the same time, he was in the heady throes of a new relationship, bonding with his girlfriend over their favorite music, trading songs back and forth. He was stunned to discover that a relationship could make him feel good — worthy, even. He found himself weeping.

The song came to him in a flood. Its opening lines capture so much: the fear of losing oneself, to age or the grind of daily life; the relief of being seen by another person, and the strength that can be drawn from that; the intoxicating strangeness of a new song, how it rearranges the molecules in your brain and heart.

“If I ever start to lose my mind,” Kazarian sings, “Play me something new.” Music, he believed, would always bring him back to himself.