Amy Winehouse - Wake Up Alone

The sign of freedom fairly defined the U.S. Cold War political and cultural zeitgeist: while American foreign policy aimed to promote capitalist free enterprise, artistic movements like free jazz, abstract expressionism, beat poetry, method acting, and modern dance enshrined expressive freedom as their highest aesthetic ideal. Thelonious Monk once was quoted as saying “jazz and freedom go hand in hand,” and the sound bite found its way into Cold War era propaganda campaigns linking jazz to American ideals of liberty and democracy. This was a time, alas, when the publishers... refused to put black jazz musicians on their magazine cover, and civil rights workers were showing up dead in backwoods Mississippi. While black musicians drew on the freedom discourse to signal their music’s political urgency, they also sought to distance themselves from the term’s association with unfettered choice and wanton artistic license. Some of the era’s most innovative and challenging sounds came from jazz composers and auteurs, who fashioned themselves heirs to the formal ambitions of Duke Ellington.

An impressive level of technical proficiency, not just the leaders but sidemen, became a hallmark of this new music, though very few bands could match the musicality and conceptual innovation of these pioneering groups. Instrumental technique and cutting-edge electronic equipment often became fetishized in the broader fusion movement, resulting in a sound that struck many traditional jazz, soul, and American popular song fans as bereft of warmth, gracefulness, and conversational intimacy. At the same time, certain jazz knowledgeable pop artists developed styles that valued tunefulness and groove over fusion style pyrotechnics.

Much of the allure of jazz throughout its history had to do with its radical individualism, its outsider stance, its renegade assault on musty conventions and proprieties. Many of its canonical figures were larger-than-life characters. American originals who became subjects of romantic legend and myth. On the face of it, the new preservationist mission ran against this current, emphasizing past accomplishment over present and future change, tradition over innovation, established authority over resistance and reinvention. What made jazz special and powerful, for many, was that it was an intrepid music with a heroic narrative full of audacious risk and arduous struggle. How could jazz maintain its verve and vigor if it became another music of the conservatory, the library, and the museum? How could it avoid being consumed by its past and continue to be a living and growing art form?
Source: Jazz in America after by John Gennari

Amy Winehouse - Wake Up Alone

• Written by: Paul O'Duffy, Amy Winehouse
• Released on: Back to Black Album October 2006
• Genre:Pop

"Amy Winehouse's songs started with a guitar and a vocal and a basic beat, if there was any beat at all... it was really about her being able to express herself lyrically and then find the chords she wanted to use and then get it arranged after."

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