Skip to main content

Karen Dalton - God Bless the Child

Dancing had long been a mainstay of New Orleans nightlife, and Bolden's popularity was based on his ability to give dancers what they wanted. During the nineteenth century, string bands, led by violinists, had dominated dance work, offering waltzes, quadrilles, polkas, and schottisches to a polite dancing public. By the turn of the century, an instrumentation borrowing from both brass marching bands and string bands was predominant, usually a front line of cornet, clarinet, and trombone with a rhythm section of guitar, bass, and drums. Dance audiences, especially the younger ones, wanted more excitement. The emergence of ragtime, blues and later, jazz satisfied this demand. Increasingly, musicians began to redefine roles, moving away from sight reading toward playing by ear. In contrast to society bands such as John Robichaux's, representing the highly-skilled Frenchmen or Creoles of color, bands such as Bolden's, Jack Laine's Reliance, or the Golden Rule worked out their numbers by practicing until parts were memorized. Each member could offer suggestions for enhancing a piece of music, subject to the approval of the leader. Gradually, New Orleans jazzmen became known for a style of blending improvised parts sometimes referred to as collective improvisation. It appealed to younger players and dancers alike because it permitted greater freedom of expression, spontaneity, and fun.

The goal of every jazz musician is to find their own voice, a sound that is at once unique and identifiable. One of the best examples is Louis Armstrong whose distinctive tone on cornet and personal singing style changed the course of American music... Furthermore, many gifted players stayed home in the 1920s, giving rise to the remarkable diversity found in local jazz recordings... None of these recordings became hits in the manner of Armstrong... but they reveal an essential truth-that the New Orleans music scene remained a fertile ground for creative musicians of diverse backgrounds, who were united by a common love of the music and a reverence for the culture that produced it.
Source: A New Orleans Jazz History, 1895-1927 by New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park


Karen Dalton - God Bless the Child
  • Written by: Billie Holiday, Arthur Herzog Jr.
  • Released in: 1966
  • Genre: Folk blues

"Karen Dalton recorded a live album in October 1962, but not released until 2007, as a set of two CDs and a DVD. She would occasionally play at the Attic, a folk club in Boulder, Colorado. The album is a recording of a performances."

See previous Song of the Day

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Moondog - Behold

The history of jazz has been one of fusion. Its musicians and composers have continually drawn upon a huge range of different musics to create the rich and diverse tapestry that is world jazz today. Jazz is an evolving tradition of music making. And how often, in the life stories of individual jazz musicians, do we see these same patterns operating at microcosm? The richness of Turkish music and culture sometimes seems at odds with its turbulent and cruel history. In 1979... the country suffered its third military take over in thirty years... Every kind of music was in Turkey at that point. But it was not appreciated. To understand the culture of the country, with those three military takeovers, Turkey could not go anywhere. Musically, it was very difficult. But things were beginning to happen. Traditional Turkish music is essentially monophonic, rich in melody and rhythm but with little by way of harmony. The contrast with western music, with its beautiful harmonies but rhythmic weakn...

Veronica Swift - A Little Taste

There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.  Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing, other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of Amer...

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday Genre: RnB Released in: 1984 Duration: 5:14 "The Gap Band was most successful when working with producer Lonnie Simmons, with four consecutive gold records. Their party train soon slowed to a stop. They reformed in the 90s and occasionally toured and attempted a comeback album." See Previous Song of the Day