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The Durutti Column - Trip for an Opera

That may be like asking What happened to jazz?... The revival movement itself was a revival. Back in the late 1930s, when the From Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall gave American jazz the imprimatur of the cultural establishment, the music had changed course and languished in a contemplative state. Writers and musicians of the period rediscovered the artists and styles of the music's past, a respite, time has shown us, during which jazz began metamorphosing into bebop.

Manhattan is empty during the last week of August, and the kind of emptiness it achieves is like that of the mind during meditation, a temporary, unnatural purity. On a Tuesday evening in late August of 2001 I was wandering around Greenwich Village and ended up at the Village Vanguard. After sixty some years of business the illustrious little jazz haunt hasn't changed, it remains one of the inexplicable constants of the Manhattan landscape... There's still a Cotton Club in Harlem, but not in the original location, and now it's a seedy disco. The Vanguard has somehow survived in its primordial basement and has retained all the bohemian eccentricities that have always helped make it cool, the fence post marquee, with performers' names handwritten vertically, the treacherously angled stairwell, no food served, no credit cards accepted. Lorraine Gordon, the Vanguard's owner and the widow of the club's founder, is a Medici of the jazz world, a patron and king maker. Among jazz fans and musicians the Village Vanguard is clearly a paragon of the music's own kind of purity, one that's neither temporary nor unnatural.
Source: Wynton's Blues by David Hajdu


The Durutti Column - Trip for an Opera
  • Written by: Vini Reilly
  • Genre: Electronic, Rock
  • Released in: 2004

"The Durutti Column featuring Vini Reilly, a classically trained pianist and virtuoso guitarist, took their name from Spanish revolutionary Buenaventura Durruti and the cartoon of Two Situationist Cowboys in the comic Le Retour De La Colonne Durutti. Bruce Mitchell has been the drummer since 1981. A succession of other guests has augmented the line-up over the years, notably John Metcalfe, Tim Kellett, and Keir Stewart."

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