Skip to main content

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."

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