Skip to main content

April Wine - Oowatanite

Yet jazz embodied freedom, multiethnic democracy and was even censored by the Nazis during World War II. Jazz gained popularity in the Big Band Swing Era. Hollywood jazz musicals emerged with sound era talkies, as in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s original score for Love Me Tonight, 1932... As the war commenced, Abel Meeropol penned blues number Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday’s jazz hit, which she later performed on British television. The protest song critiqued the lynching and racial violence against Blacks in the American South and would continue to have cultural resonance in its call for social justice decades later in an era of civil rights... The filmic rendering of jazz shifted from seedy, underground and illicit to stylish, cultured and aspirational during the war and postwar years. The hip, sophisticated iconography in Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day, for instance, was shot in expansive outdoor spaces at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, as yachts sail by on the water, rather than the dark claustrophobic confines of a nightclub. Jazz critic Nate Chinen recalls Amiri Baraka’s conception of jazz as trying to foster a self reliant alternative culture as a reaction to popular culture. He observes that jazz constitutes just a sliver of our cultural landscape. But within those margins, there are worlds to explore, joys to savor, even miracles to be found.

Jazz performing in musical noir featured low lit lounges, enthralling minor key sounds of musicians, and blue film scores suggesting censorable activity in afterhours nightspots. Smoky jazz noir nightclubs created an atmospheric milieu in Blues in the Night, 1941, Jammin’ the Blues (1944, with Lester Young), Phantom Lady, 1944, To Have and Have Not, 1944... Gilda, 1946, Lift to the Scaffold is renowned for its evocative moody blue Miles Davis jazz score.


April Wine - Oowatanite
  • Released in: 1990
  • Genre: Rock, hard rock, pop rock
  • Written by: Myles Goodwyn

"The Henman brothers, David and Ritchie, got together with their cousin Jim Henman and fellow musician Myles Goodwyn to April Wine, a name chosen because they were two words that sounded good together. April Wine has released fifteen studio albums, three live releases, numerous compilations, a boxed set and thousands of concerts."

See previous Song of the Day

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 
Post a Comment
Read more