Skip to main content

Kenny Dorham - Just Friends

Music is a unique, powerful, and special human phenomenon. It’s universal in that, as far as we know, all human cultures everywhere have ever had some form of expression we would call music. Music is deeply embedded in our everyday lives, and it features in every major social and personal event in our culture, parties, birthdays, weddings, sporting events, political rallies, religious ceremonies, social functions, graduations, funerals, etc.

All music is fundamentally social. We use musical sounds to express ideas and emotions and to communicate with others. We use music to explore our notions of group and individual identity. We use music to document and disseminate our shared cultural history and common human experiences. We use music to make sense of the world and of being human, and we use it to communicate things that are impossible, or at least difficult, to say using verbal language.

With any music, we can always ask, what does it mean for these people to make these sounds in this specific time and place? In other words, what’s music all about?

Like a spoken language, musical styles develop rules and vocabulary. Though the precise definitions of words constantly shift and change, and words can fall in and out of fashion, some generally agreed upon linguistic meanings exist. Within a given social/musical/cultural context, certain sounds, linguistic and musical, come to mean certain things, even if the precise meanings are debated, and everyone’s individual experiences of shared phenomena differ.


Kenny Dorham - Just Friends
  • Release on: October 4, 1961
  • Genre: Jazz
  • Recording at: Peter Ind Studio, New York, NY

"Kenny Dorham was one of the most talented, bop oriented players, and an excellent composer who played in some very significant bands and penned the timeless jazz standard Blue Bossa.”

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