Marillion - Somewhere Else

Whatever jazz today has lost in the size of its audience as compared with forms of popular music with bigger market shares, it has gained in the high esteem in which it is held in the business and art worlds as a sophisticated artistic expression it is frequently used as mood music in upscale business establishments, in museums and galleries, and in commercials promoting upscale products, and in the institutionalization it has experienced as a formal course of study at many colleges and universities. Indeed, if it were not for colleges, universities, and high school jazz bands, and institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center and SF Jazz, it is quite possible that few young people in the United States would be playing or hearing jazz today.

The art music known variously as jazz, swing, bebop, America’s classical music, and creative music has been associated first and foremost with freedom. Freedom of expression, human freedom, freedom of thought, and the freedom that results from an ongoing pursuit of racial justice... that jazz was a beacon, an act, a trope of freedom, an expression against repression that inspired many people around the world. But if jazz was, at one point in its history, about freeing oneself from artificial and arbitrary constraints in both popular and classical music, about freeing society from its restrictions and repressions, then, for many of its fans and practitioners, it has now become about preserving and conserving a tradition, an ideology, a set of standards, a form of practice. Today, jazz is an art that can satisfy the compulsions of the liberationist and the conservative, of those who seek change and of those who prefer stasis.

Source: Why Jazz Still Matters by Gerald Lyn Early and Ingrid T. Monson

Marillion - Somewhere Else

• Recording at: The Racket Club, Buckinghamshire, England
• Release on: April 24, 2007
• Genre: Pop/Rock

"Marillion are rightfully credited with having established the neo prog subgenre, and have explored many types of music over the decades that, thanks to their expert musicianship, have celebrated their long, inventive passages for electric guitars and keyboards."

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