Vilde Græs - Udenfor mit vindue

Along the way, there was jazz, which admitted heaps of blues influence but developed, more than is often acknowledged, apart from these other traditions. Jazz began in New Orleans, among the professional ensembles that had evolved out of the city’s longstanding brass band tradition... they played most of the music of the time: quadrilles, schottisches, polkas, ragtime tunes.

The blues was certainly jazz’s nucleus. It was there in the African derived harmonies, the tapestries of syncopation, and the bent notes that often seemed to imitate the grumbles and whinnies of the human voice. But jazz’s roots were cosmopolitan and relatively commercial. They sprang from the vocationalism of society bands and the hamming of vaudeville as much as from the unselfconscious patois of the blues.

Baraka points out that as big band jazz became more popular, it hewed more closely to the demands of a paying concert audience. The blues inside the music, the self styling, the low furor, the professions of pride and desire, was given a narrower berth.

In the 1950s, many jazz musicians migrated away from dance music and into the small combos of bebop. The blues’ core truths stayed lodged inside of it, but they were often relegated to instrumental expression. The jazz tunes that did have words were mostly versions of show tunes. With some marked exceptions, blues poetry usually proved too much for the jazz economy, largely driven as it was by the demands of white audiences and white promoters. The lowbrow humor and social realism that had defined the work of artists like Rainey, Cab Calloway, and Fats Waller nearly vanished from jazz singing.

Source: The Enduring Influence & Tradition of the Blues by Giovanni Russonello

Vilde Græs - Udenfor mit vindue

• Recorded on: February 11 and 12, 2018
• Released in: 2018
• Genre: Folk, World, & Country

"Vilde Græs is made up of Morten Aron aka Aron, guitar and vocals, Søren Pilegaard Hansen, piano, organ andvocals, Theis Boisen Hansen, bass and vocals, Lars Bang Petersen, guitar, and Frederik Leo, drums."

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