Sam Jones - Buckle Up

It is no wonder, then, that literary critics intent on analyzing musical elements in Wilson’s plays, but who are not, after all, professional musicologists, tend to pursue the seemingly reasonable shortcut of consulting secondary scholarly sources about the blues, rather than daring to dive into what is, for most people, a vast, obscure, and forbidding ocean of pre World War II music... Yet there are inevitable and profound limits to any mobilization of secondary scholarship or theoretical frameworks that is not also rooted in solid knowledge of, or basic research into, the pertinent primary material.

When literary critics address the pervasive blues and jazz elements in Wilson’s plays, armed with a handful of secondary sources and generalizing abstractions but without substantial awareness of the relevant music, they frequently stumble into error... The protagonist of this drama may indeed be a composite of several historical sources, including Jefferson, but one might reasonably wonder if a fictional character named Blind Willie Johnson owes some debt to the renowned real life 1920s gospel blues singer Blind Willie Johnson. Conventionally, Dixieland refers to imitations of traditional polyphonic small group New Orleans jazz. Sometimes the term even has negative associations as a shorthand for ersatz white efforts to emulate Black music, from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917 to the nostalgic revivalism of the 1940s and beyond. Swing, as a generic/historical descriptor, meanwhile, usually refers to the large orchestras that mixed hot rhythms and short solo passages within riff based arrangements during the 1930s and early 1940s. While it is true that good Dixieland jazz does swing, Dixieland swing is not a term used by jazz scholars. The kind of music that Levee dreams of recording would likely resemble the modernized and solo oriented evolution of Black, small group New Orleans jazz that Louis Armstrong developed in Chicago in the second half of the 1920s.

Source: Music That Breathes and Touches: The Implications of 1920s Blues and Jazz in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by Tim A Ryan

Sam Jones - Buckle Up

• Released on: Jun 23, 2014
• Genre: Electronic
• Track Duration: 9:02

"Sam Jones has released on Kearnage Recordings, Damaged Records, Mental Asylum, Black Hole, and Armada, and has performed in Sweden, Australia, Argentina, Ireland and UK major clubs."

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