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Dead Can Dance - Amnesia

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.

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... nearly vanished from jazz singing.


Dead Can Dance - Amnesia
  • Released in: Europe
  • Genre: Rock, Folk
  • Released in: 2012

"Dead Can Dance is composed of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, the group formed in 1981. They relocated to London the following year. They are described Dead Can Dance's style as constructed soundscapes."

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Location: United States

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