Friday, January 20, 2006

Duke Ellington and biorhythms.

Duke Ellington's style of jazz, full of jungles and swaying hips, is among my favorite musical styles. I can listen to "Mooche" over and over again, and I have been for years. The rhythm of some of songs, like "Mooche," bring to mind scenes played out long ago in Congo Square - hypnotic dancing between tours of duty in the cane fields. They are the sorts of rhythms that swing back and forth between the ponderous, long moments of survival and the rapturous, brief moments of abandon. I hear it in other performers' music, as well. Tom Waits' "Fumblin' with the Blues," in particular, calls to mind that seductively melancholy combination of resignation and determination.

I can't bring myself to embrace the rapid-fire of most modern music - the aggressive shouting of people who still believe that shouting makes people listen. There is a lack of compassion in it. There is a brutal one-ness, a gory personal fable that belongs to teenagers and to middle-aged salesmen who refer to themselves always in the third-person and who pinch waitress bottoms as though waitress bottoms belonged not properly to waitresses but to middle-aged men. There is a lack of soul. I don't hear soul in angry music.

I do hear soul in Duke Ellington.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love "The Mooche"!! My middle school jazz band played it last year.

10:18 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.