Rodrigo’s style is 20 th century neoclassical, which means his compositions attempted to live up to the principles of the great classical composers like Mozart and Haydn: ordered, structured, clear and free of the emotional flourishes of Romantic composers like Liszt and Tchaikovsky. The original is a concerto for guitar and orchestra, and a stunningly beautiful work that has been recorded by great classical guitarists from Andrés Segovia to Sharon Isbin. The dominant piece on Sketches of Spain is the second movement from Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, written in 1939. This collaboration with the brilliant arranger Gil Evans is a tribute to artistic curiosity. While Miles’ most famous album is that masterpiece of modal jazz, Kind of Blue, a better demonstration of his genre-bending tilt can be found on Sketches of Spain, released in the summer of 1960. His rock-jazz fusion work popularized in Bitches Brew caused as much consternation in the jazz world as Bob Dylan’s electrically-charged performance at the Newport Folk Festival did in the folk world. As his career advanced, Miles frequently confused jazz zealots by wandering outside of the genre for inspiration. ![]() He learned his craft from Charlie and Dizzy, then moved on to be one of the founders of the “cool jazz” movement that removed much of what listeners considered the excess of Bebop while retaining its willingness to expand the medium beyond the traditional. There are few jazz artists who pack the emotional and sensual punch of Miles Davis. This is sad, for while some modern jazz is more about virtuoso indulgence than accessibility, the best pieces paint vivid sound pictures that carry tremendous emotional and sensual power. To enhance that feeling of intellectual and aesthetic superiority, jazz critics tend to write primarily about jazz technique and the musicology of jazz, using a language that is impenetrable to the curious but untutored listener. Talk about snobs! Saying you dig jazz is like saying you belong to a secret club that allows no riff-raff. ![]() This exclusivity is aggravated by jazz fans and jazz critics. Today, jazz is much more popular in Europe than in its homeland. Jazz thus began its long and steady journey to becoming the music of aficionados and intellectuals, and except for the odd record here and there (usually one of the “soft jazz” variety), jazz has never regained its prominence in American popular culture. What’s most important is that when jazz became undanceable it lost its connection to the vast majority of its audience, most of whom assumed music and dance meant the same thing. With its fast tempos, strange timing, odd harmonic combinations (asymmetrical phrasing), use of the small combo (as opposed to big bands), the emphasis on the virtuoso soloist and Kenny Clarke’s shift from the bass drum to the ride cymbal as the beat keeper, Bebop must have sounded like something from outer space to the average listener of the era. The most important change was the disconnection from dance. The faces of that revolution were Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and the musical form they and their cohorts developed was called Bop or Bebop.īebop constituted a radical departure from what people knew as jazz. With the advent of the popularity of Glenn Miller and his bubblegum approach to jazz, more serious musicians staged an underground revolution (“underground” because recording was severely restricted in the United States from 1942-1944 due to union problems). After Louis Armstrong cleared the clutter of early jazz and energized the medium with intensity and direction, jazz reached its peak as a popular art form during the Swing Era, that strange time when Americans dealt with economic depression and world war by dancing to happy-go-lucky tunes played by the big bands. ![]() I’m not sure about the pints of beer part (heroin appears more frequently in the biographies of jazz musicians), and the “always the same” comment is absurd, but I can certainly understand the sentiment about jazz never seeming to get anywhere-a sentiment which many people share. Jazz never gets anywhere, never does anything, it’s always the same and all they do is drink pints of beer.” John Lennon famously described jazz as shit music, but the actual quote is a bit more interesting: “I think it (Jazz) is shit music, even more stupid than rock and roll.
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