2 posts tagged “jazz”
// EDIT #2: The website Seeqpod has closed down. So, there goes my playlists, as well as access to many of the songs I picked. :-( But my Dropbox still works. // Doug, 16-JUL-2009 13:47 PST
// EDIT: I noticed the Dropbox links weren't working well, so I eliminated the spaces in the filenames and updated the links below. Let me know if you have any problems. // Doug (aka, BossaNova) 26-Mar-2009 10:32am PST
Streaming audio from my Dropbox:
- Mike Viola's "So Much Better" (1:50)
- Pizzicato Five's "Cleopatra 2001" (5:21)
- Joshua Redman's "Chill" (7:41)
Depending on how intelligent your browser is, and yet still comes up short, you might have to right-click those links above, copy the URL and paste it into your Winamp or other media player, etc.
This week marks 15 years since Miles Davis [Wiki] passed away. KCSM, the US’s only 24/7, no-commercial jazz radio station, honored the man by airing The Miles Davis Radio Project, a definitive, hours-long documentary packed with interviews with fellow musicians.
It’s been told often how Miles, more than any other musician, single handedly broadened the scope of jazz. From his early ground-breaking bebop, to the creation of modal jazz, to the orchestral incorporations, to the electric fusion, he stretched jazz in many different directions, driven by inner impulse, peer rivalry, and (obliquely) the need for public acceptance.
Miles’s playing is quite distinct, sometimes brittle, always sensitive. “Like a man walking on eggshells,” a fellow musician from that documentary said. A fellow trumpeter (I forget their names) remarked that Miles’s trumpet playing was “like singing.” Blowing into a “mechanical thing…with pistons,” Miles played like “it wasn’t even there. If you took it away, he’d still be singing… the blues.”
In that documentary were words from the man himself, spoken in that quiet, gruff, scary voice, which is also distinctly him. Of his own playing, he said, he sought “a round sound with no attitude.” And if he hadn’t found this sound, he wouldn’t have been able to take the music out there, move it in and out of key. This base, as one can imagine, was crucial to him.
It was funny and interesting to discover James Brown's influence on Miles. When an interviewer asked him, “So you like James Brown?”, Miles responded with “Everyone likes James Brown.” He went on to say he got the idea of the double horn jab in “So What?” (from the landmark Kind of Blue album) from JB, quipping that he “stole it” from him.
I wish I’d heard The Miles Davis Radio Project in its entirety. He was a giant and a complex, irascible, brilliant man. I should surely read up on him.
