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That's All

That's All

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Selection from LINER NOTES: My father still practices. I remember this was a source of irritation when I still lived at home during high school, especially on Saturday mornings when Bach's "Goldberg Variations" would often jolt me awake at the most inconvenient hours. Besides, I didn't understand why after 25 years of playing jazz professionally, my father still insisted on "sharpening his technique" by putting his fingers through the agony of baroque fugues, subsequently subjecting my ears to arpeggios before breakfast. After about an hour or so of measures being mercilessly repeated until they were "cleaned up" and until I actually got up, Dad would then switch tunes mid-measure, sometimes segueing into a lighthearted Rodgers and Hart piece, or a little Cole Porter. So I didn't necessarily grow up thinking a bar of Bach or a song of Schubert's would be incongruous with any one of a number of Ellington's, Kern's or Berlin's melodies. Imagine then the sort of shock and fascination I experienced in graduate school after reading Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment which lambastes jazz musicians and arrangers for their syncopated mutations of "serious music." Indeed, the text evoked memories of what it was my father accomplished during his Saturday morning practices. Yet I also realized that he didn't merely "contaminate" the classical with jazz articulations and interjections every now and then in smirking derision. His techinique playing jazz tunes also betrayed a kind of reverence for his former training. Thus, "Body and Soul" and "Cheek" were infused with a certain classical effusiveness. It came as no surprise to me, then, that on his album he managed to find a way to insinuate Satie's "Gymnopadies" and Chopin's Waltzes into "Body and Soul" during a peculiar (but pleasantly surprising) 3/4 section. Instead of playing "Prelude to a Kiss" like "a Schubert tune, with a Gershwin touch," he opted for an aesthetic alliance between Ellington and Chopin
Product details
Release Date:
2007-12-11
Publication Date:
2007-12-11
Publisher:
Audio & Video Labs, Inc
Languages:
Published: English
Weight:
113 g
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