WILT_2021-06

A playlist of songs that intrigued me from Sunday to Saturday. Week of 7 Feb 2021 to 13 Feb 2021.

1. Huntress (Cara) – Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah
2. Kiss of Death – Morabeza Tobacco
3. Orinoco – Morabeza Tobacco
4. Movement 1 – Hauschka
5. Solved Quick – ||||||||||||||||||||
6. I Own The Night – Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah
7. New Jack Bounce (Interlude) – Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah
8. In The Beginnning – Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah
9. I Gave You – Bonnie Prince Billy, Matt Sweeney
10. Tusk – The Crystal Ark
11. Rhodes – The Crystal Ark
12. Yamerarena-I – Pixeltan
13. I Told You So – Pixeltan
14. Ode to Solitude (Gavin Russom Remix) – HIM, Gavin Russom

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2021-06

Notes

Melody is dead. Long live the beat.

This is the phrase that played out in my mind this entire week.

Obviously the phrase is hyperbole and clickbait, but if you examine the notion, there are some specks of truth in them. Contemporay music is dominated by the use of beat, percussion and groove. You might say we’re almost reliant on it to make a piece of music enjoyable for popular consumption, especially in recent times.

However, theres’s plenty more to discredit that sentiment. Strong melodic ideas will always have a way of evoking a set of emotions within the listener. There is something about the space between each note, as well as how each beat makes us a feel a certain way. You might say that it’s the punctuation within musical ideas that allow us to make sense of we listen to, what we feel, what we negotiate, and how we choose to react.

So with that, I’ve had a really enjoyable week exploring the music of Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah across multiple albums in his discography. I chose Huntress (for Cara) to open this week’s playlist because of the mesmerising performance by the flutist (I think it might be Elena Ayodele). It is also a counterpoint to dominant phrase in my head. I don’t really think that melody is dead, and there will always be a place for it especially when ideas are elevated through the conflation of all the beautiful aspects of music.

Deeper in my exploration of Christian Scott’s music, especially from his Centennial Trilogy, the pieces that really stood out for me were the percussion solos. Or I at least selected some of them to be part of this playlist. While I was high on afrobeat in the last quarter of 2020, it is especially enlightening to listen to the ideas of contemporary jazz musicians explore their cultural heritage to perform their negotiations with the present day. It is very exciting to observe another intersection of different musical ideas from across continents, time periods, cultures and more, just for the pursuit of elevating one’s relationship with an ephemeral expression such as music.

But something interesting found it’s way into my listening journey last week. Some mention of upcoming work by Matt Sweeney and Bonnie Prince Billy. Sweeney I was familiar with (I still love ZWAN), but Billy I was not. Curious, I pulled on that thread and was perhaps confronted with the contrast of my rhytmic slant. Here was Billy, singer-songwriter who duetted with the melodic meanderings of Sweeney, chord choices reminiscent of the American iconography as well as lyrical ideas of modern day poets. Truly another way of looking at the world.

And from there, seeing that Billy and Sweeny contributed to a tribute album to Fleetwood Mac (one of my favourite bands), and coming across the musical duo, The Crystal Ark who covered one of my favourite songs, Tusk, in a manner that was in my opinion, respectful of the source material, unique in its arrangement, and fun in it’s performance. From there, I could start digging into a few more acts stabled by DFA (Pixeltan, Gavin Russom), who also bent towards fluid melodic and rhythm choices.

So perhaps I might need to rephrase.

Melody is dead. Long live Melody.

Long live the beat. The beat is dead.