Module 6

In the initial run of his course, I spoke about it being a shame that I wasn't more of a Carlos Santana fan and that I didn't own any of his albums.  I regret that I've not corrected that issue in the past six months.  Perhaps iTunes and I need to have a little talk with my credit card this weekend.  It's true that the music I'm familiar with, Oye Como Va especially, are tunes I really like.  I know from college pep band that it's a great tune, and it was always one of my favs when we played it at Wisconsin, and certainly when I’m flipping through the vast array of options on my XM Radio while driving, a Santana chart all but guarantees that I’ll stop on that station and listen.

Santana's Wikipedia article credits him with fusing Rock and Latin American rhythms and using blues lines in his guitar playing.  While Wikipedia is, perhaps, not the most academic resource, this statement about his music certainly shows in Oye Como Va.  I can hear grooves and lines that have their basis in the blues, he has extended guitar solos that are very evocative of blues charts we listened to back in Module 4.  I can hear the connections to big band (and jazz itself harkens back to African grooves) within the Afro-Latino styles, and the added Latin percussion completes the flavor.  Having just completed World Musics at UF, it's easy to hear these additions and respect the authenticity of the charts.  It’s also not surprising to me that versions of Oye Como Va appear in the books of many public school jazz bands, and it's probably time that I made sure we had it in our books with the East Tophatters too.  

Wayne's World was easily one of my favorite Saturday Night Live sketches back when I was in junior high and high school, but it made it's leap to the big screen when I was a freshman.  At the time, my knowledge of hip rock'n'roll was quite limited.  I wasn’t one of the “cool kids," and all my folks listened to, which I've discussed at length in both runnings of this class, was their own vernacular music.  This movie was my introduction a Queen other than just the annoyingly ubiquitous sports anthem We Will Rock You, as well as the music of Led Zeppelin.  I loved the scene in the music store with the “No Stairway to Heaven” signs in the store as Wayne takes the Fender Stratocaster, “No Stairway.  Denied.”  Between Wayne’s World and the No Quarter collaboration, I really came to like a lot of Zeppelin’s charts, but I never saw the appeal of Stairway.  I suspect it’s because I’m not a guitar player, so that “famous riff” at the start never resonates with me in a personal way.  Listening to this chart now, with much more mature ears, the tune is brilliant.  A chorale at the beginning?  Then a prolonged rock section?  As a concert band guy, this blows me away.  It’s not the rhapsodic hodge-podge that is Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s a Bach Little Prelude and Fugue, a Clifton Williams piece (Dedicatory Overture comes to mind), Carter’s Overture for Winds, McBeth’s Chant and Jubilo.  It follows format that really works for me with the maturity I now possess in my musicianship. 

Are Talking Heads the “gateway drug” to George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic or is it the other way around?  I only know Talking Heads for Burning Down the House, which was influenced by Clinton and his group, and they date back to doo-wop.  The question makes sense in terms of this listening, despite our Talking Heads chart for the week being prior to Burning Down the House, as Talking Heads claim to have gotten the idea from a Parliament-Funkadelic show.  I think I need to familiarize myself with that group too.  With the advancement in electronic technology, our Talking Heads chart has an early 80’s sound to it, despite its 1977 premiere, yet the structure is very much rock with roots all the way back to the blues. 

The bulk of the remainder of this week’s listening are charts that I’m familiar with from either the Saturday night “Super Gold” that I've referred to many times or pep band tunes.  

Module 5

The listening for this module consists of Motown, the British Invasion, and what we've come to know collectively as "rock'n'roll."  It's a module full of the original "boy bands" - the Beatles and the Beach Boys - as well as a host of other soloists and groups that give us the true switch over from the jazz idiom to what we now know as rock music.

Of our listening this week, I maintain that the Beatles are the most harmonically interesting.  The charts on this week's listening are quite diverse, and not just within the idiom, but for the group too.  Although their core sound is easily recognizable, the Beatles strive for a great deal of interesting musical ideas and styles.  Of all the pop music from this period on, they are probably one of the more diverse artists, with the exception of Billy Joel.  Like Billy Joel (Good Night My Angel), the Beatles utilize a great deal of classical harmonic structures, with suspensions and double suspensions throughout this week's listening.  There is also a lot of joking about how modern popular music requires a great many collaborators to write, and yet music of this era is much more complex yet was written by fewer people.  Certainly the poetry of the Beatles' lyrics is extremely interesting.  I enjoyed reading about the story of Hey Jude coming to be earlier this fall as my band prepared for its fieldshow.  Paul McCartney originally wrote it for Jules Lennon in the wake of the Lennon's divorce, and he wrote it during his drive to Cynthia Lennon's home.

Yesterday also has an interesting story behind it as it wasn't originally written and performed by the Beatles.  Even though it appeared on a Beatles album, Yesterday was written and first performed by Paul McCartney.  It was only after it became a hit that the Beatles made it part of the full group's book.

The Beach Boys and I go back to my youth as my parents were huge fans.  Surprisingly, Good Vibrations has a much more “modern” sound than the bulk of the listening we have.  The electric guitar parts use sounds that are unique for their time.  Most electric guitar lines of the time sound just like basic rock guitars, where Good Vibrations utilizes something akin to distortion pedals.  I am not conversant in guitar lingo beyond this, so I’m not quite able to articulate what I hear, but I’ve always thought that this chart was more of a late 1970s tune than the mid-60s.  Perhaps it was my own exposure to the chart on the Saturday night “Super Gold” oldies program on the local radio station that my parents listened to (I’ve referenced this in my discussion posts), so I heard it out of context, but it always struck me as later than it actually was.