PASSWORD:
BAISTOPHE

DEAD LINKS

NOTE : DEAD LINKS
We'd like to thank everyone for preventing us of dead links. For the moment, we are note able to re-up them.

Feel free to keep on preventing us of those dead links. We will update them when we (I and Jeb-E-Diah) have more time to (understand : from september). Some of them will be partially or completely repacked considering albums which would have been issued thereafter and surely with new and improved artworks.

Stay tuned !







Tuesday, May 10, 2011

STAN KENTON (ABO#423)

STAN KENTON

ARTISTRY IN RHYTHM

(1940-1960)

An off-the-wall choice today. I had it at hand, and decided that it didn't cost anyone to share it. To enjoy this collection, you'll have to have some appreciation of postwar Big Band music or Exotica.
As you begin to explore Jazz, you'll see Stan Kenton's name mentioned often. He is a controversial figure, recognized as a flawed genius by many. This baistoiphe covers roughly 1940-1960. Dates are hard to determine, as most pre-Sixties jazz albums are compiled from 78s and 10" EPs and released on budget labels with no annotation. Be forewarned that this baistophe bounces around stylistically. It opens with a big band sound, but the next tune could be the theme of a '60s action show. Another would be a fitting score for the denouement of a James Bond film; where they confront the villain in his hollow volcano. You may recognize snippets of cartoon music; both Raymond Scott and Carl Stalling borrowed ideas from The Kenton Orchestra. The collection wasn't originally constructed for public consumption, so I won't feel badly if you take cuts from both CDs to make one that suits you.
Kenton's 'Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra' was known less for their music than their sound. While everyone else had a dance band, he had an orchestra. If he were to start today, he would definitely be into heavy metal. He liked everything big and dramatic with unusual time signatures. His progressive musical ideas emphasized power and had more to do with 20th Century orchestral music than jazz. Today, it just sounds like swing music and it's hard to judge how radical some of Kenton's ideas were. It's like a 15 year old trying to figure out what was so different about Nirvana.
He had hired top-flight musicians and vocalists but this was not enough to win the respect of jazz aficionados. The music often veered off into ponderous and overly commercial territory. But he depended on his chart hits to finance his more experimental works. By the mid-Fifties, he was drifting toward more conventional big band arrangements. By 1960, jazz was becoming irrelevant, and Kenton, having been irrelevant to jazz, was just a musician on the margins of popular music. His best musicians had moved on, and he filled their positions with young and inexpensive talent. He tried to reinvent the band by emphasizing a big brass section, but it mostly sounded the same except for more horns.


-BURNS-








6 comments:

Anonymous said...

WTF is that??!!! O_O
This blog keeps surprising me and i'm not often disappointed in the artists you select and the track lists you come up with.
I'm a little afraid that 45 songs of tropical easy-thingy will be a tad hard to swallow... We'll see...

Jeff Gee said...

Anonymous,

Some of this is certainly what you anticipate, but check out "Thermopylae" on disc two, which must have sent most easy listening fans screaming into the night. And they released it as a SINGLE.

Anonymous said...

How weird... You jumped from ABO420 to ABO423.
Was it on purpose?

Anonymous said...

You're right. I was working on ABO422 when Jeb-E-Diah posted his "good bye" post and I made the mistake to number this one 423 instead of 421. No matter, the next will be 422 and the following one will be 421 and then we'll go on with 424.

KeeWee said...

Gidday ... I know I'm a bit late to your blog and have probably missed a lot in the last 4 years (4!) ... but whatever happened to "Spooky Tooth - ABO#149 - issued around Jan 2009" ... cannot find any reference to it anywhere except your list of compilations !? ... was this one of your rare "please remove" blogs ... cheers mate

PeterP said...

Thank you for the slice of the past.