How things change.
Apr. 9th, 2003 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oakenguyThis morning I'm playing a '30s-style big band CD in my office (Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks), and it shook some memories loose in my officemate, who's been playing piano for about fifty years.
Paul: During the seventies, you know, they got together a bunch of us to make an album like this. Glen Grey--you wouldn't know him, but he was huge back in the day--he'd died, and his heirs had donated all his music to Northeastern. So Northeastern thought they'd get together a big band and make an album, a tribute album. They got together some of the best players in Boston, all together in this room.
And it was MISERABLE!! Instruments have changed--the vibrato's different, they just don't sound the same. And so many things folks have been doing for decades, in percussion, in brass--totally different from how it was back then. It was some of the most difficult music we'd ever seen, because it was so alien to us.
I'm thinking about this now as I listen to the album. The obvious difference is rhythm--the percussion is weak and passive and the brass players are aggressive in a total flip-flop of their roles these days. (It wasn't until the swing era, another ten years after most of the songs on this album, that the bass became widely used to drive a song). But for the quality of the instruments themselves to change so much that a '20s sound can't be reproduced on a modern trumpet....that's a whole new concept for me.
Paul: During the seventies, you know, they got together a bunch of us to make an album like this. Glen Grey--you wouldn't know him, but he was huge back in the day--he'd died, and his heirs had donated all his music to Northeastern. So Northeastern thought they'd get together a big band and make an album, a tribute album. They got together some of the best players in Boston, all together in this room.
And it was MISERABLE!! Instruments have changed--the vibrato's different, they just don't sound the same. And so many things folks have been doing for decades, in percussion, in brass--totally different from how it was back then. It was some of the most difficult music we'd ever seen, because it was so alien to us.
I'm thinking about this now as I listen to the album. The obvious difference is rhythm--the percussion is weak and passive and the brass players are aggressive in a total flip-flop of their roles these days. (It wasn't until the swing era, another ten years after most of the songs on this album, that the bass became widely used to drive a song). But for the quality of the instruments themselves to change so much that a '20s sound can't be reproduced on a modern trumpet....that's a whole new concept for me.
