Month: June 27, 2013

*I’m kinda indulging in the parentheses so feel free to skip those parts. You’ll still get the point.

That right there is Allen Toussaint, who has only recently been brought to my attention as a New Orleans legend. I’m disappointed that I didn’t know of him until now. There’s something really great about the sounds that come out of New Orleans, and my hunch is it’s the blending of cultures, but it doesn’t seem to travel very far past the boundaries.

The reason I’m really posting is because this is because it’s a good example of the life of a song. This is actually a Jelly Roll Morton composition yet it sounds incredibly fresh, even when being played by a 71 year old. He doesn’t actually change all that much, either. It’s still clearly a blues. He adds some runs that you’d sooner hear Chick Corea play or a classical pianist, but they work. He throws in some minor 2nds, like the ones around 4:57, but sparingly, and those have always been pretty acceptable in blues, at least melodically. There might be some perfect fourths in the lower two voices at times, too, but that’s enough technical jargon.

The point is, he’s playing with 70-80 years of history between himself and Jelly Roll. Because others between the two kept the song going, kept making it fresh, it gave him a chance to continue it with all the influences he’s accrued in his own lifetime. It’s another version of folk music traditions, where the song doesn’t even belong to the composer because no one can remember who the composer was. It simply is.

(This is sort of echoed by other people. Kurt Cobain once said something like a song is never as good/the same as the 1st time it’s played. Kaija Saariaho–and Nico Muhly, too, I believe–once said she just composed her music, then it belonged to whoever was performing it. [Sorry, can’t find links, let me know if you can, or can correct me.] A pretty diverse crowd. It’s a good reminder that, really, music is a temporal experience that exists as something new with each repetition, even if the repetitions are reminders of earlier experiences.)

The title is a reference to the Jelly Roll version, which included words:

(Honestly, I like the lyrics a lot. Just remember, he came up in Storyville.)

(And for those interested in the technical stuff, there are definitely some strong impressionist influences in Toussaint’s playing. He often uses a 3 against 4 run that sounds straight out of the 1st part of Debussy’s Deux Arabesques and employs pentatonic scales that aren’t exactly the blues scales. The latter is something Debussy got from Asian music–or Russian music which got it from Asian music?–so Toussaint is sorta bringing the whole world together here.)