It’s refreshing to listen to things that sound a bit more familiar! These three works were fantastic; truly pleasures to listen to. Being bit of a jazz/blues fan myself the listening for this week was bit of a treat. Yet it was challenging to listen to it in  this different context: one in which I am listening for more formal elements to pick out and in some way explain my enjoyment. Prior, it simply sounded nice and made me feel strongly, be it happy and free or sad and lonely. Now, the task seems much more difficult.

With Potato Head Blues, the polyrhytmic nature of jazz comes through with several rhythms playing at once (the piano keeping a steady bass-line as the trumpet and clarinet shows off their finesse). It’s very interesting to hear the relationships between the instruments, particularly in the middle where there is a trumpet solo, then clarinet solo, then a trumpet solo, all interspersed and punctuated by the piano. It oddly creates a tension with its start stop feeling that is resolved when all the instruments join back together at 2:35

All the pieces seemed upbeat, but I couldn’t quite tell if they were in major or minor since there was so much going on. That sort of lively movement and fluidity made them so exciting to listen to. Particularly the interplay of instruments. With take the A train, the cascading piano in the beginning and the quick horns seem to play towards a narrative as the title suggests, as if the instruments were narrating one’s journey on the A train. What caught me was the freedom of this piece, where you have crescendos, cascading notes (towards 1.50 and 2.00) and then a bounce back up and then a cocophany of sounds at 2:15. It’s fascinating to hear them playing with all these techniques, and the short notes on the piano, and have it all cleanly resolve at the end.

Confirmation was a very enjoyable piece. It was much faster and seemed so much more variable in moving in all sorts of direction. I could only imagine how hard it would be for someone to do a live transcription of this. It seems to generally lie on one scale but slides up and down and around it with ease. You particularly hear the strong bassline at around 2:20 when the saxophone seems to take a break and give the drums and bass a bit of the limelight. When listening back to Potato Head Blues one could see how the progression of Jazz very much broke forms so as to embrace the freedom and emotion of the music.