Best Music Moments from Woody Allen Films
September 25, 2016

Best Music Moments from Woody Allen Films

Woody Allen’s films achieve a very particular duality. Effortlessly shifting from the wound-up, neurotic jokes he makes to the deep moral conundrums his characters face, he laces his films with a balance that often resembles the actual drama and comedy of real life, for better or worse. These moments of levity and seriousness are always anchored to the films’ larger moods, which are themselves bound to his deliberate and inspired use of music. Manhattan kicks off with Gershwin’s ecstatic Rhapsody in Blue, the jazzy crescendos and woozy melodies of which set the tempo and timbre for the rest of the film. For Love and Death the director chose Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s music from Alexander Nevsky and Lieutenant Kijé, both of which lent the film a particular sense of folkiness and pomp, perfectly mediating the screenplay’s reliance on slapstick comedy and black humor. This playlist collects a number of the director’s most inspired musical selections.

Eric Dolphy Sideman Work

Eric Dolphy Sideman Work

Like this playlist? Love vinyl and jazz? Buy all the songs mentioned here and much much more on vinyl at Wayout Jazz.A musician’s-musician all the way through his brief but influential career, Eric Dolphy amassed a long list of guest appearances to help supplement his supburb solo albums. While most jazz fans know of his stints with both Charles Mingus and the John Coltrane Quartet, there remains a treasure trove of other collaborations that showed his true intellectual style and willingness to experiment based on nothing more than mutual respect of those artists whose visions he believed in. Don’t be put off if that sounds pretentious. He was not one to choose art over beauty, and time will reward repeated listens by exposing deeply emotional playing and thoughtful arrangements. -- Wayout Jazz

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August 6, 2017

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The history of black experimental music is made up of musicians who were and are unapologetically proud of their African descent. They not only used their skills to create profoundly unique music — they also leveraged their connection to their heritage to uplift black American communities, as well as convey their personal frustrations with the oppressions of the pre- and post-civil right eras. This mixtape is filled with artists like Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Betty Davis, and Funkadelic, who pushed, pulled, and broke the boundaries of what black music in America should be, yanking themselves from the mold of Motown to explore new musical territory. A small army of gifted artists followed in their footsteps, from Afrika Bambaataa to DJ Spooky, Flying Lotus to Azealia Banks.

Unpacked: Thundercat’s Drunk

Unpacked: Thundercat’s Drunk

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!There may be no other contemporary player who’s logged as many miles, taken as many left turns, or made as many friends on his musical journey than Thundercat. The artist more prosaically known as Stephen Bruner began playing bass at age 15, absorbing the lessons of jazz fusion greats like Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, and Jaco Pastorius. He soon joined his older brother Ronald Jr. as a member of Suicidal Tendencies, serving the L.A. thrash-funk-metal institution for the better part of a decade, while still making time to tour with Snoop Dogg and build a rep as a session musician for the likes of Erykah Badu and Bilal. Even after Thundercat established his own flair for spaced-out, vanguard R&B with his debut solo album The Golden Age of Apocalypse in 2011, he continued collaborations with Flying Lotus on the Brainfeeder label and forged a new one with Kendrick Lamar. He and brother Ron were also a part of Kamasi Washington’s formidable group for The Epic.The influence of these past hookups are easy to hear in the astonishingly diverse sounds of Thundercat’s new album, Drunk. Yet the album contains fresh surprises, too. Appearances by Lamar and newbies Wiz Khalifa and Pharrell may not be so shocking, but who could’ve known that Thundercat’s allegiance to yacht rock was so fervent that he’d enlist Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins for cameos on the ultra-smooth “Show You The Way”? The album’s crackpot humor and abundance of short, weird tracks are equally suggestive of his devotion to Frank Zappa, and at some shows he’s performed a cover of “For Love (I Come Your Friend)” by George Duke, the R&B maverick who was one of Zappa’s best musical foils.Drunk could only be a product of Thundercat’s vast and vivid musical universe, one that we explore here via songs he’s either created or helped craft, plus equally vibrant tracks by other artists he’s covered, sampled, and loved.

Before the Blues: Ballads and Breakdowns
October 5, 2016

Before the Blues: Ballads and Breakdowns

Jason Gubbels provides an excellent overview of the music that served as the building blocks of the blues, which, by extension, made it the foundation for much of American popular music. You should check out the entire piece. He also points out that much of this music was marketed as blues when it originally was released following the turn of the century, but that twelve bar blues didnt exist until the 20s. Quote:

    "Blues" itself became a hip marketing term attached to song titles in an attempt to stay current with an evolving musical culture, often taking the place of what before might have been "rag" or "stomp"...Many of these early blues performers were never strictly blues artists -- Mamie Smith came out of vaudeville, Blind Blake picked ragtime guitar, and plenty of Mississippi Delta blues singers incorporated country music and current pop songs into their repertoire. So while we largely lack historical recordings demonstrating the origins of the blues, the reality is that plenty of blues performers continued to cut examples of pre- and proto-blues material during their recording sessions.
The Unlikely Influence of Ornette Coleman

The Unlikely Influence of Ornette Coleman

It could be argued that Colemans greatest influence was beyond the borders of jazz. Generations of rock and experimental musicians have internalized the lessons of Coleman, understanding that oftentimes some of the most beautiful music first sounds ugly and random. You can hear Ornettes jagged, screeching stabs in everyone from the Grateful Dead to Television, but more than just a style or type of playing, Coleman taught musicians a new way to approach music -- an improvisational and at times confrontational method that was akin to a primal scream. Of course, Ornette could pull that off because he had chops, and the head-first style would later generate a lot of really bad noise, but weve tried to collect some of the better examples here. Some of these artist are explicitly indebted to Ornette. Thurston Moore has sited him as an influence; Nation of Ulysses named their song after him; and both the Grateful Dead and Lou Reed played with the man.

Ten Free Jazz Albums to Hear Before You Die
October 6, 2016

Ten Free Jazz Albums to Hear Before You Die

Free jazz is a bit of a nebulous thing. All Music Guide lists Thurston Moore, Charlie Haden, and Eric Dolphy, among others, as its key artists, and even Ornette Coleman, whose album Free Jazz arguably launched the genre, later publicly dismissed it as a genre. Still, whatever you want to call it, the type of playing that Coleman pioneered -- the endless tangents, aborted themes and searing improvisational stabs of noise -- became a style that would influence generations of jazz and rock artists. This playlist, from the Village Voices archives, captures some of the highlights of that style. This is definitely a narrower (and more current) take on the genre -- there is no Thurston Moore, but Sharp also leaves out Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor, two very important musicians I generally have associated with the genre. Still, this remains a compelling playlist.

RIP Ornette Coleman
June 15, 2015

RIP Ornette Coleman

Ornette Colemans passing on June 12 at the age of 85 reminded us what a rare bird he truly was. He innovated a dissonant, harmolodic-based version of bop that he coined "free jazz," only to distance himself from the term for the rest of his life. He inspired controversy, intellectual debates and rebukes. He seemed distant from the pop marketplace, yet regularly collaborated with rock musicians in the second half of his career, including fellow iconoclast Lou Reed and guitarist Pat Metheny. Seth Colter Walls Rhapsody playlist does a good job of surveying Colemans memorable career.

Musical Diplomacy: Cuban-American Jazz

Musical Diplomacy: Cuban-American Jazz

With diplomatic relationships with Cuba thawing, theres been renewed interest in the music of the Caribbean Island. For this playlist Judy focuses her attention on the direct collaborations between Cuban and American musicians, with the subtext being that though formal diplomatic or financial ties may have been severed during the Castro years, but the cultural exchange between that two nations has continued. Books have been written on the influence of Cuban on American music, particularly on jazz and the music of New Orleans, and this cant be understated. Through much of the antebellum period, New Orleans served as the port of call for slaves ships coming from the Caribbean, and much of what we think of as foundational American music found it antecedent in places like Cuba. This playlist doesnt go back that far, of course, but theres some great stuff on here, from the pre-Castro days of Chico O’Farrill and Nat King Cole, to the modern music of Wynton Marsalis and Arturo O’Farrill.

The Essential Sun Ra

The Essential Sun Ra

At the risk of sounding horribly reductive (and perhaps a bit factually vague), Sun Ra was a nut. He claimed he was born on Saturn (Wikipedia puts his birthplace at Birmingham, Alabama), developed his own brand of cosmic mysticism (later dubbed afro-futurism and adopted by everyone from George Clinton to Janelle Monae) and made a headdress and flowing robe a cornerstone of his wardrobe. He also released dozens of albums, all of which were idiosyncratic and none of which was particularly canonical, so Jason Heller’s attempt to provide a beginner’s guide are valiant and valuable. The playlist itself is understandably all over the map, but it provides a nice glance at the many stylistic shifts Sun Ra would make.

'90S THROWBACKS
Indie Rock Face-Off: Neo vs. ’90s

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Indie Rock Face-Off: Neo vs. ’90s

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Indie Rock Face-Off: Neo vs. ’90s

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.