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Archive for the 'jazz' Category
28th September, 2009 | 119 views
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What a smart man Mr. Cugat cuts on this picture sleeve, a masterful shaker of the maracas as well. You can’t fail to have your hips move to this mischievous Latin lounge swing.
11th September, 2009 | 83 views
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Friday cha-cha from Cal Tjader. If you don’t know the track by name, you may do once you hear it as it was a hit in the early sixties in the States and remains a better known latin jazz composition. Originally called Gauchi Guaro (spelt slightly differently on this release however it’s a nonsensical Spanish phrase), it was given a catchier title by one of his band members who maintained that it was spicier than the original by Dizzy Gillespie.
4th July, 2008 | 700 views
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Last weekend I was in Bristol for an extended break, change of scenery and to visit friends. Naturally, there was some diggin’ around in the crates of a record store and £15 seemed then to be a reasonable price to pay for a VG+ copy of the original 1977 gatefold vinyl release of the Star Wars soundtrack. The cultural impact of Star Wars goes without saying so the compositions would be recognised by most people. In the cantina scene, Obi Wan slices the arm off of the cantankerous alien at the bar who’s hassling Luke, with his lightsabre. The alien jazz band who are supplying the vibes in the background, amusingly stop playing for a brief moment before striking up this jolly tune again despite the carnage. The bar must be a sort of rough version of Ronnie Scott’s and the ne’er-do-wells who frequent it, fond of chilling to jazz after a hard day smuggling and looting around the galaxy.
Despite being over thirty years old, it still had the liner notes inside:
Ben and Luke enter a Mos Eisley cantina in search of a space pilot to get them off Tatooine. Ben meets Chewbacca while Luke gets in a fight with several surly creatures. Ben comes to his rescue. “Can you imagine,” George Lucas suggested, “several creatures in a future century finding some 1930s Benny Goodman swing band music in a time capsule or under a rock someplace – and how they might attempt to interpret it?”
John Williams – This is the only track that does not use members of the London Symphony Orchestra; and it is the only source music in the film. We used nine musicians, mostly jazz. They included one trumpet, two saxophones, one saxophone who doubled on clarinet, a Fender Rhodes piano, a Caribbean steel drum, assorted percussion, a drum and an Arp synthesizer for the bass. I scored it so they sound a little bit strange, almost familiar but not quite. We filtered them so that it clips the bottom end of the sound. We attenuated the low end a little bit and reverbed them so it slightly thins them out.
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