At 6:20 AM -0500 1/30/06, dhbailey wrote:
I have to disagree here -- to Glenn Miller, melody was supremely
important. Being able to dance to the music was important as well,
but melody was very important.
I think it was because for the audiences for which he played, dance
music had to have melody AND beat.
Otherwise his recordings would have been endless jams instead of the
carefully written out arrangements with essentially the same solos
each time.
I seriously doubt that the solos were identical each time, given some
of the name brand players, but David does point out a contradiction
in the big band era. Once a song was recorded--and this goes for
sweet jazz, hot jazz, or cool jazz equally--and people were used to
hearing solos one particular way, that's the way they expected to
hear them. The success of jazz recordings was ironically what caused
this problem for jazz players, making a relatively free form into a
relatively fixed form and actually suppressing creativity.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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