Dear Maya,
This is to help serve the cause of your musical education through listening. A great deal of what is expressed is going to be opinion, and you should feel free to like or dislike anything. Everyone’s tastes are different and what you will like in 10 years will be very different from what you like now. I would like you to try to describe what you do and don’t like about a certain piece or style. Feel free to discuss it with others and have others participate online here in the discussions.
Julian “Cannonball” Adderly was one of the great sax players. His style grew out of a Blues/Jazz tradition from the 50′s into the 60′s from which also came Miles Davis and John Coltrane; and this style eventually became one of the parents of Fusion. The common element is repetition of a background pattern over which a series of solos were improvised. The solos in this tradition were expected to be strongly melodic and every member of the band would have their solos. Because of the improvisational nature of this music Adderly recorded most of his albums live which create a different atmosphere than studio work would.
Listen to the song “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” from the album of the same name. It was written by Joe Zawinul, who later went on to become one of the founding members of Weather Report, one of the great Fusion band.
I know you like “Carry on Wayward Son” by Kansas, and that album Leftoverture is one of the great Progressive Rock albums of the 70′s. I would suggest listening to “Magnum Opus” also on that album. I remember that when we first discovered them in high school some friends and I really loved “Journey From Mariabronn” from their first album Kansas and I thought it was very cool since it was based on the Hesse novel Narcissus and Goldmund and I was totally into Hesse then. It also, according to one friend, contained a Hungarian Minor scale; hey we thought that was totally cool for a rock group. Listen also to “Roundabout” on the Yes album Fragile. A roundabout is a traffic circle that one uses to get on and off roads, remember all those fun ones in Ireland? Or it can also be a merry-go-round.
Let me know what you think.
Uncle Venom
Hi Uncle Ron,
I really enjoyed the Julian “Cannonball” Adderly song. Whenever I’m practicing with my band we do 12 bar blues and take turns improv soloing. Usually in e or a pentatonic. We’re a bit limited in 12 bar blues considering we don’t have a horn section, which would probably enhance the blues jam by a lot, but sadly, not many 12-year-olds are great saxophonists, trombonists, or trumpet players. We still have a great time playing it though, and it sounds good enough. The guitar solo was very interesting on Magnum Opus in that it wasn’t particularly melodic, but it somehow still worked very well in the song. Every instrument had great parts on Journey from Mariabron. The piano in particular sounded really great. It sounds like they’re throwing in a harmonic minor on the intro to roundabout which I like a lot. As for the rest of the song, it’s got a nice melody and kind of funk piano part with the acoustic guitar part in the background which sounded really great together. It sort of reminds me of the police a little bit. Thanks so much again for doing all of this.
Best,
Maya
Clarity young lady! You did a great job describing specific parts of songs and what you liked about them. But only on Mercy, Mercy, Mercy do I know that you actually liked the song. There will be many songs of which you like part, yet not like the whole thing overall. Indeed, there will eventually be songs that I call your attention to a specific part; however, for now I want to know which ones you like enough to listen to beyond this exercise. This way I can be sure you are getting some enjoyment from it, which is the most important thing.