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 |  |  | | | | Track Listings | | | The Blues Are Out To Getcha | 7:45 | | Sophisticated Strut | 8:25 | | Palpitation Affirmation | 5:54 | | To Be With You Again | 3:14 | | You’re So, So-So Sociable | 4:42 | | You Can’t Pas De Duex | 5:43 | | Out of the Blue | 3:57 | | Total time: | 39:51 |
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| | | | | | Listen With Your Feet - Ed Strauman | | | Our Price: $9.95  | | | | Item Number: MMC2044J | | Audio Format: DDD | | Genre: Big Band | | | | Description | | Excerpts from the Liner Notes (by Mitch Hampton)
Ed Stauman’s Listen With Your Feet follows in the grand tradition laid down by such fore fathers and mothers as Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, George Russell, Gil Evans, Count Basie, Thad Jones, and the most advanced space explorations of Carla Bley, Sun Ra, and Bob Brookmeyer: a tradition that combines the spontaneity of improvisation with the planned rigor of European structure, without sacrificing the strengths of either.
There is an old dictum about the creative process, the origin of which remains a mystery to me, that says the greater artists write one work their whole lives, a perpetual variation on an infinite theme. We recognize the Gershwin or Copland sound because those artists keep coming back to the same leitmotifs or, to put it more frankly, obsessions.
What are Strauman’s (un)common themes? Well, as the title of this recording would suggest, there is a lot of rhythm. Big Band music was originally our pop music, and people danced to it. Ed has not lost sight of this, a considerable feat considering how harmonically advanced his music is. The music swings, grooves, shakes, rattles, rolls, and just plain always moves, often like the running and hiding of children at play. Then there is Strauman’s penchant for very chromatic, sinewy, off-kilter, linear melodies: these melodies are sometimes contrapuntal, with cycles of chromatic dominant sevenths to create a dizzying whirlwind, contributing to an impish quality in the music.
Finally the music leaves the home base of the blues and swing as much as it goes back there and never with the expectations of the listener. This is very evident on the opening three tracks that together comprise a suite, a magnum epic opus that treats the big band as a symphony. The first cut, "The Blues Are Out to Getcha," starts with a powerfully slow swing groove, which is interrupted by another groove in double time. The contrast between the Basie-like riffs as rhythmic locomotion in the piano and guitar with a simple, down-home blues feeling one the one hand, and fast tempo bebop changes on the other, forms the duality of this tune and indeed, the entire album. |
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