It is that perception of the resources that makes this recording – with its blues-derived melodies, its down-home polyphony, its use of mutes, its grip on swing and on grooves – another soulful to exotic gathering of blooms in the aesthetic victory garden Marsalis has been seeding, watering, and pruning for a decade now. But with this music, we hear quite clearly the substance of the studies he has done of New Orleans music and of the extensions, elaborations, and refinements Ellington brought to that monumental Crescent City synthesis of European an African music throughout his career. Until now, Crescent City Christmas Card was his most detailed success in that direction. Marsalis has long had ambitions beyond the creation of an instrumental identity he has also worked hard at learning the craft of composing music for both his performing group and larger ensembles. But even so, the development of this young musician over the last decade is just as evident. It is that standard to which Wynton Marsalis aspires in the music for Tune In Tomorrow…, and the Ellington influence is a guiding element. The finest handling of those responsibilities by a jazz musician was achieved by Duke Ellington, whose music for Anatomy Of A Murder is perhaps the high point of American composition written specifically for film – given the quality and originality of the score’s melodies, harmonies, colors, and rhythms. Mood and pulsation were the primary areas of importance for the film score, and they still are. Those pit bands or those organists underlined the action, introduced roles, gave atmosphere to sets, and put the emotions, dreams, memories, desires, and thoughts of the characters into sound. In those theaters where celluloid, controlled light, and darkness made the movie house a twentieth century temple of mystery, adventure, romance, and terror, pit band were prepared music or improvising organists such as Count Basie extended the role Wagner had refined and layered in his operas. The international tradition of providing specific musical themes, timbres, and rhythms for rituals and dances is the universal precedent for the film score, which developed its relationship to cinematic narrative long before technology evolved for the reproduction of recorded sound.
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