CD Odyssey Disc 658: Various Artists

I’m just a couple of hours away from my annual football pool draft. This also means that I’m only a few days away from the regular season starting again. Yeehaw – go Dolphins!

Disc 658 is…. A Portrait of Big Band Swing

Artist: Various artists

Year of Release: 1998 but featuring music from the thirties and forties

What’s up with the Cover?  Some fellas getting their brass on. These guys look square as hell, but they were the rock stars of their day.

How I Came To Know It:  This is one of Sheila’s albums. I think she bought it because she liked big band and it was a hell of a good price.

How It Stacks Up:  This is a compilation album, so it can’t really stack up. Even if it could, this and the “Glenn Miller Story” (reviewed not that long ago, at Disc 617). are the only big band albums I can think of in my collection, so there isn’t much to compare it to.

Rating:  compilations and ‘best of’ albums don’t get a rating. That’s how the CD Odyssey rolls.

Swing was the dance music of its day, and listening to this two disc set full of the finest examples of the form, it is easy to see why. This is fun-lovin’ stuff that feels good to the ear and gets you shakin’ those parts that it feels good to shake.

There were 48 songs and over two hours of music on this album (hence my lengthy absence) and it took three full days walking to and from work to get through it all. Far from being a labour, the music generally put me in a happy mood. Listening to it everyone I passed seemed happier, the colours of the trees, houses and cars around me all seemed brighter; even the passing cars and bicycles traffic seemed to be cruising along in time with the music. I felt like I was starring in my own personal musical. I may even have danced down the sidewalk from time to time.

One of the things that kept coming back to me was how the music had a predictable quality to it, but yet never felt boring. Growing up on western popular music, I’m so used to certain chord progressions that songs always feel like they are going to go in a certain direction. Swing follows all the rules, with melodies that feel so natural it is like they were decoded directly from the Music of the Spheres.

This experience only works if you’ve grown up with western music though. A listener from a different culture might find the melodic progressions unexpected and novel, in the same way that eastern or African music surprises my ears.

In addition to a lack of melodic surprises the music is characterized by the jumping and dragging of the notes through the rhythm (I think that’s what puts the swing in Swing). Whatever it is, it makes you want to dance and even as I type this I find myself swaying in time to the music (currently “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” by Count Basie and his Orchestra).

I was talking about how damned happy this music made me over the weekend with my friend Andrew, and he made a good point. This stuff comes out of the thirties and forties which for the most part featured either economic depression or world war. Maybe Swing was exactly the tonic that the nation needed to forget its troubles. If it feels a bit vacuous or frivolous in places (and it does), then I think we can forgive it on that basis alone.

The songs were almost all three minutes long – to the point of being uncanny. I remember I used to have a “Best of James Brown” cassette tape and all those songs were also three minutes long. It didn’t take much delving into James Brown’s collection to determine that very few of his songs are that short, and they’d all been edited for length.

I don’t know much about this music – maybe radio demanded a short song – but it left me wondering if they’d been edited for length or not. I hope not, because that is always a damned shame. If there is editing, it is artfully done and the songs never feel truncated. Besides, the “extended dance mix” of any dance music is only fun if you are actually at a dance.

The sheer enormity of this package makes singling out artists and songs difficult. I recognized a lot of the Glenn Miller songs, and some other ones that are so iconic that we all know their tune (like Benny Goodman’s “It’s Only a Paper Moon” or Artie Shaw doing “What Is This Thing Called Love?”). The album is full of greats like Miller, Shaw, Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, the aforementioned Count Basie and tons of others.

These guys were all living legends in their day, and listening to them now it is easy to see why. Writing a catchy pop lick and making it feel effortless is one of the toughest things in music, and these guys have them rolling out of the horn section as easy champagne cascading down a wine-glass fountain.

After three days, I’m ready to move on to something more familiar to me, but I’ve had a hell of a good time getting to know another important branch of my musical tree.

Best tracks:  Hell if I know – after three days and 48 songs my head hurts trying to figure them all out. Lots!