The thirty-ninth album: #39 Charles Mingus - The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
Welcome back from the holiday break! I was hoping to cover some songs over the break but never quite got to it.
We're coming back to jazz on our first album of 2017, sounding more avant garde than before. Disjointed is the main impression I get from the first track, Solo Dancer, although it slowly melds into a more coherent whole. It never quite meshes in a conventional way, it keeps sounding uncomfortable, but it wavers. It certainly sounds different, especially from other albums of the time I've listened to, and it takes jazz out of the comfortable corner I feel it was in before in the albums I listened to.
With that it does also feel like there's a lot more experimentation there, already like some of the more complex classical pieces I've listened to. There's growth that now demands you listen far more than before. It's a mess, but one that ends up going somewhere.
The seventeenth classical recording: #9 Josquin des Prez - Missa Pange Lingua
As we go back to the early runs, we also go back to choral music. The voices sound well together, working as five linked movements that work through the different parts of the sound. It's relaxing and meditative, putting you in that state of near emptiness by carrying you through there. It's concordant - quite different from before and pleasing.