How did I miss this?!
Darcy James Argue is a composer and arranger of modern, progressive big band jazz.
This is so good!
This is a track called "The Enemy Within" from his new release, "Real Enemies".
Here's a behind the scenes video from the recording session.
And if there were a god, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence - Russell
I dig Infernal Machines, but less so Brooklyn Babylon, but I'll check the new one.
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
I have this one on order, but it hasn't come in yet.
From the bits I've heard, while you could certainly call it jazz, there's also quite a lot of big band rock: a sort of "lost" Sixties musical genre that never really stood on its own as absolute music, never made it to commercial radio or even as live music despite its near-ubiquity as the soundtrack to innumerable movies and TV series. This in particular has a strong flavor of the scores to thrillers or cop shows, which fits right in with ithe album's concept of American political paranoia.
I am digging it. He utilized some 12 tone ideas on this one. I think it's his best one, thus far....I love all three albums, actually, but there were a few strange transitions, esp. on Brooklyn Babylon.
"And this is the chorus.....or perhaps it's a bridge...."
Totally agree - I own Infernal Machines, passed on Brooklyn, but will be checking out this new one and if the rest is as good as the video I'll be getting itOriginally Posted by mogrooves
Here's something else with 12-tone jazz writing:
There's definitely a bit of similarity, although the writing process for David Shire's Pelham score would have been quite different - the structure, mood, and tension/release cycles of the music were governed by the film scenes it accompanied, rather than being up to the composer, and the whole thing would have been written much faster.
Or, for that matter, something that's usually considered rock or pop:
Last edited by Baribrotzer; 10-18-2016 at 12:10 AM.
Well, it arrived, and I've been listening to it. Good stuff. At points, it reminds me a little of Mike Westbrook - the feel tends to be different, but some of the harmonic groupings sound similar, and Argue incorporates jazz/rock guitar in a similar fashion. Some of it also sounds more than a bit like David Shire's score for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (see above). Indeed, Argue dedicates the entire work to Shire and to Michael Small (who scored Klute, The Parallax View, and other Seventies thrillers) - and quite fittingly, if you ask me.
In a way, the theme, concept, and approach of Real Enemies all play to Argue's strengths by paradoxically rubbing against his usual tendencies. While he's not a great melodist, his music often has a certain forceful power, and his typical compositional manner of moving big blocks of sound about, and occasionally running them head-on into one another, fits this piece's dark theme quite a bit better than it works with some of his lighter material. It also seems to mesh better with the 12-tone construction of Real Enemies than with his earlier pieces' typically diatonic Minimalism: The chromatic dissonance and biting textures throw some unusual and striking changes into the Minimalist churn, and tell the musical story quite well even without hummable tunes. In contrast, his earlier, less fierce work can sometimes fall rather flat, with much arpeggiated or hocketed twiddling but no strong melody to carry it. And thus, I think this is my favorite work of his so far - it really seems to strike home, whereas his earlier two albums showed a lot of potential, but never seemed to quite get there.
EDIT: Here's an interview with Argue about the piece: http://www.jazzspeaks.org/real-enemi...-argue-speaks/
Last edited by Baribrotzer; 10-24-2016 at 01:40 PM.
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
On the recording of Real Enemies, the last track includes an excerpt from Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, read by the actor James Urbaniak in a convincing Fifties-documentary voice and manner. The remarks Argue makes in the interview come close to a paraphrase of that excerpt: that to a political paranoid, "history itself is a conspiracy, set in motion by vast and demonic forces". And that every genuine fact he encounters gets neatly slotted into his pre-existing, all-encompassing theory, happily coexisting with and supporting bits of rank nonsense, and because of that the theory can never be disproven - indeed, such theories often make more logical sense than the messy, confusing, often random, and contradictory reality.
Another interview, from about a year ago, this one including performance footage showing the stage set, the projections, and the musicians' spiffy suits: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/20...s-isaac-butler
Last edited by Baribrotzer; 10-27-2016 at 12:01 PM.
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