Wednesday, January 7, 2009

letting the busy non-diagetic soundtrack enter your consciousness


A little too spritely for my usual tastes, but Wynton Marsalis' string quartet At The Octoroon Balls (lala) is much better than I thought it would be. Ditto for his chamber piece A Fiddler's Tale added into this disc. They both have the feeling of not-really-watching an old movie but letting the busy non-diagetic soundtrack enter your consciousness. It was a lark well spent.

What I really wanted, though, was the meeting-of-motherfuckers that is Money Jungle (lala). The way Mingus makes his bass sound like an engine that won't turn over on the title track kills me each time I hear it.

The Madeleine Peyroux disc (lala) here because the lala recommended it, is just lovely. "Everybody's Talkin'" has never been talked at you with such coy sensuality as it is talked at you here. Sitting up at work, trying to coax a database engines into calculating a median correctly (this function is not built in?) has largely rendered all this as non-diagetic music: music that sets the scene in a film that is unheard by the actors on screen, or in this case, in front of one.

No comments:

Post a Comment