What a great essay! I’ve never seen The Beiderbecke Affair although I did watch The Beiderbecke Connection with my parents a few years later. I want to say it was a lesser creation? Although I was a little too young to appreciate it at the time, I feel like there was a real spirit of rebellion in 80s drama that seems to have been lost. This makes me a little sad.
“In those days you recorded as a band, crowded around a microphone, a needle carving your performance straight onto the shellac; you can hear them all on recordings, all pressed into the room, the piano fainter at the back, the horns blaring away at the front. The lumping gallop of the banjo and the plashing high hat, the great wailing wall, the warp and weft of the interweaving brass, putting some jazz into it, all dancing around the melody like Bacchantes leaping and jiving in the train of the great god. It’s quite the party.”
Also, I am not a jazz person but this description absolutely makes me want to listen to Clarinet Marmalade!
What a great essay! I’ve never seen The Beiderbecke Affair although I did watch The Beiderbecke Connection with my parents a few years later. I want to say it was a lesser creation? Although I was a little too young to appreciate it at the time, I feel like there was a real spirit of rebellion in 80s drama that seems to have been lost. This makes me a little sad.
“In those days you recorded as a band, crowded around a microphone, a needle carving your performance straight onto the shellac; you can hear them all on recordings, all pressed into the room, the piano fainter at the back, the horns blaring away at the front. The lumping gallop of the banjo and the plashing high hat, the great wailing wall, the warp and weft of the interweaving brass, putting some jazz into it, all dancing around the melody like Bacchantes leaping and jiving in the train of the great god. It’s quite the party.”
Also, I am not a jazz person but this description absolutely makes me want to listen to Clarinet Marmalade!