LogFAQs > #969272343

Duke Ellington - Far East Suite results

The participants sorted by deviation from final results:
Giggsalot (8)
Snake5555555555 (12)
neonreaper (14)
Seanchan (14)
ChichiriMuyo (16)
Johnbobb (16)
BlueCrystalTear (18)
FoolFantastic (26)
hotdogturtle (26)
Raetsel_Lapin (30)

General Album Comments

Seanchan: That was enjoyable! I felt like I was doing the album an injustice by multitasking, rather than just sitting back, closing my eyes, and simply listening.

Raetsel_Lapin: I'm glad that we got a chance to cover something different, even though this isn't a style of music I'm particularly into.

FoolFantastic: I'm happy to have revisited this - it was sitting in my 8.3/10 zone but now appears likely to crack my 9/10 range. As far as jazz goes, I've always been drawn toward the more chaotic side, and Duke Ellington is not that. But Far East Suite really clicked this time around - not that I have the language to really express why. There's just so much motion to these pieces.

As far as ranking these pieces go, I feel like this could go in any order - I really prefer this as a full work.

ChichiriMuyo: I'm glad we went with one of the more foundational, easy to listen to jazz albums. I find the genre intimidating, but this was a pretty reasonable introduction. I was wondering for a bit if I was going to like the album. I like Tourist Point of View but right after it goes into slower/quieter stuff that just didn't do it for me. Once Mount Harissa hit, though, I noticed that I was subconsciously moving along with it. I almost made it my top song, but the last two minutes really dragged it down for me. And that's kind of the problem for me - this album is all over the place, there's not even internal consistency in many of the songs, let alone the album as a whole. I know some people love that about jazz, but it doesn't work for me. Overall a good experience, though.

Giggsalot: Interesting to hear what folks think of this one. In a lot of ways it's a fairly unique record, but it marries a lot of different strains of jazz together - traditional big band, classical influence, hard bop, vaguely conceptual stuff - in a pretty fun and representative way. I also love that all of these songs are so dynamic - there's such a great sense of motion throughout here, and even the songs where I dont love the main theme have at least one section that bangs. I could imagine this being a pretty decent intro to jazz, if this was the first album someone actively listened to. I guess that's why I nominated it!

Johnbobb: Fantastic album start to finish; not a bad track among the bunch

hotdogturtle: It's so hard to rank an album like this compared to most other genres because you don't really have a "main part" of each song to latch onto, like a chorus or a leitmotif. You really have to consider every song as a beginning-to-end entity. And then Ad Lib on Nippon was the hardest song to rank because it's so many different things at once.

BlueCrystalTear: This album is equally strange. I don't even know what it's supposed to be. This album excels when trying to simply be jazz, which is Duke's forte. However, it fails when he tries to make it a jazz/world music crossover, largely because Duke is trying to convey Eastern sounds with Western instruments. I'm left wondering what I'm supposed to be feeling, particularly because I don't sense anything "Far East" about this (the track titles imply Iran and India, save for #9). I too don't like ranking this - this was meant to be a single entity, so ranking each movement "from start to end" is tough since it's meant to flow together, which it does. I have no idea what I'm left feeling here. Just... groove, maybe? And I couldn't even tell you which song was which, but I only listened once. So... yeah.