LogFAQs > #969687689

Two more to get us up to 8 eliminations:

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#709: Miles Davis - Pharaoh's Dance [20:04]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtORTuLJw7o

Nominator: Lasa [11/14 Remaining]

Initial Score: 49.80
Revised Score: 51.00
Final Score: 53.009

(First Reaction: This is the type of song that gets full scholarly articles about its innovations and impact on not just jazz, but music as a whole. There is a sense that I'm listening to something revolutionary... but without enough knowledge on the history of jazz or basic music theory to properly grok what's happening, it's just... long.)

It's not the type of song I'll listen to often... 20 minutes is a big ask and i'm not really into it enough to justify going out of my way to hear it again, but it is relatively interesting. There's definitely something to be said for expanding my horizons and listening to more challenging music. I'd also say that for as long as the song is, and all the different parts it features, I don't dislike any of them--there aren't any parts that I especially loved either, but I'd say I feel generally content with it for the entire runtime? It's nice enough.

Reading about the album in general is also rather fascinating in its own right;

https://vintageking.com/blog/2018/04/miles-davis-bitches-brew/

Davis intentionally assembled a team of 13 session musicians on very short notice, in order to capture a more spontaneous performance. Most of the musicians had never rehearsed the material, and some of them had never even heard it.

According to Davis: I brought in these musical sketches that nobody had seen, just like I did on Kind of Blue and In a Silent Way.

These sketches were the only direction given to the players. They would typically include a tempo, maybe a few chords or notes hed like to focus on and thats it. Davis felt this forced musicians to pay close attention to one another, to their own performances, or to Davis's cues, which could change at any moment.

If you listen closely, you can actually hear Davis snapping his fingers to denote the tempo, or whispering notes to the musicians on some songs.

That's unorthodox, but quite interesting; The article also goes into some comments from the producer, Teo Macero and Miles Davis' rebuke; Macero seems to take credit for basically everything on the album (going so far as to brag that he edited things so drastically that even the actual artists couldn't recognize their own work), while Davis strongly disputed that... suffice it to say that trying to work out the facts of a 50 year old argument is well beyond my abilities (and the scope of this topic in general), but it's certainly an intriguing subject to learn about.

...of course, that all has remarkably little to do with the song itself, but i'm afraid I don't quite have much to say directly. I don't doubt that it's groundbreaking and revolutionary, but trying to study the pre-70's history of jazz & contrasting it with how the artform evolved following this album is--yet again--beyond the scope of what I'm able to do here. And without any specific knowledge of jazz or music theory in general, I'm left with 20 minutes of nice music that doesn't inspire any specific emotions or fantasies.

[Final Thoughts: Another song in the "all time classic that I'm not able to connect with" pile, though I am liking it a bit more each time.]

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-Groovy-

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#708: Anatoly Volnov - Miguel the Sniper [0:06]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh0zBMyr3CA

Nominator: paulg [46/52 Remaining]

Initial Score: 50.40
Revised Score: 50.40
Final Score: 50.40 [Upgraded to 53.01]

(First Reaction: ''Kay. It's some nice strumming, but not exactly iconic or memorable enough to compare favorably with actual songs or things I have a particularly strong attachment to.)

There are certainly short little jingles that get ludicrously high scores (perhaps even some on this very list!), but this isn't one of them. It's fine? There's not really enough music here to judge and it's not a song or style of song that I have an emotional attachment to, so it's just... fine? It's cool and all, but this feels like one of the more "space filler-y" examples of the very short songs nominated.

[Final Thoughts: I'm not going to say a longer Flamenco music track would have done better, but having a unique style of song represented entirely by a five second jingle doesn't feel great. This is some good guitar playing, yes, but I need more of it.]

[Later: I don't know what I'm doing, so I'm moving all three songs that were scheduled to be eliminated up to a three-way tie with 53.01 points and will revisit them later.]

[Yet Later: The other two songs that were tied with this one have been moved further up the list again, sparing them for now--I'm not sure exactly how far up I'm moving them, but we shan't be seeing either of them on this morning at least. Still, this song held on for a fairly decent amount of time from its scheduled elimination, so it should be proud of that. Were songs capable of feeling pride anyway.]

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