Music Banter - View Single Post

SATCHMO · 09-07-2010, 10:12 AM

I'm gonna cheat for now and throw down a post from a thread that I started from a journal of mine a while back:

Quote:

You know, I get a little OCD sometimes, about music and sometimes about other stuff. But one thing that really surprises me about myself when it comes to my love of music is the way I gravitate toward concepts, latch on to them like a Rottweiler on a Raggedy Ann doll, and refuse to let go. I think this is a huge reason why I have such an interest in jazz. Jazz is very much about taking the tangible thought and emotion and making it conceptual, more vague, but at the same time, more specific.

Case in point. The song Mercy, Mercy, Mercy written by legendary jazz keyboardist Joe Zawinul was first recorded in 1966 by The Cannonball Adderly Quintet, of which Zawinul was a member, on the album Live at 'the Club' (which, by the way, is a live album in the same vein that Tom Waits' Nighthawks at the Diner is a live album: It's really a studio album with an imported audience). This song is pretty much the definition of a contemporary jazz standard. It has been recorded and performed in so many different ways by so many different ensembles, from solo piano performers to orchestra-size big bands. Now the rub of this song is that it's one of those tunes where the feeling and emotion of the song is supposed to reflect the title of the song, as Cannonball Adderly Explains in the intro to the original right here:

As much as I love this song I've always had somewhat of a presumptuous attitude toward it in a couple of different ways. First of all, despite Adderly explaining the song as depicting the feeling of hopelessness when faced with adversity, I have never gotten that from this song, probably because this song has always filled me with a much more vivid impression. Mercy Mercy Mercy has always struck me as the quintessential "I'm so in love that I just don't know what to do with myself" song. Musically It has all the same telling gestures of being caught up in that same wave of emotions and thought processes. That being said, I guess my disagreement with the overall concept of the song pretty well explains my second point of contention, and that is that nobody, not even Joe Zawinul and The Cannonball Adderly Quintet, plays this song correctly.

On the piano, particularly the electric piano, this song has made itself quite the standard repetoire for jazz and blues afficianados, but there are two almost juxtapose qualities that any performance of this song has to have in order to get my seal of approval. One, it has to be slower than molasses goin' up a hill backwards and it has to have swagger. These are two qualities that tend to cancel each other out with all but the most patient and proficient players. Firstly Everybody want's to play this song too fast as seen here with this gentleman on the fender rhodes, which is as close to terrible as your gonna get:

Then you have the other extreme with those players who seem to be fairly in tune with the songs tempo, but the slow pace of the song throws off their ability to work the pocket with the bottom end chord work of their left hand which gives this song that essential "helpless" soulful inflection that makes it what it is. Like this kid on the piano, the swagger is all off:

Despite the fact that I could not find any marginally professional solo performers doing this song on youtube, (all of the professionally recorded versions have either been full ensemble or completely off the mark) its been an interesting experience seeing the various subtle ways in which this song can be interpreted by amateurs. Perhaps the best version I've been able to find was by this poor sap in his living room gettin' groovy on a Rhodes electric piano, which is really the only instrument that truly does the song justice. It's still, too fast, but it's as close as I'm gonna' get.

This song has been driving me quite crazy as of late. It seems to really be my musical holy grail, but I'll be having many more of these moments in the future as you will undoubtedly see.