Darkness has penetrated jazz for so long that it is no longer clear which of the musicians first turned onto the crooked path. Billie Holiday, in addition to the creepy “Strange Fruit”, performed a number of afterlife songs, ending with the great death song “I’m A Fool To Want You”. Artie Shaw also composed the macabre “Nightmare” as a business card for his orchestra in 1936.
Billie Holiday – I’m A Fool To Want You
The heroin Ethiopian of kool-bop, Miles Davis, created several truly “black” sound canvases for Louis Mahl’s directorial debut “Elevator to the Scaffold” in 1958. But the Ethiopian also destroyed the Swing Temple to the ground, coming up with some kind of fusion that scared the listener except with an abundance of notes, whereas Billy’s voice scared with the naturalness of his life, few dared to listen to the senile vocals of young Holiday, broadcasting about a strange fruit hanging from the crimson branch of a twisted southern tree. Well, let’s face it, swing has been killed by English shrieking manes since the seventies.
In 1984, Francis Godfather-to-his-brother Coppola finally made a decent film, The Cotton Club, featuring both Ellington and Calloway, and Richard Gere playing the trumpet himself, without stuntmen. The film was a flop at the box office and was panned by critics feeding on the compost of the Italian mafia. The next year, in which jazz was able to raise its head, 1991 happened. Angelo Badalamenti has managed to bring back many people’s interest in jazz by turning it inside out. The music was visually accompanied by a dancing dwarf and a motionless giant, scarlet curtains and zigzags of parquet.
A separate masterpiece is the appearance of Jimmy Scott, a singer who, due to genetic disorders, remained a teenager with a broken voice even at 65. A decrepit youthful voice framed by a bowed double bass is a mesmerizing sound under the sycamore trees, “Sycamore Trees”. It was the music to “Twin Peaks” that gave the impetus to the emergence of the dark jazz genre. Already in 1992, four notorious German punks changed their plowshares to whisperers. Calling himself Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, they set off along the Badalamenti trail, rattling krautrock shackles and shuffling ambient props. After swapping the guitar for the saxophone, the Teutons finally plunged into darkness, composing soundtracks for unreleased noirs. Notable pieces: “Maximum Black”, “Midnight Radio part 3”.
The Dutch from The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble began by composing suites for cinematic expressionism by Fritz Lang, Friedrich Murnau and others. Enriched with trombone, cello, and violin, TKDE seems to have repeatedly tried to summon Dagon, Cthulhu, and other Ancients. The existence of our website and its readers claims that they failed. However, such iconic compositions as “Mists Of Krakatoa” and “Samhain Labs” declare that armageddon was near.
The Muscovites of Fogh Depot decided not to limit themselves to the limits, since the edges when dark jazz turns into trip-hop, and trip-hop into IDM, are sometimes elusive by experts. Fogh Depot is characterized, among other things, by the soft use of Russian motifs. Necessary for understanding: “Anticyclone”, “Svetly Prazdnik”.
“For me, darkjaz is a niche genre, elements of which quickly turned into a widely available and easily reproducible cliche. I don’t think he ever really had any special philosophy behind him. On the second album, we began to consciously distance ourselves from this genre and it is unlikely that we will ever return to it in its pure form.”
– These are the thoughts of Alexey Gusakov, drummer and founder of Fogh Depot.
Listen online or download Dark Jazz compilation (mp3, 143 MB)
Modern dark jazz is really more of a background music, which is pleasant to watch as the lanterns go out, the hangmen swing, and the windows are flooded with autumn absinthe. But in order for a particular style to be filled with content, this content must be embedded in it, Comrade. Gusakov. In many ways, dark jazz took a wrong turn precisely because people who were far from jazz were involved in it, although there are most of them in modern jazz.
Anyway, the genre has a huge potential, invested by the forerunners, it remains only to wait for the creator who can revive the golem.
