Logging back into Bluesky for the first time in like a year to immediately be served the highest order conceptual filet mignon

I did this and it's actually the best thing ever. Now working on the coolest shit I've ever composed, someone find me a power metal vocalist and a guy that can shred a six-string bass Patittuci style so I can make it a reality

I think if someone asked me to present the original codification of jazz I'd show them either one of these cuts or James Johnson playing What Is This Thing Called Love (a standard so enduring you can chart most of jazz history through its iterations)

Lil Hardin rips when you can actually hear her. The guy on clarinet holds his own and the tuba fills are unreasonably tasty. It's funny to think we get from this to Ascension in half a century but this really does feel like the blueprint being laid down for small jazz ensembles

I've been listening to her a lot since vocal versions of jazz standards are so much easier to learn than bebop blowing sessions, but mother of God, Nelson Riddle went beast mode with some of these arrangements

You can only see someone juggle gamelan, jazz chords, Catholic mysticism and serialism so much before realizing they've figured out something the rest of us haven't

I'm such an admirer of attempts at musical 'theories of everything' even if they inevitably run into the limits of cultural tunnel vision. With that said it's definitely the composers of the 20th century rather than the theorists that were seeing the game in 0s and 1s

Bluesky doesn't quite have the comedic potential of golden age Twitter as it stands, but it's nice that the userbase isn't so ontologically evil. You win some you lose some

It eases you in with two movements of fuddy-duddy functional harmony then tasks you in turn with 'make your audience cry for 20 minutes' followed by 'perpetual motion fugue with a million left hand trills at max tempo'