Then & Now

I just bought the new Atlantic 60th anniversary CD at Starbucks, where I seem to do all my cd shopping these days. I bought this one because it has the Les McCann & Eddie Harris performance "Compared to What" from the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival. I first heard this cut in college, thanks to my jazz-loving boyfriend at the time and bought the album (Swiss Movement)after we broke up, for the same reason I picked up the Atlantic CD: this performance is a driving force of energy, building with each chorus to a crescendo of a indignation that is still topical ("The president has got his war, folks don't know just what it's for") and still thrills me everytime I hear it. The details may have changed (Iraq, not Vietnam) but the lyrics' incredulous anger, McCann's pounding piano chords driving the music forward, Harris's raucous sax shooting up into the stratosphere, their energy ratchetting up through each round of misdeeds and stupidity called out. Someone has to speak the truth and they do it here.

How is it that a performace, captured in a particular place at a particular time, still resonates nearly 40 years later? I heard Werner Herzog in an interview on the radio the other day say, "The poet must confront the truth." He was describing the basis of his own work but it applies, I think, to all art. That may be why this piece is still exciting to me when most music I hear today is, well, boring--limp, pallid, forgettable, banal. Popular music, classical music, church music--a lot of it is a snooze. My intention here is not to rant on the low state of music today. Boring is a very subjective judgement. I'm just surprised and pleased that something I liked years ago, I still enjoy listening to today. And the problems--they still exist too.