Bonus: The Duke of Ellington

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2020

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When the quarantine began, professors around the world raced to put their classes online, and for the Jacobs School's big undergraduate music history course (M402 represent!) Phil created a series of solo podcasts, many of which have been appearing on the Weird Studies Patreon site. Our patrons seem to be enjoying them, so we thought we'd publish the first one ("The Duke of Ellington") as an off-week bonus for all our listeners, partly as a teaser for the subscriber-only stuff on Patreon and partly because Duke Ellington is cool. There's a bit of technical music talk in this, but you can ignore it and still get the main point: Ellington's early short film Symphony in Black and his subsequent orchestral suite Black Brown and Beige represent his lifelong project of using his "beyond category" music to articulate a vision of African American past and future. Please note: this was Phil's first attempt at doing a solo podcast in far-from-ideal circumstances, and the sound is pretty unpolished in places. He got his act together for the later ones; go check them out at https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies. REFERENCES Fred Waller (dir.), Symphony In Black - A Rhapsody of Negro Life Duke Ellington, Black, Brown, and Beige Dudley Murphy (dir.), Black and Tan Fantasy John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spector Vision Radio.
0:05.2	Hi, this is Phil Ford.
0:07.4	So before anything, I should probably say this is not actually a weird studies episode.
0:12.7	This is bonus content.
0:14.5	It's an off week for us, and instead of just giving you nothing,
0:19.0	JF and I thought it might be nice for me to drop one of my
0:22.4	solo music history podcasts. I did a bunch of these earlier this year when the quarantine
0:28.7	began. My undergraduate music history class, M402, went online, and I decided to create content
0:36.6	for it in the form of a series of podcasts.
0:40.3	And I've been releasing those on the Weird Studies Patreon. They're available for our three and six dollar patrons to listen to.
0:49.3	And the patrons over there have been enjoying them. And so that gave me the idea that in an off week when we're
0:55.3	not releasing one of our flagship shows, maybe I should drop one of my solo music history
1:00.7	podcasts. Again, not weird study stuff, but nevertheless, perhaps, of interest to our audience.
1:07.6	And that could accomplish a couple of things. Number one, it could give you a sense
1:12.0	of some of the stuff, by no means all of the stuff, but some of the stuff that you might
1:17.3	expect to encounter if you sign up for the Weird Studies Patreon. But also, I just really,
1:23.8	really love this music, and I want to share that love with you.
1:28.6	Word to the Wise, when we all scrambled into our separate isolations, I had to figure out
1:35.8	how to record a solo podcast. I had to figure out how to get the audio right in, shall we say,
1:43.2	very limited and compromised circumstances. And for the later
1:48.2	podcast, I pretty much got my act together and managed to get it sounding okay. For this one,
1:54.4	the sound is at times a little rough, but I'd like to think that the content is good. Well,
	...

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