I'm feeling good...am I?

A few Jazz and Blues songs I love

There are few things more pleasurable than sitting back on a Sunday morning and listening to the songs you love, while doing nothing else. The songs have your complete attention. For me, not all genres are conducive to this kind of leisurely listening. For example, if it’s an old Bollywood number, I involuntarily start humming the song tunelessly, ruining it for myself and others around me; if it’s a rock or a metal song, it’s impossible for me to sit still. But what can be loosely defined as Jazz or Blues, I can listen to for hours, sitting still, marinating in the emotions, mostly melancholy, evoked by the songs.

I am sharing a playlist of some such songs with you which, by no means, is complete or representative. Unlike

Amod Deshpande

, who curates his lists carefully to ensure some thematic commonality across songs, I have created this list purely randomly. He had asked me to share a list of songs. What I happened to be listening to at the time, I added to this list. I’ll keep adding more songs to it. What follows in this piece are my comments on a few songs from this playlist.

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Feeling Good

When I first heard this song in the climax of the movie Perfect Days, I came on the verge of crying. When the reverie of this beautiful movie subsided, I googled the song and discovered the singer with a voice (Nina Simone) that can make anything happen to its listeners. This song starts with nothing but this voice. When she sings ‘I’m feeling good’ you know something’s gotta give, some dam’s gonna break. It does, with the instruments coming crashing in, creating a perfect background for this voice to express itself. When the next time it starts with ‘it’s a new dawn’, this voice is not alone. And when it pronounces ‘I’m feeling good’ again, the instruments seem to take off with this message to be delivered to the whole wide world.

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In a Sentimental Mood

No percussion is heard in the first few seconds of this song. The rhythm is set by the notes of the piano. In fact, the song starts with the piano and a few seconds later, the saxophone of John Coltrane joins the party. ‘Butter’ doesn’t have the intensity of ‘makhhan’ said with emphasis. ‘Makhhan’ is what comes out of Coltrane’s saxophone. The piano notes of Duke Ellington lacerate this buttery audio mass without any urgency, like a heavy knife that doesn’t require much external pressure and glides through effortlessly. We get to hear some percussion in-between that sets the rhythm for the piano to meander. But it seems to slip out of significance as soon as the saxophone reappears. Of course, the percussions are there in the background but that’s all they are - percussions in the background, doing what they are supposed to do.

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My Little Brown Book

This song is from the same album as the previous one. The saxophone is a bit more pliant to the rhythm set by the percussion and cello in this one. The piano is only faintly heard, reluctant for most part of the song’s duration, letting the saxophone of Coltrane do what it does. It’s brought to the fore in the last few seconds and it flourishes like the flicker of a flame about to go off. It leaves you with the sense of wanting more. Every song on this album does.

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Solitude

I first got to know the name Billie Holiday in Jeet Thayil’s book of poems. In fact, the preface of the book starts with her mention —

I was born the year Billie Holiday died, in 1959. In my recurring dream of Billie, she is a photo on the front page of a newspaper that prints only obituaries. It’s a dream stolen from a poem called ‘The Day Lady Died’ but that doesn’t make it any less strange. Someone sent me a photo of Billie, in which she’s leaning into a microphone, her face swollen. There’s a red whisky tone on her skin and she seems to have nodded out standing, though you can’t be sure because cat’s eye sunglasses are obscuring her eyes.

This made me curious about this singer and that curiosity opened up a new world. In this song, Solitude, the emotional force of her voice is at its expressive best. Despite meandering languorously, her voice seems to be running away with the song, leaving the instruments to do some catching up. It’s less a song and more a rendition of solitude itself. The voice seems to have only its inflections as companions, deepening the mood of solitude. One can only imagine what it must have been like listening to her live. The writer Elizabeth Hardwick describes it like this —

In her presence on these tranquil nights it was possible to experience the depths of her disbelief, to feel sometimes the mean, horrible freedom of a thorough suspicion of destiny.

I can only take Hardwick’s word for it and Holiday’s voice gives no reason not to.

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The Thrill is Gone

Corroborate is what BB King’s guitar does with what the soulful voice is singing. When King sings ‘the thrill is gone’, the guitar follows to nod in agreement that the thrill is indeed gone away for good. This particular song is a lament. A cry not out of desperation but of what comes after it—emptiness. And what comes after that—empty hope—is where the song ends. I say empty because the voice that sings ‘I’m free from your spell’ sounds unconvinced, as it is followed by a grunt-filled assertion ‘I’m free free now’, as if to convince itself, more than anyone else, that some hope can be scraped out of the bottom. What does the guitar do after the voice has laid itself bare? For the last 2 minutes, it corroborates with every word sung.

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What a Wonderful World

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, when the voice of Louis Armstrong says that the world is wonderful, it’s impossible to not believe it. Listening to this song feels like sitting on a swing, in a garden full of all the wonderful things mentioned in the song. If not in the real world, this garden surely exists in the music of Louis Armstrong.

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