John Coltrane animation

[Cali]

Check this out:

Trane animation

If you have a high speed connection give this about a minute to open.

[jazzypaul]

that is awesome.

[Peter Johnson]

BRAVISSIMO!!!

I've seen it before, but never that large...gives me chills every time.

[MartyJazz]

Wonderful. I know quite a few Trane lovers that will dig that.

[Noj]

Very cool, thanks for posting it!

[7/4]

cool, made me dizzy....

[Jazzmoose]

Wow....I so glad I finally broke down and got DSL!

[joeface]

Wow, I really like these kinds of things, even if the attempt was not completely successful to my liking. What I mean is that for this to really work for me, I would have preferred an additional layer of abstraction between music concept and visual concept (which, paradoxically would have drawn the viewer even deeper into the little cosmos at work). As it stands, too much of a direct correlation between a song about making steps set to the visible formation of steps.

But nevertheless, this gives an approxomation of what a listener's imagination might construct from the music just based on the 'color' of the music and the song title. Very nice.

[joeface]

Well, thinking about it some more, this little cosmos is topped off with NYC, the most visually recognizable urban area in the world, thereby transporting the real world (a specific time and place we might idealize or at least apprehend its signfigance) right smack onto this constructed world. By that we are drawn in very efficiently. That's an intelligent idea.

Also, the breakdown of the visual construction guides us through the format of the tune. Melody build, expansion and colorful elaborations, back to melodic foundation, dissipation.

I think this little film describes to a degree what Pat Metheny talks about in that article quoted in that other thread, i.e.:

let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around. It's a cliché, but it's such a valuable one: something that is the most personal becomes the most universal.

But there's another way that music connects: with who the person is, the time he's living in, how he's able to manifest a sound that represents all that.

That's why, perhaps, we eventually get to this big picture of the NYC cluster as the 'top build'.

j

Edited March 8, 2005 by joeface

[JohnS]

Pretty neat!

[catesta]

Cool.

[PHILLYQ]

Verrrry cool Are there alternate takes or false starts?

[Bright Moments]

COOL! B-)

is there a trick to saving a copy to my hard drive?

[couw]

10Mb Quicktime .mov file:

http://www.michalevy.com/gs_10mb.mov