I am just crazy about this song. I only heard of this group a few months ago though they are HUGE on the Rhythm and Blues circuit in America and have had big following for years.
Once in while I hear a song that cracks me up open like a summer melon but it is generally as rare as seeing two moons in the night sky. I bring this up because I began watching interviews with Derick Trucks and Susan Tedeski, who are married to one another with children and started the band many years back.
As is so often the case when I approach the vast world of music; Classical, Jazz, Country, etc, etc... I marvel with envy at the communal life-style of a musician in today's world. They appear to share an intimate life together while touring in tight living quarters through thick and thin, and their collaborations bring forth a collective creativity. Their work it seems, is almost always linked up with other human beings obviously because music is mostly, almost always a communal experience.
And this fact that inevitably hits home for me is that visual artists (in the plastic arts) work like hermit crabs, alone with their solitary feelings, their anxieties, fears, panic attacks and basically, just all the neurotic plumbing that creates a personally individual creative vision, remote from the cacophony of a jam session.
Of course there are the musical loners like Satie, holed up in his apartment surrounded by his silent umbrellas, but this is rare. Music is about joining together the feelings of the human experience through humans themselves.
I can really only speak as a painter, but I do know that this solitary class of craftspeople melts into so many other creative professions too,,, I think of potters, poets and authors, etc, etc,,, just off the top of head.
Any solitary creative experience is often a lonely one and one must accept that or slowly go crazy. And of course there is the penalty of the family around such an artist.
I am reminded of all the difficult characters in the Painting World. Half of them died from drink or drugs, many others lived in poverty and died alone, while still others left their families flying high but then low like Icarus. Paul Gaugin, who easily comes to mind, gave up any semblance of a normal Bourgeois life to live in far-off Tahiti.
The list is long, but nowadays this contemporary life has tamed somewhat the quirky, solitary, misfit artists because after all, WI-FI keeps all sorts of connections going without actually having to spend time getting anywhere, or without having to even be in the same room with another human soul.
But anyway, I really just wanted to say that I love a great melody, and they are not freely given out from God easily. They must be earned just like a painter must earn his or her own use of light.
Like in the Painting World, where there is so much crumby, cheap Painting, the POP music has churned out so much junk too, that one becomes inured it.
So this melody from Midnight in Harlem really gets me but but it may do the same for others I understand.
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