![]() It never had a regular pop hitmaker, and did not concentrate on a particular style of music. Compared to Motown, however, the label lacked focus. It also boasted a strong tradition of blues, R&B and jazz, which found a home at Chess Records. ![]() But another industrial metropolis in the Midwest was ahead of Detroit when it came to experimenting with an early form of symphonic soul: Chicago.Ĭhicago had a formidable reputation for classical music, thanks to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1891 and regarded as one of the five most important orchestras in the US. In the space of a year, The Supremes’ records transformed from the comparatively simplistic 1964 chant “Where Did Our Love Go” to the more complex “Stop! In The Name Of Love,” and just months later they were singing “I Hear A Symphony.” Their writers, Holland-Dozier-Holland, were commercially and musically ambitious, and their August 1966 smash hit for Four Tops, “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” was like two different songs in a mini-suite.Īcross town, a rival label to Motown, Ric-Tic, was recording an orchestra that played soul, The San Remo Golden Strings, releasing several singles, the best known of which was “Hungry For Love.” Motown eventually absorbed Ric-Tic and many of its artists, and released a version of “Reach Out I’ll Be There” credited to San Remo Strings. ![]() But the arrangements grew increasingly complex, even if few fans seemed to notice at the time. I hear a symphonyĪs R&B and jazz fed the development of soul in the early 60s, the focus turned to the beat and the vocals rather than the sweetening: Detroit’s Motown rose on a crashing snare drum and the sort of heavyweight rhythm section that sweated dancefloors. ![]() Rhythm’n’blues also deployed orchestral arrangements: Little Willie John’s beautiful “Let Them Talk” (1959) perfectly combined blues, gospel and pop while sweetened with strings. Musicians craved complexity, a challenge Duke Ellington’s series of suites co-written with Billy Strayhorn, such as “Such Sweet Thunder” (1957), aimed to give jazz and the blues all the texture and depth of classical music. Before them, swing bandleaders gained a reputation for a questing, highly accomplished, multi-layered music that influenced classical composers in return: Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie were among them, the latter retaining his deceptively simple playing style amid an orchestra that stimulated both the synapses and the dance glands: soul amid art, if you like. Charlie Parker, the founding father of bebop, jazz’s mid-century revolution, did so in 1949 Miles Davis hired Gil Evans to give his music an orchestral backdrop in 1957. People used the word “soul” to describe the playing of bebop musicians, many of whom did not fear working with strings. Symphonic soul has been around as long as the music itself. Listen to the best symphonic soul on Spotify. Here is an uplifting, transformative, heart-melting, complex music worthy of any classical composer – and it’ll touch your soul and delight your feet. And those that have left us still have their music to speak for them. Those that are still with us will tell you soul is a symphony. Just ask Richard Evans, Quincy Jones, Diana Ross, The Delfonics, Soulful Strings, Billy Paul and all the rest. Soul can be a symphony and appeal to the higher nature of the human spirit. If jazz excited dancers and yet was classical, then so were soul and R&B, because they grew from the same roots. The people who danced to jazz in the first half of the 20th Century also danced to soul in the middle of it, and R&B at the end of it. It says that Black America is educated, aspirational, cultured, sophisticated: African-Americans may be able to dance, but they also feel a higher artistic impulse, as if it could be any other way when you think of Black America’s contribution to culture. It gives the lie to the idea that jazz was played entirely from the gut or was purely for dancing. That phrase has echoed down the decades: it is observational, contentious, challenging. In the US, Taylor was known for interviewing musicians on television, and coining the phrase “jazz is America’s classical music.” In the UK, pianist Billy Taylor was best known for writing and performing “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free,” a soulful, Pentecostal jazz tune that has been the theme of BBC One’s flagship movie review TV program for decades. “We was thinking about Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Brahms… but maybe we should have had a little bit more Brown.” James Brown, “Dead On It,” 1975
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