One Media® presents
"On The Block"
by
Nowhere Near
(Electro Swing Music Video with Dancing!)

"On The Block"

Electro Swing by someone who unmistakably hung out with Glenn Miller heads ...

One Media® humbly offers a swinging tune for a Steemit Music League #beatbattle season two, round eleven (S2:R11) entry in a Positive & Uplifting theme...

So while hanging out with our fellow cats on THE NEEDLE ON YOUR RECORD SMA - Radio show, conversations tend to explore which genre or sub-genre of electronic music or EDM the tunes we listen to belong. Of course that's a wide-open and ever-expanding topic. But while doing some exploration itself, Nowhere Near learned someone fairly recently did coin the term, 'Electro Swing'. The marriage of EDM and the Jazz Swing era was inevitable considering both are immensely popular dance musics and rely heavily on the "four on the floor" steady kick drum on every beat.

Swing, the kind of feel good music that could lift a whole nation out of depression...

Of course hearing that Electro Swing is gaining traction among dance audiences tickled Nowhere Near as a combination of Jazz and electronica remains the essence of the Nowhere Near project. Furthermore, considering Nowhere Near's repertoire includes tunes that fly a bit too uptempo to call Downtempo ;-) or even a bit energetic to earn a 'Chill Out' classification, this recent personal discovery of a following for Electro Swing fuels inspiration.

Some may notice the influence of Glenn Miller, in fact the bass figure in the head of the present tune "On The Block' is the triplet melody from Glenn Miller's 'In The Mood' ... played in the bass, here it pulls the whole rhythm section into a 3/4 time signature, which is rare in Swing, most commonly in a 4/4 time signature. Thus the head is a 32 bar ABAC song form which then breaks out into solos in a twelve bar blues (in 4/4) with a 3-6-2-5 turnaround. Several elements are anachronistic here, of course, the Theremin and Vibraphone notwithstanding, practically no electric instruments were in Swing in it's first incarnations starting from about ninety years ago. Also the 32 bar head with 12 bar solo/chorus sections become prevalent in the Bebop era which followed the Swing era. Nowhere Near's musical sensibilities tend more towards Bebop's use of blue notes and chord substitutions, so here conscientious effort was made to center on the sixth harmony. For instance, modal playing in an A minor blues scale in the key of C accentuates the 6th of the root, omits the 'harder' blue notes, the dominant seventh and the flatted fifth (a necessity to appeal to the popular mostly white audiences mostly uninitiated to Jazz and Blues at the time) but does allow the minor third for some blue shading. Overall it was a rather enjoyable regression for Nowhere Near, playing swinging licks with what seems like simpler, brighter sounding harmonies of Swing relative to the harmonic complexities of Bebop, which Nowhere Near often emanates.

So the title of the tune, while tipping it's hat to Glenn Miller's 'In The Mood', also pays tribute to blockchain technology, an innovation which holds the potential to lift many out of the present Great Recession.

Happy listening!
Zig

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