Composition
The album has a melodic form, and employs pentatonic scales for melodic development, a practice common in African and African-American folk music. Goin' Home is mostly tempoless, as most of the pieces are performed in a rubato-like free rhythm. Shepp and Parlan perform sudden accelerations and intended delays and halts, particularly at the end of bars, phrases, and sections in a piece. Most of the spirituals have a thirty-two-bar form, with the eight-bar section comprising four two-bar phrases wherein two choruses of the spiritual are played. Shepp and Parlan's interpretations include few choruses from the original spirituals.
Eschewing common jazz practice, Shepp does not improvise new melodic lines within the spirituals' harmonic framework, but plays short, impromptu passages around a melodic idea. Parlan plays piano solos on only two of the album's pieces. Shepp contributes a tonal roughness to the songs with growled sounds, which he plays by singing or humming into his saxophone. He also uses harmonic overtones, breathy tonal weight, and expressive chromatic development of melody to add textural and timbral variety to the songs. Shepp and Parlan's reverent takes on "Amazing Grace" and Go Down Moses" exhibit split tones and fortes.
Read more about this topic: Goin' Home (album)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (16941778)
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)
“Vices enter into the composition of virtues as poisons into the composition of certain medicines. Prudence and common sense mix them together, and make excellent use of them against the misfortunes that attend human life.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (16131680)