Note for the video above: Thermopylae is the first track performed. It ends around three minutes in. The rest is easily worth a listen if it catches your interest.
The work of Robert Graettinger is the 1940s/50s equivalent of industrial music. Only imagine a world where nobody had ever heard anything like industrial music before and would actively ostracize musicians who explored atonal territories.
Graettinger was a notorious loner, reed thin and deathly pale. When composing - which was always - he would lock himself away in his one room apartment for weeks on end. Sadly this fanatic devotion to his music (and sucking down more tobacco than a humidor) lead to his early death at 33.
Today's song is called Thermopylae, the first piece Graettinger composed for Stan Kenton, his employer and fellow musical maverick. The recording is of Kenton's band performing the piece in 1947.
This is big band jazz hyped up on amphetamines. Cyclonic and explosively violent crescendos of brass. Piano keys tinkle by on the very tips of their toes. Drums thud with a wooden intensity like fists slamming upon doors. Sleazy saxophones slime and shimmy before ripping apart the heart stopping tapestry of sounds, only to then drag the song off by it's hair in a whole other direction.
There's an undeniable urban edge to the entire composition, something which Graettinger explored further in his famous four part City of Glass suite. It's the sound of a late night city pulse.
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