Style v Substance

from PARKER PLAYS X by Richard X Bennett & Matt Parker

	/

Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

$1.29 USD or more
Buy the Full Digital Album
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
This 4 sided CD package comes with a wonderful 19-page booklet that features short stories and liner notes by Richard X Bennett. Album designed by Lauren Webster

Includes unlimited streaming of PARKER PLAYS X via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 4 days

$20 USD or more

lyrics

Spiritual life

In the beginning, when just about everything was full stop I went to a church in Brooklyn Heights every Sunday just to be around other people. The general format was a short service (singing forbidden) followed by an inspirational and positive sermon followed by a foreboding post-Wagnerian organ piece that said, “ignore the sermon, hellfire awaits”. All that in less than an hour. Every week it was the same eleven masked people sitting in a space that could fit five hundred. We felt like the early Christians, defying death and the lions. Eventually the minister became more dispirited and disheveled and you could sense he was running out of things to say. The final straw was a sermon on vanity existing solely of cliches.. “all that glitters is not gold” (true enough), “appearances can be deceiving” (occasionally), “style over substance”… and now we have a problem. Is style really sinful? In Matthew 3:4, John the Baptist is described as being casually dressed in a “… raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins” I would wear that! Last year I was even transphobically dismissed by an “All About Jazz” reviewer for wearing “ladies' leopard-skin tights”. John the B was beheaded and my future is uncertain but we do agree on the importance of a fresh look.
Once the Smith Street bars reopened I stopped going to church.

Musical Notes: The bass line is inspired by Kirk Franklin. The chords on the bridge are taken from a 1897 treatise on post-romantic German harmony. It’s a circle of fifths going backwards. The overall arc of the song is taken from the Alap section of an Indian Raga. In the Agra Gharana (my lineage) you start singing in the mid-range, go down to your lowest note and eventually meander up to the highest peaks. This process takes an hour. In Style V Substance the quartet takes a much quicker path with the piano taking the low part and the sax going high. The piano sets it up and the sax knocks it down.

There’s also a bar of 5/4 that starts the piece and appears occasionally throughout so if you’re clapping on the wrong beat, don’t stop and things will stylishly work themselves out.

credits

from PARKER PLAYS X, released May 5, 2023
Richard X Bennett - piano, melodica & composition
Matt Parker - tenor sax
Adam Armstrong - bass
Julian Edmond - drums

art by rXb

license

about

Richard X Bennett Brooklyn, New York

In NYC composer/pianist Richard X Bennett has performed at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, The Guggenheim Museum, The Rubin Museum, Brooklyn Museum & Central Park Summerstage. Internationally, his bands have played in over twenty countries. He has twelve albums on Indian, American & British labels.
"Hypnotic" - New Sounds
"unabashedly joyous, groove-centric, spiritually danceable" NYC Jazz Review ... more

Recommendations