Moanin': music and soul

A new section in The Revelry

First: hit play above.

I always want to write more about music but think no one wants to read about it. Music is complex: highly emotional, tightly tied to personal history, and challenging to understand without investing time in it.

So, instead of pushing back my wish to write about this subject I love, I put this choice in your hands, reader. I will write about music, and we’ll figure out, together, if it makes any sense.

This article is built as a new section in my Substack newsletter, so you are free to unsubscribe from it — maybe you think I have terrible taste in music, or maybe you just prefer to not read about it. I don’t know about your particular taste.

I know, though, about my particular taste, and I’ll share it with you in non-scheduled posts. Maybe I’ll replace a Revelry or Quickie, or maybe I’ll do whopping three different newsletters in a single week; we’ll see. I hope you can get excited with novelty as much as I can.

Why Moanin’?

Finding a name for The Revelry was hard. I didn’t know exactly what concepts I would write about or what symbols I wanted to evoke with the newsletter. In the end, after talking a lot with some newsletter-writing colleagues, I discovered I wanted a name that would suggest a party: fun, loud, and sexy. Not precisely organized, but not entirely lost in confusion: a planned mess.

A revelry is, according to dictionary.com:

boisterous festivity

So, boisterous:

rough and noisy; noisily jolly or rowdy; clamorous; unrestrained

And, festivity

pertaining to or suitable for a feast or festival

After naming this planned mess The Revelry, I decided every new section would be sex-related because sexuality is good and pleasant, and taboo is only taboo because it’s not openly discussed. For me, these terms invoke fun smiles, not as in teenager joke smiles, but in we’re adults and sexual beings.

I first started with Quickie, a weekly report on quick stuff. Moaning was easy: I’m talking about music, and the music of sex is the moan. I decided to drop the g and keep it just like Charles Mingus’ work of art at the start of this post.

Also, if you hit play as I suggested, you’ll see how Mingus’ Moanin’ is an absolutely crazy song without losing its grip: it’s loud, confusing, and messy but sexy, enthusiastic, and full of swing.

What comes next

I have the following planned:

• Reposting “Finding worship in concerts” from my blog

• Another chapter of my Classical Music Journey

• Bill Withers

• The Monks

• The Holy Trinity: bass, brass, and keyboards

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