Eulogy To Oscar Romero-

Nostalgia-

The music has been a little harder recently, so let’s go somewhere else…

Individual Choice (1983), by Jean-Luc Ponty. A man whose work I am still fairly new to, but I’ve been mesmerized since then.

If you didn’t guess by the name, Jean-Luc Ponty hails from France. A master on the violin, he was accepted into one of the most esteemed college’s for music in France at the young age of 16 and graduated with the highest honors offered in only two years! He would then perform in orchestras for a couple years before leaving that life behind in pursuit of jazz during the early 60s; however, he wouldn’t leave behind his violin. Ponty took the unusual approach to jazz with a violin, and was able to accomplish this by focusing on horn parts with be-bop phrasings. It’s been said that there was no one that truly sounded like Ponty before him. A similar recent example would be the work of the YouTube star Lindsey Stirling. Just like her “dub-step violin” there really wasn’t a market for “jazz violin” before Ponty (apart from something like Duke Ellington’s Orchestra).

One of the first Ponty albums I came across was this one, Individual Choice. Since then I’ve added several of his albums to my collection. I find his music beautiful and extremely relaxing. It’s my go-to if I ever need anything calm for background noise and may have actually found its way onto my record player just as often as anything else while I was drawing. This album, like most of Ponty’s late 70s and 80s albums, includes a healthy amount of synthesizer, which is also performed by Ponty.

The first song, “Eulogy To Oscar Romero”, was written to honor the influential life of Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez. Romero was the Archbishop of San Salvador (the capital of El Salvador) and heavily spoke out against poverty, social injustice, and the violence that had engulfed his country through civil war. In 1980 he was shot and killed during mass and is now listed as a martyr for the Roman Catholic Church. This song was Ponty’s way of paying tribute to this man and what he stood for. “Nostalgia”, while still mellow in tone and title, was much lighter overall. Its non-stop synth part provides the baseline for the song while the guitar and violin are free to accompany as they see fit.