Normally, I am not a fan of jazz noodling and music that goes nowhere fast, but there’s something about the Cinematic Orchestra’s “Ode to The Big Sea” that wins me over, every single time. It’s the loneliness and searching of the central riff, which comes and goes throughout the song, I think. It’s something that’s classically “jazzy,” but when happening over that particular perpetually shuffling drumbeat, becomes something weirdly contemporized in my head. The original recorded version might explain what I mean, more, with the obviousness of the samples underscoring the “acid jazz”-ness of the whole thing, with the atonal riff feeling as if they’re as Sun-Ra inspired as anything else; it suddenly seems less trad fusion jazz, and more something that you could imagine coming from Mocean Worker.
It’s that tension between timeframes that fascinates me, I think.