Purple - Locust St.

by C.

Purple is a cold color, steeped in mystery; it is always at one remove from us. Its parentage is of the highest royalty--mysterious, regal blue, and titanic red--yet it is not entirely linked with the ruling class, as it is a color long embraced by eccentrics and the avant garde, by Oscar Wilde and Prince. It is a color of rituals: the Incas would perform an annual dance in long purple robes, " In music, purple has a rarefied presence, although Scriabin found both the keys of D-flat and A-flat to be purple. A few select instruments are said to be purple in tone--Kandinsky heard purple in the English horn, Goethe in the French horn, Theroux in the tympani, such as the one at the beginning of Beethoven's Violin Concerto. Some woodwinds, especially the oboe and bassoon, seem purple to me. And purple songs, for whatever reason, are often sung quietly, with breathy, barely-there vocals (see, in this list, Stina Nordenstam, The Clientele, The Real Tuesday Weld, etc.) The ultimate purple song is, naturally, Peter DeRose's "Deep Purple," a solemn, slightly ponderous number, first performed by Paul Whiteman and which, after receiving a set of lyrics from Mitchell Parish, became a huge hit for Larry Clinton in 1938. Of all of Clinton's "color" songs (most of which have been featured in this series), this was the most enduring, a reverie for a world about to convulse into bloody war. And the following year the master Art Tatum took the song and performed his usual prestidigitation. Tatum’s version of “Deep Purple” is quite minimal by Tatum’s standards—-no wild runs down the keyboard, little ornamentation, no constant harmonic movement. Rather, it’s a fairly linear performance, with Tatum’s left hand providing the rhythm and developing chords, while his right hand dances out with the melody. It’s a precursor to the sort of clean, modern style practiced in the ‘40s by Nat King Cole and Billy Kyle. Find on ". So this creates a solid line of succession--indigo is...

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