Here's the latest installment of tune-detective-I-can't-resist-this-stuff.
One of the members of my jazz combo class suggested that we try playing "Song from the Old Country," a tune written by Don Pullen and played by the Don Pullen-George Adams Quartet. It's a cool piece, with what comes across to me as a Cuban flavor (after the slow intro):
I wondered what "the old country" in the title referred to, exactly. Usually the term is used to mean the European country of one's ancestors, if one is European-American. For this song, it didn't seem to fit. Was Pullen somehow referencing Cuba or Africa? The answer came to me when, out of the blue, I noticed a strong correspondence between the theme of the song and the second theme of Brahms' Hungarian Dance #5 (0:37 in this recording):
The harmony is the same, the melody somewhat parallel, and there's a rhythm break in the 7th measure. Pullen gave us a clue in the title.
Digging a little further, it seems that Brahms did not actually write this theme himself. Wikipedia notes,
In 1850 Brahms met the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi and accompanied him in a number of recitals over the next few years. This was his introduction to "gypsy-style" music such as the csardas, which was later to prove the foundation of his most lucrative and popular compositions, the two sets of Hungarian Dances (published 1869 and 1880).[3][4]
Only numbers 11, 14 and 16 are entirely original compositions.[citation needed] The better-known Hungarian Dances include Nos. 1 and 5, the latter of which was based on the csárdás "Bártfai emlék" (Memories of Bártfa) by Hungarian composer Béla Kéler, which Brahms mistakenly thought was a traditional folksong.[5]
The borrowed theme starts at 2:04 -
Anyway, that explains the title of the Pullen tune. The class has had quite a bit of fun with it; the changes are very natural, and easy to jam on.
