He and She is about that eternally compelling and most elemental of subjects, the relationship between a man and a woman. Marsalis hasn't merely crafted a love story, but a life story - a bittersweet rumination about the evanescence of life as well as the elusiveness of romance. Time is very much at the heart of He and She: the swift passage of time over the course of one's life, the mood-altering shifts of time in the duration of a song.
He and She began with words, not music, though it was music that brought forth the words. Marsalis had been listening to Max Roach's Jazz in � Time, along with pieces by Duke Ellington, like "Lady Mac" from Such Sweet Thunder, work that explored waltz tempo in a jazz context. Roach's classic album features "Valse Hot," which, explains Marsalis is "a Sonny Rollins piece, a jazz waltz that I started to play when I was in high school." That tune set off a spark: "I began to contemplate the shuffle rhythm, that the shuffle rhythm is the combination of a waltz feeling and a march feeling, and I thought it would be good for me to do an album of waltzes. I had written a couple before -- one was for a ballet by Twyla Tharp, inspired by the Matisse painting, The Dance. I was thinking about waltzes and how in Vienna today younger people still dance the waltz, a waltz season is still a part of their social calendar. From there, I began to consider the ritual of courtship. The waltz is a courtship dance and at one time it was considered to be risqu�. Now, of course, it's genteel. Then I started to think about men and women, our relationships."
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