Daily Jam - Fugue in D Minor

I watched a lot of cartoons when I was growing up. A lot of them. Saturday morning lineups and after-school blocks were part of my weekly routine well into my early teenage years, with primetime fare and cable offerings eventually taking their places as I grew older and the original networks began to lose interest in animated programming. But the music has always stayed with me. I credit my enjoyment of classical music to those cartoons because so many of them (Looney Toons in particular) used it to score their shows. I’m horrible with the names of individual pieces or with who composed what, but all of that music is now engrained within my psyche, and I love when it pops up in other places and other works of pop culture…especially when those works of pop culture are awesome.

And so, barreling into my life almost 20 years ago was English prog rock band Egg’s wonderful and intoxicating take on “Fugue in D Minor” by Johann Sebastian Bach, the song featured on the extraordinary Prog Is not a Four Letter Word compilation. Curated by Twisted Nerve’s vinyl-loving maniac Andy Votel, the album featured 15 tracks of freaked-out, cosmos-exploring jams from across the world. It still makes it into regular rotation for my drive to and from work, but the classical organ funk from Egg has always been the standout for me.

Originally appearing on the band’s 1970 self-titled album, “Fugue in D Minor” kind of sums up the entire scene, or you could argue even the entire progressive rock genre. The song features talented, classically trained musicians applying everything they’ve studied and learned to their own experimental takes on jazz, blues, and rock n’ roll. “Fugue in D Minor” bumps and grooves, but also serves as a callback to what came before. It’s the starting line to a race we’ve never actually finished.

Egg released a couple more albums before disbanding, and eventually fell off the cultural radar like so many prog rock bands along with them, only to bubble back up to the surface to be rediscovered and reexamined to the delight of audiophiles and crate diggers alike.

Check it out below, our Daily Jam.