Jazz Pump-Up Music

I've just returned from a soccer referee physical fitness test (came in first place 2nd year in a row out of 100+ people...although the average age was around 40, so I don't know if that really means anything). As I was driving to the test, I was searching for music to get myself "pumped" for the run. I decided upon 3 tunes from Horace Silver's Cape Verdean Blues: the title tune, "Nutville", and "Mo' Joe". Thinking about the music that I chose to get pumped up and realizing that I was going to be driving to the event blasting Horace Silver, I thought about the reaction that would garner from the others. Upon reflection, I recalled that there were several matches where I would get to a field and emerge from a car blasting things like Trane on "Resolution" from A Love Supreme or Mingus's "Haitian Fight Song". To the majority of the population, this whole spectacle was perhaps more peculiar than "bad-ass" (picture the cliched contemporary movie scenes where gangsters emerge from a Cadillac; it's almost always accompanied by rap/rock/metal/etc.). I wasn't necessarily going for an image, but I can admit that in my days as a player and even as a referee, the way you arrive at the sporting event—especially if you can present an element of "intimidation"—is significant. For an example of this, witness the "Maori war chant" that the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team does before the start of every match. The link brings you to an Adidas commercial which features the dance, but there are dozens of clips of them doing it before regular games.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3788249896856764811

Getting back to utilizing jazz as pump-up music: I began to contemplate the relationship of "invigorating" jazz with "masculine" sounding jazz. There's something about Joe Henderson's solo on "Cape Verdean Blues" that—to me—is very masculine (I use the term at the risk of being as controversial as Lacy in his description of Rollins!). It's very bluesy, true; but it also has a quality that taps into something that is more linked to what I see as the unifying theme behind all the "pump-up" tunes on my playlist: it's very primal. I began to realize that all of the songs which I consider to be masculine have elements that we consider (whether accurate or not) to be primitive in nature: the strong pulse; a sense of tension (as is the case in "Resolution"); a raw tone; a low-frequency, strong voice; a sharp articulation; an abundance of open-fifths.

So perhaps the issue of "masculine" and "feminine" sounds is not the right terminology to define it, but I do think some sort of categorization can emerge when we talk about the characteristics of music that suggest different identities. And those differences might necessarily not exist along gender lines but, rather, in terms like "primal" or "polished/polite/etc.".

Thoughts?