I’ve written several pieces on what is often described as an ongoing revival of American traditional music (listed below with links). A piece on NPR today and in the N.Y. Times earlier this week on Southern California’s Frank Fairfield brought the subject back to mind. While you (or I) may argue with the assertion that this is a revival — did it ever go away — there is undoubtedly more media attention being paid to performers of American vernacular music, such as Frank Fairfield, Tim Eriksen, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, and Blind Boy Paxton (to name a few). One of the encouraging aspects of this “revival” is the reclaiming of the history of musical exchange between Anglo- and African Americans that was pushed out of our collective memory by Jim Crow and record companies — I’ve written about that recently so I won’t repeat myself here (go to A history of jazz & country interchange for that). This could be a revolutionary force in American culture or am I just being too hopeful? Regardless, what the new “revivalists” are doing is aptly described by Pierre Bourdieu in Rules of Art:
…one cannot revolutionize a (artistic) field without mobilizing or invoking the experiences of the history of the field, and the great heretics inscribe themselves explicitly in the history of the field, mastering its specific capital much more completely than contemporaries so that revolutions take the form of a return to sources (1996, pg. 238).
Working on a couple of posts but still too busy to put much time into it. In the meantime, here’s a repost of a Jon Pareles piece (N.Y. Times) on how Bassekou Kouyati has revolutionized the use of the ngnoi but first here’s a YouTube video of Kouyati with another “revolutionary” who has taken the banjo into new territory (in this case, you could call it a post-modern encounter with an ancestor).
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times: Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba Mr. Kouyate with the ngoni, a traditional lute from Mali that dates back hundreds of years, performed with his band at SummerStage in Central Park on Sunday.
There were no Western instruments onstage when the Malian griot Bassekou Kouyate and his band, Ngoni Ba, performed at SummerStage in Central Park on Sunday afternoon. Ngoni Ba is a string band — four sizes of ngoni, a four-stringed African lute that’s an ancestor of the banjo — with Mr. Kouyate’s wife, Amy Sacko, as lead singer, along with two percussionists playing calabashes and tama, a West African pressure drum. The band wore African clothes, and the songs were in Bambara, Mali’s main language. One, a meditative 17th-century praise song that Ms. Sacko sang in expanding arabesques, delved into 2,000-year-old Malian history.
But this was no traditional African concert. Through technique, technology and open ears, Mr. Kouyate hurls the ngoni into the 21st century. After performing in groups with notable Malian musicians like Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, Mr. Kouyate has taken an instrument traditionally used to accompany a singer, pushed it into the foreground and multiplied it into an ensemble.
The bass and tenor-register ngonis in Ngoni Ba, founded in 2005, were invented by Mr. Kouyate, and they bring extra layers of counterpoint to what was already intricate, quick-fingered music. Traditional musicians play the ngoni in their laps while seated; (to read more…)
Fat Freddy’s Drop tore up the Independent in San Francisco on Friday, June 25. Soul drenched vocals and reggae riddims mixed with electronic effects, club beats and a killer horn section to create a fresh sound that is contemporary but deeply rooted in a diverse collection of black music styles that came of age in the 1970s. Funk, soul, reggae, ska, dub—sometimes straightforward, sometimes deconstructed—were not unexpected from an outfit that started out as a jam band. What was unexpected was that it all worked!
I was drawn to Fat Freddy’s Drop’s show by the song “Boondigga” (from their last album Dr. Boondigga and the Big BW), which had been firmly entrenched on my personal playlist for a month before the show. The song came early in the eighty-minute set so if things had bogged down or fell flat, I wouldn’t have second thoughts about cutting out and looking for a plan B but I didn’t leave until the show ended. Now back to the song that drew me to the show because I think there’s something in there that explains the appeal and brilliance of Fat Freddy’s Drop. “Boondigga” opens on a smooth soul groove, anchored by the sweet Philadelphia sounds laid down by the horn section and driven by a very ‘70s electronic drum track. Joe Dukie’s smooth vocals ride on top of the slowly building arrangement that does not gain its full power until after the break, three minutes in. A subtle shift in the horn chart brings in the more harmonically extended controlled dissonance that Tower of Power brought out of Oakland signaling the beginning of a major deconstruction of Boondigga’s smooth soul sound. The horns exit and a soulfully deviant aural soundscape is created from distorted guitar, swelling keys and electronics. Live the horn section left the stage at the start of the deconstruction, which was given twice as long to develop as on the album – a full four minutes. And that was true of the entire show: (for the rest…)
I am the revolution and you are the revolution
In your spirit you have the power
In your heart lies the secret
From your lips spills the truth
That the wine of power is in our blood
Together we can make a revolution
Tell your comrades
I am the revolution
We are the revolution
Recently I drove over to Preston to meet two of the bands that are at the forefront of thetaqwacore scene in the USA. I already wrote about The Kominas with some thoughts about the documentary film Taqwacore: The Birth Of Punk Islam. The other band on the tour were Al Thawra (“The Revolution” in arabic) from Chicago, a group that were not given much airtime in that film but certainly deserve greater recognition.
Al Thawra are a trio but on this trip they had expanded to four members. Syrian-Polish-American Marwan Kamel sings and plays guitar; Matt Scott stood in for the absent bassist Mario Salazar; Micah Bezold was on drums; and Adam Jennings from Winters In Osakaguested by playing the sampler. (to read on…)
Histories of American popular music have tended to create a clear bifurcation of “White” and “Black” musical genres. Country music has been portrayed as a genre primarily drawn from Anglo-Scottish roots. The significant influences of African Americans on the genre have been diminished or placed in a carefully constructed pre-history. African American musical genres have also been defined within strict boundaries—stripped of areas of inter-cultural contact, influence and collaboration. This separation was largely created by the commercial music industry during the 1920′s when widespread recording of “blues” and “hillbilly” artists began in the South. A&R representatives of northern record companies were instrumental in shaping the repertoire of black and white artists along perceived lines of marketability. The “blues craze” of the 1920′s had a particularly dramatic effect on the future of African American popular music. Most African American performers had a large repertoire of different types of songs but the only material most record companies wanted to record were blues. This had a powerful effect on shaping the perception of African American music that was subsequently reflected in scholarship on the blues. Early blues scholars were often preoccupied with looking for “authentic” blues, material uncolored by intercultural contact, not only with “White” music but also with commercial forms of African American music that they perceived as less authentically “Black.” Styles of the blues were legitimized by separating them from other styles of music and by constant reference back to their roots in rural black culture. (Callen, “A Deconstruction of a Constructed Genre: A Critical View of the Oakland Blues” presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Austin, Texas. October 1999.)
The quote is from my first conference presentation as an ethnomusicologist based on research I’d done on the West Coast Blues in which I’d found that the clear separations made between Black and White musical traditions in the U.S. were a misrepresentation of a history of continual exchange. It was something that was obvious and I should have known but ran contrary to the common sense version of American history that I had accumulated. My research on the West Coast Blues began my interest in the process of genre definition and those frequent moments when genre categories are inadequate and transgression is necessary and inevitable. Lately, it’s been interesting to watch the rediscovery (again) of the connections between jazz and country music — did everyone really forget Texas Swing and Bluegrass? Below are a couple of excerpts from an excellent Jazz Times article by Geoffrey Himes on the history of jazz / country collaborations and a new crop of “fusions” worth checking out — and advocacy for a definition of jazz less as a genre or style than as a process that can be applied to any musical material. The article is well worth reading in its entirety.
When Sonny Rollins released his Way Out West album in 1957, the cover featured the tall tenor saxophonist standing out in the desert between a bleached cow skull and a multi-armed cactus. In the William Claxton photo, Rollins cradled his horn like a six gun, planted his fist by his holster and peered out slyly from beneath a big gray cowboy hat. The cowboy theme carried over into the music as the trio of Rollins, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne played “I’m an Old Cowhand,” “Wagon Wheels” and the leader’s title tune.
It was an important record for several reasons. For one, the piano-less format allowed Rollins the harmonic freedom to break with bebop orthodoxy and to follow his melodic inspiration wherever it led. For another, it challenged the assumption that only blues, ballads and show tunes were the proper materials for jazz improvisation. The album proved that country music, even ersatz country music like Johnsy Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand,” could inspire great jazz performances.
Rollins wasn’t the first to point this out. After all, in 1930 Louis Armstrong had played trumpet on “Blue Yodel No. 9” by the “Father of Country Music,” Jimmie Rodgers. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys had recorded “Basin Street Blues,” one of Armstrong’s signature tunes, in 1946. But Rollins was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace country music so emphatically.
It has taken a long time, but country music is now winning grudging acceptance from the jazz world. One of 2008’s best-selling jazz releases was the Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson collaboration, Two Men With the Blues (Blue Note). This country-jazz hybrid was new territory for Marsalis, but Nelson has been singing and picking jazz standards all his life and even recorded a jazz-guitar record, The Gypsy, with Jackie King in 2001.
Another key release last year was Charlie Haden’s Rambling Boy (Decca), a collection of old country songs he sang as a young boy in the Haden Family. Before he moved to Los Angeles and joined the Ornette Coleman Quartet, Haden sang with his parents and siblings on the radio in Iowa and Missouri. Haden first hinted at those origins on his 1997 duo album with Pat Metheny, Beyond the Missouri Sky. Now Haden revisits the actual songs of the Haden Family with help from his kids, Metheny, Elvis Costello and such country stars as Rosanne Cash, Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs.
Jenny Scheinman, the jazz violinist who has recorded with Bill Frisell, Norah Jones and John Zorn, released two KOCH label albums in 2008. Crossing the Field is an instrumental jazz record with Frisell and Jason Moran, but Jenny Scheinman is a vocal project, featuring country and folk songs recorded with fellow members of Frisell’s band. (to read the rest)
Rollins, Haden and their fellow fusioneers take the approach that jazz is primarily a process, not a repertoire. Almost any piece of music can be given an elastic syncopation, substitute chords and theme-and-variation improvisation. Some tunes may work better than others, but Rollins has demonstrated that a successful tune might as easily be a calypso as a show tune, a Hank Williams song as readily as a George Gershwin number.
“Jazz can use any source material,” argues Scheinman. “Jazz is an approach, and you can start with any melody and make it work for improvisers. The tune is just the conversation topic, and you can take the topic anywhere you want.”
“That’s what’s so amazing about jazz,” Frisell agrees. “That’s why it’s such a perfect world to be in. I don’t think there are any rules as far as what you use as source material. It’s more about having the opportunity to take what you know, to draw from your experience, and do whatever you want with it. All my heroes—Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk—took the music that was around them, the music that they liked, and transformed it through their own eyes.”
If this is true, if jazz is a process that can be worked on any ingredients, what are the advantages of turning to country music for raw materials? Well, the genre is full of gorgeous melodies, aching emotions and rural textures that have been largely untouched by the jazz world. While blues, ballads and show tunes have been worked to exhaustion, country music represents a largely unplowed field. Here is a wealth of material just waiting to be alchemized into jazz, if only musicians and audiences can overcome their prejudices.
The final night of this year’s Jewish Music Festival features performances by two groups that stretch the usual definitions of diasporic music (Jewish or otherwise). French “world & bass” group Watcha Clan is dedicated to making music that advocates for nomadic peoples, for whom national boundaries are an inconvenient detail. It’s roots music where the roots intertwine with each other, creating a technologically enhanced vision of a world of unfettered movement. In that context, the idea of a “pure” music, or culture, is an anomaly. Sephardic and Ashkenazi music are integral parts of the mix, brought to the band by vocalist Sistah K (daughter of an Algerian Berber Jewish father and a Lithuanian Jewish mother). Opening the night is the San Francisco-based punk/funk/Balkan/Jewish band Charming Hostess, presenting their own take on diasporic music. Sunday, July 18 at YerbaBuenaCenter for the Arts (701 Mission St., San Francisco). YBCA.org
I’ll have some original material up next week but until then here’s another installment in the excellent series on Taqwacore from my sadiqi at Tales from Bradistan.
After being brought over to the UK to perform at a special night at London’s prestigiousMeltdown Festival, taqwacore bands from the USA The Kominas and Al Thawra undertook a short tour that took in half a dozen dates in England and Scotland. I travelled over toPreston to meet them, take pictures and hear them play live.
The Kominas are one of the main bands featured in the documentary film Taqwacore: The Birth Of Punk Islam. Hailing from Boston, three of the members are of Pakistani origin and the fourth from India. On this tour they were joined by Elester Richard, a black American trumpet player who adds a different dimension to their sound.
The bands that make up this taqwacore scene are regularly described as Islamic punk. On their latest CD “Escape To Blackout Beach”, The Kominas sound more power pop than punk (although their first effort “Wild Nights In Guantanamo Bay” is quite a bit heavier). Live, they play much faster and with more energy and watching them reminds me of my misspent youth where I was seeing punk bands every week. (click here to read the rest)
The final night of this year’s Jewish Music Festival features performances by two groups that stretch the usual definitions of diasporic music (Jewish or otherwise). French “world & bass” group Watcha Clan is dedicated to making music that advocates for nomadic peoples, for whom national boundaries are an inconvenient detail. It’s roots music where the roots intertwine with each other, creating a technologically enhanced vision of a world of unfettered movement. In that context, the idea of a “pure” music, or culture, is an anomaly. Sephardic and Ashkenazi music are integral parts of the mix, brought to the band by vocalist Sistah K (daughter of an Algerian Berber Jewish father and a Lithuanian Jewish mother). Opening the night is the San Francisco-based punk/funk/Balkan/Jewish band Charming Hostess, presenting their own take on diasporic music. Sunday, July 18 at YerbaBuenaCenter for the Arts (701 Mission St., San Francisco). YBCA.org
Taqwa - (Arabic: التقوى at-taqwá) is the Islamic concept of “God-consciousness”
Core - (from Hardcore) is a subgenre of punk rock that’s generally faster, thicker, and heavier than earlier punk rock.
As humans, we need labels in order to describe things and have some kind of order in the world we live in. However, when it comes to music, labelling can become patently absurd. It seems like every genre of music has multiple off-shoots and for the outsider it can often be totally confusing to try and work your way through a maze of descriptive names. The metal and punk scenes in particular have a bewildering number of labels – how abouthardcore, hardline, street punk, grunge, metalcore, D-Beat, post-hardcore, emo, screamo,thrashcore, grindcore, sludge metal, crust punk or even anarcho-punk?
If that’s not enough then how about desi-punk, bollywood punk, raicore or punk islam? All of these terms are real and the ones in the last sentence all fall under the taqwacore genre that is attracting a lot of attention, in particular in the USA. If I wasn’t short of time and trying to get this blog entry together then I would probably think up a few terms of my own although I’m certain that someone like the satirists Chris Morris or Armando Iannuccicould do a lot better than my efforts.
While it starts to get quite laughable with all of these often quite ridiculous labels, the taqwacore genre is definitely worthy of attention as there are some quite interesting things happening in this scene. (to read the rest, click here).
I’m still putting together my blog entry on the taqwacore punk bands Al Thawra and The Kominas and hope to publish it shortly. Until then, following on from last week’s taster “Sharia Law In The USA” by The Kominas, here is a crisp biscuit from Chicago punks Al Thawra. “Miskeen” which is arabic for a poor or unlucky person is taken from their 2008 CD “Who Benefits From War”. This is about as abrasive arab music ever gets and is not for the faint-hearted.
