Category Archives: musics

Cantwell continued

I’m continuing to read Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, and still experiencing, in about equal measure, dissonance of the loathed and the admired: too-frequent overblown PostModernist claptrap, but mixed with really astute observation. Here’s a nice bit of analysis, replete with apposite coinage and illuminating simile:

Culturally, the banjo was an enigma, having been thrust out of a series of social niches through associations that had themselves become indefinable: abandoned by black culture, which reconstructed it from an African progenitor, forsaken by the Gilded Age parlor society in which it had a brief vogue, repudiated by jazz as jazz moved uptown –it was the instrument that history left behind. To take it up, as [Pete] Seeger had, was a gesture at once disarmingly candid and hauntingly emblematic, a fundamentally comic piece of cultural scavengery that like a clown’s broken umbrella solicits ordinary good will in conventional terms as it also legislates some independence of norms and conventions. (pg. 245)

Laili Laili Jan

Larry Porter is a person I’ve corresponded with and I’ve bought his CDs. This bit of video explains some of the niceties of rebab performance that I’ve wondered about:

Katy Hill

It’s somehow not quite fair to rediffuse stuff that appears on BoingBoing (I mean, who doesn’t read BoingBoing?), but this one is just too wonderful to miss:

Kalamazoo

Over at dippermouth.blogspot.com there’s a discussion of Louis Armstrong’s take on “I’ve Got A Gal in Kalamazoo” that includes a wonderful video clip with an even more right-on intro:

…(Regarding the vocal by Tex and The Modernaires, I once showed this to an old friend from high school and all he could say was, “White people….ugh.”)

[but hang in there –after 4 minutes of whiteface bathos there’s a specTACular Nicholas Brothers dancing take on the tune]:

Cuban music again

I confess and lament my cluelessness about Cuban music, and I’ve been working at repairing the historical part of the deficiency by a careful reading of Ned Sublette’s Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. It’s a wonderful book on many counts, not least for its careful weaving of history (political, economic, ethnic) with musical disquisition. I (like most Americans) knew very little of Cuba’s history and woes, and little of the importance of Cuban musical ideas in American popular music –some names, but not much of the profound entanglements that are context for the last 50 years (which are not covered in Sublette’s book). I can’t recommend the book highly enough, though I do wish (on practically every page) that recorded snippets were available to illustrate the text. Some bits can be imagined, thanks to Sublette’s felicitous prose:

The intensity of Pérez Prado’s music came not only from its dissonance but from its rhythmic tension, the clarity of his writing, the physical impact of its brilliant, forceful timbre, the discipline of the ensemble, and the leader’s sense of humor. The breaks in Pérez Prado’s tunes were typically silences, punctuated by his sonic signature: a head-resonated grunt that some have romanticized as Ungh! and that sounded rather like someone undergoing a prostate exam. And then the trumpets assaulted again, as if to say: this is serious. (pg. 559)