Daniel Aaron Lazar

History of Hip Hop from National Geographic

Not since the advent of swing jazz in the 1930s has an American music exploded across the world with such overwhelming force. Not since the Beatles invaded America and Elvis packed up his blue suede shoes has a music crashed against the world with such outrage. This defiant culture of song, graffiti, and dance, collectively known as hip-hop, has ripped popular music from its moorings in every society it has permeated. In Brazil, rap rivals samba in popularity. In China, teens spray-paint graffiti on the Great Wall. In France it has been blamed, unfairly, for the worst civil unrest that country has seen in decades.

Its structure is unique, complex, and at times bewildering. Whatever music it eats becomes part of its vocabulary, and as the commercial world falls into place behind it to gobble up the powerful slop in its wake, it metamorphoses into the Next Big Thing. It is a music that defies definition, yet defines our collective societies in immeasurable ways. To many of my generation, despite all attempts to exploit it, belittle it, numb it, classify it, and analyze it, hip-hop remains an enigma, a clarion call, a cry of “I am” from the youth of the world. We’d be wise, I suppose, to start paying attention.

read this National Geographic article and check out the pictures

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How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul

In the 22 October 2007 edition of “The New Yorker”, Sasha Frere-Jones offers some perspective on the failure of modern music. Read A Paler Shade of White and please post a comment using the link below.

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Gil Scott Heron Brings us Perspective

On Black History:

On Revolution:

On 9/11 and War:

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Little Feat

The band was formed by two former members of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention: songwriter and guitarist Lowell George, who also provided vocals and slide guitar and Roy Estrada on bass guitar. The name of the band came from a comment made by Mothers’ drummer Jimmy Carl Black about the diminutive size of Lowell’s feet.

There are two legends about the genesis of Little Feat. One has it that George showed Frank Zappa his song Willin, and that Zappa fired him from The Mothers, because he felt that George was too talented to merely be a member of his band, and told him he ought to go away and form his own. The second version says that Zappa fired him because Willin contains drug references (“weed, whites and wine”).

I got turned on to these cats in high school by cat with whom I worked out at Odyssey Fitness in BG. If nothing else, find a copy of Waiting for Columbus and dig in as it might be the best live rock and roll album ever recorded.

I hadn’t listened to them in a while but rekindled my appreciation as a result of an interaction with the father of one of my students. Thus, I present a Little Feat video.

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Robert Glasper

Erika, Ben, Kili, Bart and I saw young smokin’ Blue Note piano cat Robert Glasper in Plaza Reial last night (his drummer Damion Reid is simply ridiculous…find every album this guy plays on and buy it)  Read about Glasper here

and watch some solo piano feed here

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New Beck Album

Beck is something of a musical chameleon — he’s been called a cracked folkie, a hip-hop joker, a sonic innovator, even a pop star. His latest CD, The Information, finds him in all these guises, and more.The 15-song collection is his most difficult descent into narcotic funk and psychedelic rock. And it may well be a classic.

Read More and Listen to Full Length Tracks Here

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Jason Moran

Jazz pianist Jason Moran’s new album, Artist in Residence, is the result of music he created after he accepted commissions from three American art institutions. Moran has been described in Downbeat magazine as one of the most important figures of his generation. This interview originally aired on June 27, 2005.

Listen Here

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Devil’s Music

In her history “The Music of Black Americans,” Eileen Southern identifies three types of plantation songs in which the African tradition of using music on all occasions and of classifying the music according to function was most clearly reflected –

• Songs that accompanied religious gatherings
• Songs of harvest celebrations
• Songs that accompanied the work of men and women in the fields

To the improvised work songs — the shouts and “field hollers” that accompanied plantation labor, communicated between workers, and expressed personal feelings of the moment — American slaves introduced what would be later recognized as the distinctive sound of the blues. In addition to the falsetto whoops, hollers, and field cries, there was now the sound of sorrow, mournful expressions of sadness and weariness, sometimes lightened with a wistful irony.

An observer described these feelings in an 1859 narrative–

The mournful tone of work songs also found expression in the spirituals, the long, slow chants that sounded forth from religious gatherings. Articulating deeply felt emotions that later gave soul to the blues, these songs just as often voiced the spirit of assertion and survival that gave support to the slave community, and they added a more melodic character to the music.

As African religions were supplanted by Christianity, blacks adapted their religious music as well, keeping American words to hymns and incorporating melodies but changing the rhythms, harmonies, and stresses of speech and adding the traditional “call and response.”

Beyond the music of work and worship, there was “the devil’s music” — the fiddle songs, juba dances, and corn songs of harvest season. Outlawed by church elders, this was music that entertained. It became the Blues.

This ain’t no slave music. This is some Devil�s Music Right Here:

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getcha little sompin that cha can’t get at home

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A Timely Reminder

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