Black Music as told by a White Boy

BIG TINGS ALERT: CHRIS BROWN CHANGED HIS FACEBOOK STATUS TO SINGLE!



Moving right along. Have you ever travelled to a place and thought "man this spot has character! There's something about it that's unlike anywhere I've ever been". Switzerland feels like the technology is dope, but it doesn't have explosive culture like Paris. When you walk around Paris you know you're not in Chicago. And not just because you can't understand a thing people say. Every place has an aura. I think it's essential to think about when and where a style of music came from if you want to be an informed listener. Blues didn't come from Sweden! Chicago blues couldn't be born in California.



I'm going to begin by saying I think blues, jazz and hip hop is an evolution of the same thing, extended over time and place: black music! Initially blues was played by a single musician on an acoustic guitar. You might have the image of a man on a porch in Mississippi wearing a straw hat and overalls. Maybe a piece of straw dangles in his mouth. Maybe I'm just thinking about the cover of my Mississippi John Hurt album but I really think I had that image in my head before! The harmonies were simple. So was the melody. The fingerpicking could be intricate but it wasn't conceptually advanced compared to what was to come, even if it was techinically difficult to play. A guy could go to a bar and play the same song for literally 10-15 minutes and just sing/mumble about how his girl left him for another man and took everything he had ( This makes me think of Tom Arnold in True Lies: "What kind of a sick bitch takes the ice tray!"). Perhaps he ran into the devil at an intersection. Crossroads whatever. Cool. Basic. I love it! But I get it.



Moving North to the Windy City. The blues got drummers, electric guitars, and saxophones! BB Kings harmonies/chord structures are virtually the same as Robert Johnson's but the rhythm is BIGGER. This is chicago blues. People in Chicago are more demanding than the Mississippi crowd. Maybe people are dancing to it instead of just bar-fighting. Solo acoustic guitar don't cut it. Different place, different music.



Parallel to this is rag-time piano coming up in the EARLY 20th century in N'awlins. Then Louis Armstrong's trumpet makes musicians around the world cry. In New York, Duke Ellington plays and starts SWINGING the blues with an orchestra! ORCHESTRA! He's most associated with jazz, but he's got tons of tunes based on the 3 chords of blues. One of my favourite albums of his is Blues in Orbit. Listen to Oscar Peterson play Duke's composition "C Jam Blues". It's dope. But his blues is jazz. Just like Jimi Hendrix's blues is rock. More on that.



New York is now the jazz centre. During World War II there's a ban on recording. Several years go by where Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are playing and playing and playing but nobody's heard it because the vinyl used for records is needed for the war effort (specifically for what I don't know, but it's true). War ends, records are made, Parker takes world by storm! Everything is twice as fast and the harmonies are NUTS! It's BeBop now. Louis Armstrong will give you a blank stare if you ask him what a tri-tone substitution is! People make connections between the atom bomb/war and the change in jazz. It makes a lot of sense to me, but even musicians at the time thought it was ruining jazz. Go to any music store now and any book of "jazz standards" Listen to Parker play KoKo and tell me the world is the same as John Hurt, Robert Johnson or even Ellington. Place and time are different.


Miles Davis travels to New York to find Parker before they had ever met, and he becomes his protege and all that. But he's never happy playing the same way for long. He makes harmonies simple again and people on California love it! It becomes "cool jazz" that fits in perfectly with their laid back, anything goes surfer attitude. Jazz is accessible for people again! Now white people can play it too! Hello Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker. That's California.


Miles doesn't like the fact that white people are taking jazz back!! He starts playing tunes like Airegin. Yes. This is Nigeria backwards. Tony Williams and Elvin Jones enter the picture and start laying down rhythms that are simply astounding. White drummers everywhere shake their heads! But really so does everyone.


But Jazz starts losing ground. It's not mainstream anymore. James Brown hears Fela Kuti and puts a band together. Sly has a family too (a white and black one). They have horns and electric guitars too! Bitches Brew=the album where Miles goes electric himself. Keyboard, not piano. Electric guitar, not no guitar. Jazz and funk intersect. They're pretty similar right?


Enter Jimi Hendrix. He is a blues player but people call it psychadelic rock. Only he's got a jazz drummer (basically...Jimi called him "my Elvin Jones" who you remember was Miles' drummer for a time but became famous with Coltrane). I said earlier white people couldn't drum like that. I take it back now. White people are cool too! Anyway, that's really why I can't tell the difference between music anymore. Jazz rock and blues have a thin line between em.


Let's just get to hip hop already! Do you know who Ali Shaheed Muhammad is? He's the DJ for A Tribe Called Quest and he's obcessed with jazz. It's not a secret. The sickest track on the album is called "jazz"! Miles Davis' bassist Ron Carter plays on the album. They shout out "Be bop" too. Digable Planets, Guru and Jazzmatazz, and countless others EXPLICITLY take jazz cuts. My favourite jazz guitar player now, Grant Green, is used all the time in break beats. For squares, that's music people break dance too. For real squares, break dancing is one of four pillars of hip hop along with rap, graffitti and DJing. Nas' father was a blues musician. Cool eh? These things come full circle.


Lastly, consider the difference between a Dre beat and WuTang: PLACE! Dre is Westside and his beats sound like. WuTang reflects the cold hard concrete of New York. Dre rolls Sess, Wu is into Kush. Primo is the same way. Time and place forms the creation of music. People all over listen and enjoy no matter where they're from. This didn't use to be true. Before people Chicago heard Chicago blues, etc.But thanks to the interweb, blonde kids named Sved from Sveden can listen to NWA!


Music is for everyone, black white swedish american whatever. I guess those countries that burn American flags are an exception...Maybe Jimi playing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock? Anyway, an understanding of where it's from is necessary to really get into it. I know I say this but I really will be shocked if people have gotten this far. I will not put you through more! I really could though! I left out a ton. Regards to Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, De La Soul, Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley, Pigpen (he was sort of black!) and more.

Leafs lost again. They had a lead coming into the third. It was obvious they were going to lose. JERRY LIVES.


J