Contemporary Rootsy Americana-y Type Stuff

[seeline]

kenny, while I appreciate the points you're making (and think they're worth further discussion), it's a little hard to follow through, due to the fact that so many posts made to this thread have disappeared. (I'm not sure exactly what you're agreeing with, out of what I remember of the things that Allen had posted, in other words. )

am also not sure what you mean by "denial of the past" in this context, but I'd like to understand more - so could you help me out?

thanks!

Edited March 30, 2010 by seeline

[kenny weir]

am not sure what you mean by "denial of the past" in this context, but I'd like to understand more - so could you help me out?

thanks!

Denial of the past?

It's not that people enjoy music without knowledge of its sources.

I have no problem with that.

But I do find it dismaying that when presented with the opportunity, they find such knowledge threatening and often actively shun such enlightenment. To their own detriment, I might add.

You and I, and Bev, and just about every O member I'd guess - for us all, a big part of our musical journey has been following our ears. Sorry, but the lack of that sort of curiosity simply gives me the shits!

Edited March 30, 2010 by kenny weir

[seeline]

OK, gotcha - but I'm not clear on how "denial of the past" fits into the discussion that was going on regarding the Carolina Chocolate Drops, or other groups mentioned here, if only because a lot of these folks seem to be very well-acquainted with many eras and kinds of music.

If you look at the influences that the members of the group cite - individually and together - there's a lot of history there!

[kenny weir]

OK, gotcha - but I'm not clear on how "denial of the past" fits into the discussion that was going on regarding the Carolina Chocolate Drops, or other groups mentioned here, if only because a lot of these folks seem to be very well-acquainted with many eras and kinds of music.

If you look at the influences that the members of the group cite - individually and together - there's a lot of history there!

Not aimed at any one group - or groups of groups!

More a general comment about the old vs new debate.

Great for both if both flourish.

But too often there is mutual hostility - and not all of it comes from cranks/snobs like me!

Here's another one: I often have said to me that I should "broaden" my musical interests. Mostly what the person telling me this means is that I should listen to more mainstream, modern, contemporary rock, country, blues.

But to me, they often seem narrow in their interests from my perspective - which is that of a fan of pop, rock, country, blues, jazz and much else spread over more than a century.

In each of these cases:

a. I am familiar with the music they wish me to pursue.

b. They have no idea of the music I dig.

My decision not to spend precious hours listening to their mainstays is an informed one.

A few months back, a very good buddy said to me: "I don't like old-timey!"

Yet this same guy is a Huge David Bromberg Fan.

He lent me a bunch of Bromberg stuff. I played it all, liked a lot of it and couldn't help but laugh.

I mean, WTF is it with that? How can you be a David Bromberg fan and NOT like old-timey?

More funny stuff: For the same guy, listening to my Hag records is like fingernails on a blackboard - "I can't handle that catch in his voice", he says. Yet he's also a major league Neil young fan. Go figure!

Edited March 30, 2010 by kenny weir

[seeline]

Now I get it [she says, with some amusement].

The David Bromberg example is great - I was a big fan of his work when I was in college, and - at the same time - no real fan of bluegrass or old-time. So I guess I can appreciate both sides of it.

And I agree that there can be - often is - hostility on all sides of these questions, as far as tastes (etc.) are concerned.

I guess I was focusing more narrowly on actual history, what with the question having come up pretty early on in the thread + JSgry's interesting comments about re-enactment/living history-type stuff. (or Disney's Animatronics, or whatever.)

As a kind of P.S., I doubt I'd have bought any of Bromberg's records had I not heard him live - that sold me.

Edited March 30, 2010 by seeline

[kenny weir]

I doubt I'd have bought any of Bromberg's records had I not heard him live - that sold me.

Yup, I saw him at the Cambridge Folk Festival in England in the late '80s. Great show! But I wuz already deep into what he's into by then anyhow.

Same thing: I owe a big debt to Comander Cody and His Crew, and they'll always have a special place in my heart. I got into them at a time and place when their sources were NOT available to me in any significant way - as opposed to, say, those of Bromberg. But these days, access to their source material is so easy, I couldn't imagine myself spending too much time listening to the Airmen 'cept for nostalgia's sake.

Edited March 30, 2010 by kenny weir

[seeline]

Funny - I really liked Commander Cody when I was in HS and college, too. I'd never heard anything quite like their music, and was able (eventually) to find some of their source music, back when that could be quite a hunt!

Edited March 30, 2010 by seeline

[kenny weir]

Bev, here's an Aussie artist worth checking out. Haven't seen him live myself, but have seen a few clips and liked thm alot. His last album was called jungle Blues and was a Jelly Roll Morton trip.

C.W. Stoneking

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/cwstoneking

Edited March 30, 2010 by kenny weir

[Big Beat Steve]

Same thing: I owe a big debt to Comander Cody and His Crew, and they'll always have a special place in my heart. I got into them at a time and place when their sources were NOT available to me in any significant way - as opposed to, say, those of Bromberg. But these days, access to their source material is so easy, I couldn't imagine myself spending too much time listening to the Airmen 'cept for nostalgia's sake.

So from your point of view (which I do understand and share to an extent) I guess the same applies to this AUSSIE band too?

http://www.goofinrecords.com/shop/index.php?topic=46&offset=300&tuote_ID=13973

Though in the end I always get back to the "sources" I really enjoy a lot of that music - just "for goood times' sake". Their version of "Jumpin' At The Woodside" is an example of what I mentioned above about "adding a new twist" to the music from way back .. (though I admit I am a bit biased in this case because "Woodside" is one of my all-time favorite tunes anyway).

As for Commander Cody (and Asleep At The Wheel too); I understand how you got into them and why you appreciated them, though - over here at least - I did manage to get hold of a lot of the "sources" (thanks, Arhoolie/Old Timey!) before I got into Commander Cody. I've always listened to them as an example of what the music would likely sound like if I wanted to listen to LIVE Western Swing at that time (late 70s and 80s). A lot of their "modernization" I like, other ingedients (especially on their later discs) I find a bit ... well ... out of place and out of style. But then again you have since got lots of "contemporary" bands in that vein that dug far deeper into the source material and added some variety that went in a different, "older"-sounding direction. And that shifts all your points of reference. The Dancehall Racketeers mentioned above would be one of those latter bands.

Edited March 30, 2010 by Big Beat Steve

[kenny weir]

Same thing: I owe a big debt to Comander Cody and His Crew, and they'll always have a special place in my heart. I got into them at a time and place when their sources were NOT available to me in any significant way - as opposed to, say, those of Bromberg. But these days, access to their source material is so easy, I couldn't imagine myself spending too much time listening to the Airmen 'cept for nostalgia's sake.

So from your point of view (which I do understand and share to an extent) I guess the same applies to this AUSSIE band too?

http://www.goofinrecords.com/shop/index.php?topic=46&offset=300&tuote_ID=13973

Though in the end I always get back to the "sources" I really enjoy a lot of that music - just "for goood times' sake". Their version of "Jumpin' At The Woodside" is an example of what I mentioned above about "adding a new twist" to the music from way back .. (though I admit I am a bit biased in this case because "Woodside" is one of my all-time favorite tunes anyway).

As for Commander Cody (and Asleep At The Wheel too); I understand how you got into them and why you appreciated them, though - over here at least - I did manage to get hold of a lot of the "sources" (thanks, Arhoolie/Old Timey!) before I got into Commander Cody. I've always listened to them as an example of what the music would likely sound like if I wanted to listen to LIVE Western Swing at that time (late 70s and 80s). A lot of their "modernization" I like, other ingedients (especially on their later discs) I find a bit ... well ... out of place and out of style. But then again you have since got lots of "contemporary" bands in that vein that dug far deeper into the source material and added some variety that went in a different, "older"-sounding direction. And that shifts all your points of reference. The Dancehall Racketeers mentioned above would be one of those latter bands.

Ahhh, the Racketeers - a Melbourne band I've seen many times. In some ways they have long played a similar role to Cody in bringing this music to people's attention here. And, yes, I really dig the way they've made western swing their own by covering and reworking stuff beyond the Wills songbook. Their Rocket 88 is my favourite. They still seem to manage a gig every year or so.

Speaking of Cody, I wonder what has become of Bobby Black? Terrific player!

Yes, shifting points of reference: In the case of the Racketeers, I'm happy to admit my attitude is coloured by proximity. Those guys, either as a band or as parts of numerous other bands, have been mainstays of the Melbourne scene for as long as I've lived here: Some of the others - Andy Baylor's Cajun Combo, Zydeco Jump, Blues Meltdown. I've downed a million beers at their gigs over the years and even seen them play at house parties, as well as numerous festivals.

[Niko]

Alela Diane is a complete unknown - looking on Amazon she might be what I'm seeking.

i am a big fan of Alela Diane, both of her albums but especially the EP Alela & Alina

[A Lark Ascending]

I'm pretty much over having friends, colleagues, acquaintances forcefully thrusting new releases in my face, demanding that I listen, that this CD is simply amazing, that I'm sure to love it. Any ambivalance on my part is often met with accusations of snobbery that can be quite angry and even hostile. Yet when I gently - I try, really I do! - point out that this tune is a cover version, that band is using this sound as its foundation, this album uses this vintage artist's catalogue ... the response is often equally hostile. Like I'm a party pooper or something ... I guess this maybe has something to with succeeding generations needing to feel they're re-inventing the wheel or something. But I can't help feel that this denial of the past is frequently not as passive as is being suggested here. It often seems wilful and deliberate.

I just think it's a matter of how it is done. None of us likes to be told that we ought to listen to and ought to like X, Y or Z - either the latest Columbia signed blues revival band or a Document record of 1930s Georgia blues. Suggest we might find it interesting, and there's every chance I might listen. Tell me I shouldn't be listening to what my cultural background, experience, instincts, rambles have me listening to but should be listening to X, Y or Z and I'm likely to start snarling.

Finally, IMHO, listeners of contemporary music of all sorts can only have their listening enhanced by familiarity with the sources.

Agree totally. But it's not an imperative, unless you are embarking on a study of musical history.

You and I, and Bev, and just about every O member I'd guess - for us all, a big part of our musical journey has been following our ears.

Quite. I have virtually no musical theory and would always defer to those who do; my sense of musical history is pretty rough and ready and I would defer to the musical historian. But I trust my ears which have done a very good job in leading me to pleasurable music over 40 years. When it comes to what to enjoy, I'm on an equal playing field with even the greatest experts.

Edited March 30, 2010 by Bev Stapleton

[AllenLowe]

"Tell me I shouldn't be listening to what my cultural background, experience, instincts, rambles have me listening to but should be listening to X, Y or Z and I'm likely to start snarling. "

really? I've lived my whole life by the idea that my persional cultural exposure should be the exact opposite of what "my cultural background, experience, instincts, rambles have me listening to" - and I think you probably have, as well. Otherwise we would never leave the womb.

[A Lark Ascending]

Thus the rambles.

They're the rambles I've chosen to take, often off on completely (for me) unbeaten paths, suggested by others or as a result of a chance hearing.

Suggest to me an interesting ramble and I might well take it.

Tell me I ought to be taking the ramble you favour over the one my instincts are leading me to and I stop paying attention.

I recall my teachers telling me that I shouldn't waste my time listening to Led Zeppelin, I should listen to Beethoven. Eventually I learnt they were completely right about the second part, completely wrong about the first.

Edited March 30, 2010 by Bev Stapleton

[AllenLowe]

drink the Kool-Aide.

actually, DON'T drink the Kool-Aide.

[A Lark Ascending]

Some sort of medicine? Outside my cultural reference points!

[seeline]

No, poisoned Kool-Aid (actually something called Flavor-Aid) and mass suicide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

Edited March 30, 2010 by seeline

[AllenLowe]

merely making reference to the power of suggestion -

my point being that there's nothing essentially wrong with having our basic assumptions questioned - I do it all the time (to myself). The key is to either accept or reject and than be secure in your decision. This is how I got from, say, Barry Harris to Julius Hemphill in my associations. I, too, was a middle-class sinner in my old life, a worshipper of the bebop idols.

so, Bev, if I could do it, you can do it.

and just to add, parenthetically, Hemphill is a perfect example of a musician who was able to take the vernacular and ingeniously rip it apart and re-assemble it to his own specs. Everything from the blues (which, as he told me, he found boring in its essence - as when he was playing backup to Ike and Tina Turner - but which he later realized held the key to major musical alterations) - to minstrelsy to various aspects of black showbiz. But he made something of it that was quite shatteringly new. This is where I find groups like the Chocolate Drops lacking. But short of new legislation, I cannot force you to look at it my way.

Edited March 30, 2010 by AllenLowe

[A Lark Ascending]

This is how I got from, say, Barry Harris to Julius Hemphill in my associations. I, too, was a middle-class sinner in my old life, a worshipper of the bebop idols.

so, Bev, if I could do it, you can do it...

...But short of new legislation, I cannot force you to look at it my way.

Interesting choice of metaphors - the implication is that you have been 'saved' and if I would just follow your path I could be too!

Sorry! Prefer to follow my own path!

I do have a couple of Hemphill records - they haven't clicked yet, but in time they might, probably if I come at them from a different direction. But if that happens it will be because I somehow connect with their inherent qualities, not because they lie on the righteous path.

****************

Around the time I got interested in jazz (mid-70s) I also got interested in English/Irish/Scottish folk music. Now this was already 15 years on from the 50s folk revival (and several decades on from Vaughan Williams and Grainger out there collecting source singers). What I heard was a vibrant, exciting, very different music from what was commercially available. But I recall hardcore traditionalists turning their nose up and insisting we should listen to the surviving source singers - there were still a fair few who had grown up learning music in the isolation of Sussex or Suffolk, supposedly unsullied by comnmerce (though it's interesting to read Bob Copper talking about his love of popular music on the radio and going up to London to hear Louis Armstrong in the 20s).

Today we're at least a generation on from the musicians I enjoyed (and who were already considered derivative by the hardliners). And there's a whole new generation of young people singing those songs, playing those tunes. And still the hardliners grumble about how they are but a pale reflection of what went before.

I hold to the view that the hardliners have invented much of the past (not the quiality of the music, just its near mythical unapproachability) and are now using that invention to besmirch the musicians of the present.

There are plenty I don't care for; but also many who sing songs or play tunes that I've heard played many times before by older musicians, yet they still send a shiver down my back.

There's a place for academic study. But when the chips are down I trust that shiver over grand theories.

Of course, not everyone will hear or feel it. But it doesn't mean it's not there.

[seeline]

Ha! And of course people like Rod Stradling (of the Musical Traditions site) tend to want to pretend that they didn't hear all those references to popular music and radio, etc. - very much like a lot of the mythologizers of Delta blues and assorted other styles.

Whether the original Carter Family group members liked swing music, well... I don't know. But I'm sure they heard it on the radio and on jukeboxes, and maybe they even bought records, and...

The possibilities are endless, and no one will ever succeed in tying it all together. That's frustrating for historians, but also means that the thrill of chase is always available.

* Rod's magazine: http://www.mustrad.org.uk/ And he's a fine musician himself, just a bit grumpy about the kinds of things Bev mentioned above.

Edited March 30, 2010 by seeline

[A Lark Ascending]

There used to be folk clubs in Britain - one in Nottingham called the Nottingham Traditional Music Club - that had rules about authenticity that were almost Stalinist in their rigour. Only source songs/tunes, no Dylan songs or self-composed things, no guitars or new-fangled instruments. No revisionism! No deviationism!

They were inventing the past.

[A Lark Ascending]

Marvellous little story told on a BBC programme about the UK blues boom a couple of weeks back.

When Muddy Waters first played in Britain he arrived with electric guitar, plugged in and did what he was doing back home. Lots of grumbling from the blues/folk purists who expected him on acoustic.

When he next appeared a few years later he played acoustic. By that time the UK had caught up with his electric records. Lots of grumbling about not hearing him play electric.

Ever anxious to please his audience Muddy Waters asked, totally bemused, 'What do they want?'

[JSngry]

I don't think anybody's questioning the validity of the Shiver Test, but some might feel that, overall/long-term/whatever, that not all shivers are equal...

I mean, yeah, ok, there's stuff that gives me The Shivers that I know is not Great Music in any way, shape or form. But, hey - I can live (and live well) with that because I've reconciled myself that Great Music & The Shivers only sometiomes intersect...some people call them "guilty pleasures", which is a term I reject, if only becasue I really don't feel guilty about it.

But I will subscribe to the notion of "enlightened pleasures", because, hey, standards have been set, and hopefully we set standards for ourself, standards that know the differnece between that with personal appeal and that with more broader import. Which is in no way to suggest that the wholesale swallowing of The Official Line is called for. Anything but. The Official Line is formualted by and propogated for the indocrination of a very specific set of values intended to establish & maintain a very specific set of social rules. And...later for all that, ya' know?

Still, to say that Bird ultimately "matters more" than Cannonball is not to disparage the work of Cannonball, nor those who enjoy him, nor even those who prefer to listen to Ball over Bird. It's just a way of looking history in the eye and realizing that Bird was one of the People Who Changed The World Musically and Cannonball wasn't, at least not to the extent Bird was.

But if there is to be honesty in all of this, it must also be accepted that Cannonball had a type of popular/populist impact outside of the purely musical that Bird didn't, and that that matters too, and that that matters too. And you gotta admit that Richie Cole or Eric Alexander matter to those whom find what they do appealing and/or satisfying. Thing is - the degree of "matters" and the degree of "satisfaction" can be fairly evaluated on a micro- and a macro- platform, not always "objectively", but a failure to do do is just that - a failure.

Hell, everything matters, which is why it's probably a good idea to look at the bigger picture and the smaller one parts of a whole, not as two entirely different holes to fall into and never be able to climb out of. We're all limited to one degree or another, and always will be, but...that's really not an excuse for....moving ourselves along, and if one can find a way to continuously refine one's macro- and micro- visions, then one is probably doing all that can be done to resist falling into the trap of compacency, which isn't all that bad in and of itself, but...in and of itself is never where it stays.

[seeline]

A perfectly placed note is all you really need for that "Shiver Test."

[kenny weir]

I just think it's a matter of how it is done.

Oh, absolutely. I'm not the sort to push stuff down people's throats. Yet, ironically, being known as a major music head means I often have stuff literally forced on me.