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Looper's Delight
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On 25 jul 2007, at 13.12, Stephen Goodman wrote: > Well, young fellers, I was born two days after Christmas, 1956. > Accordingly, my parents were 1950s parents, with all the rush to > Normality etc. While my dad as it turned out wanted to be a jazz > trumpeter - and admitted to me that one time the great Raymond > Scott's band stayed the night at their fraternity house (Univ. of > Missouri, Columbia) - by the time I was born my mom had honed down > such potentially subversive tastes, and they were populating their > new-format Hi-Fidelity LP collection with... wait for it... > Montovani, Ray Conniff, Perry Como (later done up splendidly by > Eugene Levy on SCTV, lying on a sofa in a turtleneck sweater, > crooning quietly, almost... asleep... zzzzz)... Nice description :-) Seems your music life had a "soft start". > There's no accounting for taste is there? I find the one element > that sparks my interest is CONTRAST, whether it's visual or musical. Interesting. So you mean you have always used music to define yourself? I was born in -55 and started out in a musical vacuum. No radio or music ever played at home. When I was five we had a maiden for a while (both my parents were away working during daytime) that used played the radio all day. I never thought twice about the music she squeezed out of that radio, it was just noise to me, until one day something strongly caught my interest; it was Miriam Makeba singing Pata Pata. When recalling that memory today I can see what this five year kid reacted so strongly to: it was the african beat and the simple and well defined melody alternating between singing on the beat and doing non-rhythmic slurs over the the beat (simple trick for creating tension and tickling the listening ear). Took some decades to find out about that, but never the less I just loved it at five, the first time I heard it. Another "voice from out of the blue" came when I was fifteen and happened to hear something on a transistor when in a small sailing boat at sea. I didn't know what instrument, which musician or the musical style it was and someone changed the station before I could find out. Took me another decade to find out that what I had been hearing on that windy day was Ben Webster. So I'm pretty sure, that at least for me, musical taste was there in the mind long before I even started experiencing the world. I've never had a chance to chose my taste in music. Even scales, chords etc seems to be imprinted in us "as default" without the need to "learn it". My experience was more like recapturing something that is familiar and giving appropriate names for everything I already knew by my own inner "pictures" (I tend to "see" sound and intervals. That hasn't changed since five years age), typically like "ah, so this blue rectangular block is the Tonic and that reddish thing that is tilted is called the Dominant"... But knowing the names never changed the original (subjective) three dimensional colored shapes of music/sound, the are just rock solid. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international)