Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
JD wrote: " Hey, Bill, I'm no academic in this realm by any stretch, but how do you figure in people like Martin Denny who seemed to ( perhaps, haphazardly) play any instrument they found from any part of the world? And, I think, maybe a few years earlier than the mentioned masters." Hey JD, I'm going to assume that you made the mistake that our father used to make all the time (and all our friends as well) and that you confused me, Rick , with my brother Bill. If not, disregard my reply and wait for one from Bill. It's just that you quoted my post to respond to so I'll make the obvious assumption. So, my answer is that I'm really talking about popular movements in music: movements that affected the masses and the largest share of musicians in general. People like Martin Denny (and David Lindley in our country) were vastly ahead of the curve in their fusion of ethnic musics and instruments and styles so they are the exception to the phenomena I've been talking about. They also didn't start an avalanche of influence that resulted in people copying what they did. They are magnificent islands in the stream of that popular musical history. Also, I was speaking pretty specifically about percussion which is my lifelong field of expertise, so I wasn't really referring to string instruments. What instruments did Martin Denny play in those days out of curiosity? Lindley , pretty specifically, was playing Americana folk instruments and a couple of instruments from the Middleeast in his group Kaleidescope in the late 60's. ******************* ******************* So called 'ethnic music' (a term which I"m really uncomfortable as I consider rock 'n roll to be folk music and hence, ethnic, just the music of the folk of my country and others) has been prevalent in the Colonial (Imperialist) countries since those countries started conquering peoples around the world. In the sixties and early seventies I found lots of many records on the Nonesuch label of world traditional music. There were just very few of them where I live in Northern California compared to the explosion that would occur with the so called 'World Beat' movement that I would be part of in the early 80's. Modern popular music and jazz just didn't have a lot of influence from these cultures for the most part. In my small part of the world, during the early to mid eighties that there was an explosion in commercial interest in world music, both traditional and fusion varieties. Before that, however, in my home town, Santa Cruz, which at one point had the only large concert venue dedicated specifically to World Music and World Music Fusion (World Beat----that horrid, horrid term again) I remember lobbying and lobbying the booker for the local large rock showcase club, the Catalyst until he relented and booked the first Reggae bands, the first African Bands, the first Middleeastern groups. In those days I was so fanatically and obsessively interested in so called World Music that I did everything in my power to bring it to my community. I remember my wife at the time, Janet Ring and I going down to the Civic Auditorium and at 7:00 a.m. in the morning to meet a bewildered group of musicians from the Uzulu Dance Theatre to bring them back to our home for bagels and coffee and private lessons and dance classes I'd set up for them to make some money so that they would come teach us about their artistry. A mere five years after these humble beginnings, acts like Thomas Mapfumo, Youssou NDour, Babtunde Olatunji, Sunny Ade, Johnny Clegg and Savuka, the Gypsy Kings, Les Negresses Verte, a plethora of big Reggae Acts to numerous to mention and many, many other groups from the Middleeast were suddenly headliners at all the biggest venues and their were multiple clubs that catered partially or entirely to them. Then, in Santa Cruz, this amazing world instrument (though primarily percussion) store called Rhythm Fusion opened up...............Places like Lark in the Morning which for a long time had catered to ethnic music enthusiasts suddenly began to have increasingly large catalogues and ever since it's been a cornucopia if you wanted to start finding unusual ethnic instruments to start to learn on. And , of course, all of this refers to just what was commercially available to people and musicians where I live. Every part of the world has a slightly different time line for this explosion of influences and access to the musical instruments that made them.