Not about EC, not about skin color, about culture
Tom Rossen
>It had nothing to do with EC, NOTHING TO DO WITH EC.
> NOTHING TO DO WITH EC, GET IT (re-read it if you have to). It had to do with
> MY OPINION that white folks do not express the blues as well > as blacks.
[snip]
LW 'sorry, but give it up, he's god and we all know it, CASE CLOSED"
A double shot of Halon for my friend LW here, bartendah!
This little conflagration shows why EC most definitely *does* belong in
blues-l: he's a flashpoint for a lot of serious issues.
It ain't about skin color, it's about culture. It's about people who dip
into Afro-European culture to skim off something shiny and run away from
the rest of it. It's about the star-maker machinery as no more or less
benevolent than any other form of colonialism. It's about who you choose to
live with, where you choose to live, where you spend your time, etc.
Anybody wanna argue this, I'm out in the parking lot walkin' LW around
while he tries to chill out....
Tom Rossen
VIS Corp.
Tom...@aol.com or // it's not AOL, it just looks like it ;-]
ros...@lmis.loral.com
708-304-7397 (at LMIS)
Tom Rossen
>
>>
>> It ain't about skin color, it's about culture.
> I would have to fundamentaly disagree with some of your premises.
> While the blues has its beginnings in black culture I reject out
> of hand that you can't enjoy, play, UNDERSTAND the blues without
> ever getting into the whole racial issue.
[snip]
> While the blues is associated with black America it is not
> a "wholly owned subsidiary", it is not exclusive to it. An
> Inuit can get the blues without ever having chopped or even
> seen cotton. "If I am pricked, do I not bleed?"
> It may be an oversimplification but (other than blue) I believe
> it is colourless.
Please eyeball my posts with a bit more TLC. I never said anything about
"black culture" or "white guys". It's about acknowledging an African
heritage that is inside all of us. I'm a white guy myself, but I'm
culturally part African as well as part European. I'm interested in my
roots - I consider Kunta Kinte to be part of them. The fact is that people
of color in this country still suffer from self-identified "white" people's
repression of the African within themselves and their attempts to project
the "demon" onto others whom they can destroy.
> Its a feeling [usually] expressed in I IV V , 12 bars
> at a time.
>
This kind of technomusical reductionism will get us nowhere, old bud.
Twelve-bar blues is just a moment in the history of blues that crystallized
into a very marketable and easily reproducible commodity. There's plenty
of blues that ain't I-IV-V and ain't 12 bars. "I-IV-V" is a misleading
Euromusical reductionism: the tempered scale of European classical music
is a compromise. Every interval is just a little out of tune to make
playing in multiple keys possible. "Blue notes", "bending", "vibrato",
Monk playing "between the keys" - these all represent a much greater
sensitivity to and sophistication about pitch than classical music allowed.
Vibrato was introduced in 19th century solo violin and operatic vocal
performance for the same reason: to allow the soloist to comment on and
play with the complexity of audible pitch relationships. The romantic
soloist, flamenco, fado, klezmer, all of these are closer to blues than a
sequencer playing perfect I-IV-V patterns in 12 bars.
>> Anybody wanna argue this, I'm out in the parking lot walkin' LW around
>> while he tries to chill out....
>>
>
> Watch out I hear he's "crazy" too :):)
>
>phe...@cmc.doe.ca
Crazy? I hope some screwball start a fight!
... <dismounting soapbox>