I’m so into music. It has healing vibes.
Borders, countries, language, culture all separate us and define us. In fact our identity is based on what divides us. Even though we live on one planet, we don’t think of ourselves as ‘planetarians’. Even though we’re all humans we don’t think of ourselves as human first, we think of ourselves as American, German, Swedish, Dutch, Irish, Russian, Japanese, Indonesian, South African, Argentinian, whatever.
An unfortunate characteristic of our human spirit is that we want to divide and conquer other people forgetting that our strength is in unity and collaboration not domination. How do we manage to forget such a basic simple obvious fact? It’s not like we don’t know.
The answer to that question is blowing in the wind but what I would like to say is that music has the power to heal the soul and bring us together and remind us that we are all connected. It can bridge the barriers that divide us and it does.
Satchmo
The great Louis Armstrong (1901 – 1971) was born and raised in New Orleans where he was exposed to all the rich vibrant jazz sounds that emanated from the many honky tonks, bordellos and funeral parades of his neighborhood.
It wasn’t an easy childhood. His father abandoned the family soon after he was born and his mother gave him over to his grandmother to raise until he was 5. The area where he lived was called the Battlefield and it was a rough part of town. He spent time in detention at the Colored Waif's Home for firing a gun in the street but this is also where he first learned to play the cornet (later switching to trumpet). After that he was raised by a Jewish family, the Karnoffskys, who he helped in their business delivering coal to homes in the neighborhood.
All the while he was learning how to sing and play his instrument in street bands and on the riverboat bands that docked in New Orleans and steamed up the river. After moving to Chicago in 1922 he became involved with some of the most influential jazz bands of the time and came into his own.
He moved to New York at the invitation of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, the top African-American band of the time. Even as he grew more and more famous his style was always relaxed and inclusive.
Louis Armstrong became a household name. He was one of the first ‘cross-over’ musicians, appealing to both white and black audiences. He appeared in movies alongside Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Grace Kelly - but here’s my point. In the fifties and sixties he became America’s ambassador to the world. He traveled widely and was warmly received wherever he went. Known as ‘Ambassador Satch’, he toured Africa, Europe and Asia under the sponsorship of the US State Department. His glowing smile and energetic jazz performances made friends and promoted American cultural values (which was the purpose of it as far as the State Department was concerned). It was the cold war after all and they were trying to score points. And they did. America was widely admired because of the music and spirit of one man, Louis Armstrong.
It’s so weird, we know that united we thrive and divided we fall. Power tripping one another creates conflict and chaos, working together promotes peace and prosperity. It’s not like someone has to tell us that or we have to discover it like it’s some little known hidden secret. Music has a way of reminding us and we need that.
Playing for Change
“Built on the belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome the differences that divide us, Playing For Change inspires and unites people.” says their website.
They travel all over the world with a small portable music studio, record the musicians live outdoors with headphones on, synch it up in the editing room - voila an awesome video. This is the first song I ever heard Playing for Change play.
Co-founded in 2002 by American Grammy award-winning music producer and film director Mark Johnson and film producer/philanthropist Whitney Kroenke, they have produced over 400 videos, recorded over 1,200 musicians in 60 countries and touched the hearts of millions of viewers through their music videos, performances and school programs. Brilliant.
Hip Hop and Rap
From its birthplace in the block parties of the Bronx back in the seventies to the super conservative Riyadh of today to all of North Africa and the Middle East, to England, Belgium, South Africa, Sweden, basically everywhere - rap has given voice to the kids. In the United States, Hip hop has become the most popular musical genre of all surpassing Pop, Rock and Country.
It’s all over the world: Festivals like A3C in Atlanta with over 500 Rappers, clubs like The Macbeth in London, Club Madame Mustache in Brussels and the open mic scene in Brighton (wow nice documentary).
Hip Hop, of course, includes not only Rapping but DJing, Scratching and Break Dancing, kind of the whole culture which Rap is a part of. Of course Rap has had kind of a bad rap in some ways, maybe deservedly so, but there are so many styles out there now: old school hip-hop and Boom-bap and Jazz-rap and Trap and Rap rock, Country trap, Gangsta rap. Yeah, even Tupac is singing about his Mama in one of the sweetest songs you’ll ever hear.
Rap music started out in the US but morphed into all kind of styles and spread all over the world. It’s a common language, a beat, a melody, a voice. That’s it. Amazing.
EDM, House, Ambient, etc
EDM stands for Electronic Dance Music and includes a large group of musical styles found all over the world.
It may be in the form of Raves where DJs are spinning tunes and the audience is dancing hypnotically for hours. Raves started out in Europe as giant parties in vacant industrial spaces, usually with lots of drugs. They were secretive, kind of conspiratorial, invitation only, location unknown until the day of. Then they would set up the sound equipment, the psychedelic light show, everybody would gather, party hard, dance all night and disperse before the cops caught on. Raves have evolved and spread to the United States and many other countries. Burning Man, for example, is a yearly event in the Nevada Desert where people camp out and dress up and create fantastic portable art objects and dance, dance, dance.
It may refer to House Music which includes Deep House, Progressive House, Electro House, Tech House, Tribal House. House is one of the most popular forms of EDM. It's almost three decades old. It grew up in Chicago, rising from the aftermath of disco, and is one of the truly American-born styles.
It could be Ambient music streaming on YouTube, like I often use for my podcasts, from producers like Blume and Cafe De Anatolia. They curate musicians who are in their particular style and promote them. Chill Out, Ethno, Deep House & Oriental Music are among the music styles you will find.
Ambient includes sub-genres like house, ambient techno (check this out),
biomusic, chill-out, downtempo, new age, post-rock, space music, trance, trip hop. Amazing, huh? Infinite variations on a theme. The theme being the beat, the harmonic melody, the human voice.
There are so many sub-genres to EDM I could go on and on. Techno, see Kraftwerk. Trance, see Progressive Trance. Tech Trance. Vocal Trance. Goa/Psytrance (from Goa India).
I’m so into music. Of course everyone has their own preference. There is no one universal sound. But it’s not like Country Western is going to go to war with Prog Rock. It all co-exists seamlessly.
Music in all its glorious forms is a human tradition that goes back to the beginning of culture which means basically to the beginning of being human, whenever that was. At least a few hundred thousand years ago, maybe a million.
The first instruments were drum and flute and the first singing, curiously enough, was chanting and chorus, not unlike modern day Rap. The first dancing, probably, was stomping around the campfire, the storytellers voice rising and falling in rhythm with the drum - like modern day Raves.
This is what fascinates me, what I find compelling and worth writing about - the universal aspects of being human. Like our need for food, water and shelter we also need love and community. We are tribal to our core. That’s why we build cities and nations. That’s why we have sports teams to root for. And that’s why all people everywhere from the frozen tundra of Siberia to the deserts of Arabia, enjoy making and listening to music together.
Nowadays we have the internet and streaming music. That extends from the frozen tundra of Siberia to the deserts of Arabia too. Any style you want is easily available, check out YouTube or Spotify or Apple Music, Band Camp, Sound Cloud, Pandora bloody Amazon Music or Google Play. There are millions of songs just waiting to come streaming through your ‘device’ Pretty amazing.
For me streaming music has been a renaissance. It’s like when I was 20 years old and playing vinyl LPs on a turntable to extract the deeper message, to find a clue to the meaning of life which is what I was searching for back then. Traffic and the Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, Pink Floyd and the Dark Side of the Moon, the Beatles and Abbey Road, the White Album - they were serious musical events not casual background listening.
It was a social event, me and my buddies, but often it was just me with headphones on. I remember recording LPs onto an Ampex reel to reel tape recorder that I bought so I could listen to LP after LP without a break, staying up late writing poetry all night in the attic. That was the point of it, to get in touch with myself somehow by listening to music.
So there’s that. And I still do it.
Signing off now with one of my favorite bands in the world Walk Off the Earth https://www.facebook.com/walkofftheearth/videos/483062930173446/ live streaming with their friends and thanking them for supporting their new song “Bet On Me”. As the comments are coming in from fans around the world they’re reading off where they’re from: Amsterdam, good morning from Philippines, we’re in Costa Rica right now, Ukraine, Norway, Egypt, Toronto, Poland, whoa Megastar my goodness, Malaysia’s in the house, England, New Castle, Nova Scotia, Sydney, Alabama, Texas, ‘whoa the whole world is watching’ says Sarah, Argentina, Japan in the house, Hungary, Sweden, Argentina again, Croatia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Belgium, Turkey remember when we played in Turkey?, Bet On Me is at 9:55, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Cuba, Poland, Netherlands, come to Italy, love from Tennessee, Portugal . . .
World Music in the House