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Originally Posted by JohnRoss
I'm not sure where your getting those characteristics of psalms and hymns. Psalms were quite well known and were more popular in colonial America. (You keep talking about England, but as I said, these things meant different things to different people at different times.) I read through several diaries from the time and they talk a lot about psalms and little of hymns. Many of the psalms were rendered metrical so that different psalm texts could be applied to different people. Many psalmody schools sprang up and great debates arose about how the psalms should be sung. Wandering psalmody teachers brought it to remote places - anyone who has read Last of the Mohicans may remember the strange character of David Gamut, the itinerant psalmody teacher. I don't know what kind of history of colonial music you get in England in Spain, but I suggest that it might be a bit off. Hymnody did become more prominent as time went on, but I think that you are off in the characteristics that you try to imbue it with. But African-American would have heard both.
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Similarly, it is important that the harmony of jazz is an extension of the harmonic language of classical, directly or indirectly. Without that language, jazz would have no chords or chord progressions.
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
This is not a definition I come to etymologically, but based of definition and usage by scholars and that are widely accepted in the academic community.
You go into an explanation of how some tones in modes can act kinda like a dominant. But it is not a dominant, it is just a tone that pulls to the tonic. In functional harmony, dominant function is defined by the leading tone because that defines the V-I relationship, the cornerstone of tonal music.
Peace,
Kevin
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01-29-2011 05:22 PM
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There used to be this guy in NYC named Leonard Bernstein, who knew a little bit about classical music, piano, conducting, and composing. He was also an important music lecturer. At one time he had an educational presentation recorded onto an LP, called "What is jazz?". Speaking for the academic community, he explained that jazz could not exist without the blues, and that the main elements of the blues consisted of it's form, cadences, rhythms, and the existence of "blue notes" which resided somewhere BETWEEN the b3 and 3, and the b5 and 5. He said these elements were straight from Africa.
He said these African blue notes could be accurately done with the voice, brass, strings, etc., but not on the piano, because it was too western tempered. Blues pianists found they could approximate these blue notes by playing a 2 note dissonance, because the blue note was "in between" the 2 notes. Now you are creating new language. This is where the foundation of jazz harmony came into play. Now the blues pianists start adding a New Orleans rhythm and expanding on the blues form and you have ragtime. Then, small brass bands said, hey, we can play that stuff in a group format, and away things went. A bit of a simplification, but Bernstein made a convincing argument.
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra recently went to Cuba and Wynton gave a demonstration about how Afro Cuban clave patterns synchronized perfectly over traditional New Orleans jazz rhythms, because they both came from Africa. I wonder what Wynton's whole take on the classical angle would be, since Wynton is an award winning classical performer, and a jazz historian, I am sure he has an educated perspective that would be interesting to research.
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Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
So many problems with your statements.
First of all Lenny was not addressing musicologists, he was aiming at the general public. Also, Lenny - while a great conductor, composer and ambassador for music - was not a musicologist. A composer and a musicologist are not the same thing. It would be like saying that an author is automatically an expert on the history of literature.
Next, your assertion (through Lenny's mouth) that microtonal blue notes are a necessity for jazz or blues is ridiculous at face value - if that were true, neither would be playable on the piano. Is Bill Evans an incomplete jazz player because he can't play microtonal blue notes? Is Otis Spann an incomplete blues piano player because he can't? Plenty of blues and jazz gets played without microtonal blues notes. The crushed m2s that you refer to are not an approximation but just a jarring dissonance that doesn't even come close to the original. They are a colorful feature, but they are not required. Evans would soloing on a monophonic keyboard would not sound like less authentic jazz, and Spann would not sound less bluesy. There are plenty of jazz guitarists who don't use microtonal blues notes - are they not authentic jazz players? No, it is a nice color but it is far from a structural requirement.
The first two elements that you mention, "form" and "cadences" are clearly European in origin. The forms of jazz are exact copies of common forms in classical. And cadences? Are we joking? These are from the European tradition - West African music doesn't even have chords in the sense that we do. As to rhythms, with a few stylistic exceptions, the rhythms of jazz closely resemble European music - fixed meters (the exact same ones that white music was using), standard subdivisions, etc. There are some important elements of African music (swing, loose rhythmic alignment - "heterogeneous sound ideal", etc.) True, these are very important for the feel of jazz. But to lump that all as "the rhythm comes from Africa" is just plain silly - either you misheard Lenny, or he was overgeneralizing for an audience that knows little about music. Perhaps he is trying to overemphasize the African elements just out of race-guilt, but I would hope that we were past that by now.
But this is exactly the kind of overgeneralizing that I am talking about. You guys keep telling me that there is no bias towards overstating the African contributions, and then in the process you provide me more examples.
As to the Wynton thing, as I mentioned he comes from a strong Afro-centric chauvinism. I'm not aware that he is a "jazz historian" as you say. He is a respected performer, but that is not the same thing. Jazz historians publish books, submit articles to peer-reviewed journals, and present at conferences. Just being a respected performer that likes to shoot of his mouth about the slanted view of jazz history that his father taught him - that does not make him a jazz historian. That requires intensive research, not an ego that makes him think that he knows everything. (Don't get me started on Wynton - hell of a player, but thinks that confidence and knowledge are the same thing.)
Yes the clave seems to have began in Africa. Yes, a dumbed down version of the clave is used in certain New Orleans grooves, like the boogaloo. But New Orleans didn't get it from Africa - it got it from the Caribbean, well after jazz was born. Check out Peter Navaez' article "The Influences of Hispanic Music Cultures on African-American Blues Musicians" in the Black Music Research Journal, Vol 14, no 2, Autumn 1994. Someone had previously mentioned the Caribbean influence, and it is important. When I lived in New Orleans, I even heard some of the old guys talk about Mexican influences. But these are mostly surface elements that are not in the core structure of the music. And Wynton's point is moot since the NOLA grooves he is talking about are mainly played in NOLA (like the boogaloo, originally "bugalú" in Spanish) and in a few R&B grooves (Bo Didley beat, etc.) The clave is not an element of 99.99% of jazz, so it really isn't relevant to this conversation. Having come from New Orleans, I used to try to get the guys in the band to do 2nd line groves, etc, after I came here. Too many blank stares broke me of the habit.
But it's Wynton being light a loose with the facts again. Anything that makes the black heritage of jazz look good at the the expense of the white heritage of jazz is OK with him. But even if he could prove that they both trace back to Africa (instead of one to another) all that proves is that that one element came from Africa, not everything. I have never said that no elements came from Africa. My point was the tendency to downplay European contribution and oversell the African contribution.
Thank you for providing some more examples of the subtle reverse racism that amateur jazz historians push on the unsuspecting public.
Sorry, if I got a little heated. I found your tone at the beginning very condescending.
Peace,
KevinLast edited by ksjazzguitar; 01-30-2011 at 03:41 AM.
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Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.
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Originally Posted by Dark Star
Yes, Wikipedia is awesome. But like anything else, you have to know it's limitations. If you look up "Wikipedia" on Wikipedia, you will see several of these concerns mentioned. I think that Wikipedia is a good place to start research, and as long as things don't get too technical (or controversial) then you are probably OK. But research should never end with Wikipedia - it is just too unreliable on very specific things and it is unverifiable because you have no idea who is writing it and what their standing is. And ultimately it is only one source and real research should never rely on one source (especially an anonymous one.) Of course, once you get beyond high school, no encyclopedia should be used as a research source, but at least regular encyclopedias are written reviewed by experts in their fields.
But it is great. If I can't go to sleep until I can remember the name of Elizabeth Taylor's 3rd husband, or if I'm dying to remember how many days the Alamo lasted before it fell - Wikipedia is the first place I go. But if I'm doing research into Levy-Straussian structuralism and its application of mediator triangles to Native American trickster folklore for a research paper - Wikipedia just isn't going to be good or reliable enough - not if I want confidence in the information.
Peace,
KevinLast edited by ksjazzguitar; 01-30-2011 at 12:50 PM.
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Sorry, I should have attributed that as a quote:
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IC
Now I feel bad. I love The Office.
Peace,
Kevin
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Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
Perhaps many of us who have studied the origins and evolution of jazz have been misled by educators with an agenda. We think we are somewhat informed, but actually we are still ignorant. I really try to avoid dispensing inaccurate information.
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Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
Similarly, it is important that the harmony of jazz is an extension of the harmonic language of classical, directly or indirectly. Without that language, jazz would have no chords or chord progressions.
In the same way, linguists trace most European languages back to a common Indo-European root. It may not be important for a butcher trying to talk to his customers, but it is useful for a linguist trying to understand language.
Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
your assertion (through Lenny's mouth) that microtonal blue notes are a necessity for jazz or blues is ridiculous at face value - if that were true, neither would be playable on the piano... The crushed m2s that you refer to are not an approximation but just a jarring dissonance that doesn't even come close to the original.
They are a colorful feature, but they are not required.
There are plenty of jazz guitarists who don't use microtonal blues notes - are they not authentic jazz players?
No, it is a nice color but it is far from a structural requirement.
The first two elements that you mention, "form" and "cadences" are clearly European in origin.
either you misheard Lenny, or he was overgeneralizing for an audience that knows little about music.
Wynton's point is moot since the NOLA grooves he is talking about are mainly played in NOLA...
The clave is not an element of 99.99% of jazz, so it really isn't relevant to this conversation.
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Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
when I was in Jazz history class back in 1976 we were taught that blue notes came to be as a result of the clash of the western major scale with the different pentatonic style scales that made up the music of the various tribes whose member were kidnaped and brought to the west.
Most of those scale did not contain either the 3rd or 5th so a lot of the African slaves approximated the 3rd and 5th and wound up sliding into then.
Hence the blue note
I'm no expert nor am I a historian. But I'm pretty sure this explanation has been published before.
I remember those Bernstein lectures. They were great for music appreciation. He wrote the score to West side Story. I wouldn't be dissin' him
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Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
The point that Wynton was trying to make was that NOLA music has clave and so does Afro-Cuban music, therefore they both come from Africa. First of all, it is of limited application to this discussion, since the vast majority of jazz doesn't have it. The other problem with Wynton's argument is that he is ignoring the fact that NOLA music didn't get the clave from Africa, but from the Carribbean influence, after jazz and blues developed. Again, the man is not a scholar, and his Afro-centrist view of music history is well known. People seem to think that someone being a musical celebrity automatically makes them a scholar.
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Peace,
KevinLast edited by ksjazzguitar; 01-31-2011 at 06:07 PM.
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I was hoping this forum was a little more mature and informed. This debate is still going on in 2011? Jazz is American, not European, not African. Informed by both. This is what happens in a country that does not require art and culture to be taught to all in a public education. It's called ignorance. BTW, Wynton Marsalis is the highest paid jazz scholar in the world.
Last edited by max chill; 01-31-2011 at 06:20 PM.
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Thanks Max, but we know that. The point is what elements come from what cultures (assuming that the American music culture was so close to the European one that they were effectively the same for the scale of this discussion) and is there an unconscious tendency to emphasize the African ones and underemphasize the European/American ones.
Peace,
Kevin
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Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
First of all, we know next to nothing about early secular music.
Secondly, for much of western music history, classical and church music were synonymous.
But classical theory has been the standard by which the others have been understood.
Bill Nye the Science Guy is "respected as an educator" - that does not make him a scholar.
Lenny had a great ability to connect with the public. But he was not a musicologist.
I'm not saying that it is not widely taught. But it is less commonly taught nowadays (in academia at least.)
When Miles went to Julliard...
Yes. But my point is that micotonal blue notes clearly aren't a requirement since great jazz can be made without it.
I was just trying to distinguish between things that are structural.
That argument would be really compelling if you could show that these forms have African origin.
Again, there is no harmonic form in African music
I'm not sure that the clave tells us anything about swing.
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Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
I've read the whole thread. Since jazz was a new music created by blacks in America, studying the origins raises some logical order to pursuing answers. The basic question is usually, "what makes jazz different from European classical music"? The answer would describe the African elements. You seem to propose a similar question, which is, "what makes jazz different from African music"? Then the answer would be the western classical elements.
Jazz has evolved to be so much more than it was, but the original jazz needed the African elements to be considered jazz. Scott Joplin's ragtime was not jazz, but Jellyroll Morton's ragtime was, even though they were both black. Joplin chose to let classical be the stronger influence, while Morton did not. It is not unusual to focus on what creators did that made things different. The earliest blues were much closer in melody and form to African music than western music. However, jazz as we know it today has become more complex and evolved because of the application of western harmonic theory.
Before the blues you would have had field hollers or maybe this...African American or European American?
Last edited by max chill; 01-31-2011 at 09:58 PM.
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Hesitant to weigh in here... But, I must say, that the argument the OP advances is disturbing. I couldn't disagree more with you, Kevin.
Your argument seems to be premised on an underlying sense of white victimhood, that white jazz musicians and Western aristocratic and bourgeois traditions of "classical music" have been done an injustice by overzealous African American nationalists and pseudo-scholars. While I do not have much use for Bernstein, and regard W Marsalis as in fact deeply conservative, the idea that we would dismiss non-academically-affiliated intellectuals because they do not submit to peer review, etc. is extremely limiting. I spend a lot of time reading peer reviewed academic literature, and I have not found scholarly writing to have half as much profundity and wisdom as the words of Louis Armstrong, Monk, Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, etc. The Italian radical Antonio Gramsci had a term for folks like the giants of bebop-- "organic intellectuals." To my mind, in both words and music, jazz musicians number among the most important social philosophers of the 20th century. (And the academic establishment sure lets a lot of nonsense through the peer-review filter...)
The argument that jazz's true history has been traduced by overzealous Afro-centric interpreters is all over the recent literature on white jazz (see, e.g. "Lost Chords"), and it is not persuasive, connected as it is historically to the neoconservative attacks of the 1980s and 1990s on efforts to expand the literary canon, offer courses in ethnic studies, etc. In fact, most mainstream jazz thinkers, like Marsalis and Giddens and the Ken Burns Jazz series, offer a highly individualistic story of jazz based on a few remarkable geniuses, and almost always pegged to an American exceptionalist narrative that blunts the sharp edges of jazz's challenge to American self-celebration.
To return to your argument. I think that the problem of your argument lies in the reification of the score or transcription. This is a "useful fiction" in musicology, but we should recall that jazz is a living form that includes both scores and improvisation, live performance and studio recordings, educational practices as well as social criticism. Noting that certain cadences "come from" classical music, and that syncopation and hemiola can be find in a wide variety of non-African music, seems to me an inadequate means of establishing the priority of one form's influence over that of the other.
Although I can't imagine you agreeing with this, my take on jazz history and jazz aesthetics comes down to a central, unavoidable point: in the final analysis, jazz is a part of the global black Diasporic aesthetic tradition, an internationalist and syncretic tradition in which improvisation, syncopation, group participation, what Zora Neale Hurston called the "will to ornament," the correlation of beauty and feats of skill, and a deeply dialectical relationship with Christianity (and Christian music) have been and continue to be central aesthetic tendencies.
I am not essentializing, not being a racial determinist--simply making a commonsensical observation from reasoned historical study and critical reflection. I am not denying that scottish pipers, klezmer fiddlers, or baroque organists improvise--but they don't play jazz, and counterfactually, it is impossible to imagine any context for the emergence of jazz other than African diasporic communities. Am I wrong?
There is a vast literature on this. I might recommend reading Farah Jasmine Griffin, Robin D.G. Kelley, John Szwed, George Lipsitz, Eric Porter, George Lewis, and the more recent ethnomusicological literature on jazz and blues. You might discover, as some other posters have noted, that your complaint is a very old one, and that in fact the sorting out of taste hierarchies re: jazz and "serious music" is one of the central tensions of American musical history.
Denying African American music its African American (and African) contexts does violence to historical memory and distorts the political meanings of jazz. (And a final point--the assertion re: African retentions evaporating because of the end of the slave trade in 1808 is deeply wrong... this is a deep and complex subject--among other things, the illegal importation of slaves continued well after 1808, varying levels of solidarity existed in different places and times, and there was a whole network of interaction between diasporic African communities from the beginning of the slave trade to this day-- you might want to read Sterling Stuckey's Slave Culture, Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, and George Rawick's essays on the WPA slave narratives...)
Didn't mean to rattle on so long... and sorry to be so insistent. You may well choose to ignore or fight me on these points. That's cool. But if you are going to argue what you argue, I thought you should at least be prepared for some justified anger and bafflement, of the variety presented above.
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Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
But musicologist is a label. It refers to an approach and an attitude. It is a mindset. I haven't gotten my PhD yet, but I'm getting there. Did I have to wait for my degree in classical guitar to call myself a classical guitarist? I think that having done years of grad work in musicology allows me to wear that hat.
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
Originally Posted by max chill
Perhaps there is an element of perspective - we notice things that are different. But that fact that they stand out more from our subjective position does not make them uniquely worthy of notice, at the expense of everything else.
Originally Posted by max chill
Originally Posted by max chill
Peace,
KevinLast edited by ksjazzguitar; 02-01-2011 at 02:41 AM.
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Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
I notice that you don't delve into the merits of the musical arguments. Where did jazz get harmonic language and chord progressions? Where did it get their instruments? Where did it get its fixed meter? Where did it get its diatonic scales? Where did it get its temperament? Take away even a few of these and it isn't jazz anymore. My point is that if you take away the European influences, then it is just as much "no longer jazz" as if you took away the African influences. But when people talk about the origins of jazz, they only talk about the African contributions and if they mention the European traditions contributions, it is usually just lip service and incomplete. Many definitions of jazz bend over backwards to list and define all the African contributions, sometimes even to the point of exageration.
Again, I'm not saying that jazz is from the European tradition. I'm saying that it's core (harmony, chord progressions, fixed meter, instruments, scales, temperaments) is essentially European music which has been transformed with African elements (swing, poly-rhythms, call and response, improv, group dynamic, heterogeneous sound ideal, etc.) Both are extremely important and could not have done it alone. But I do feel that one gets emphasized at the expense of the other.
Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
We can call it a travesty of history, but the African-Americans were not allowed to hold onto their culture in its entirety. But I cannot build a time machine. And if it were not for that enforced aculturalization, we would have no jazz - sometimes travesties can have a good outcome (not to diminish the cultural tragedy.)
Musical traditions were easier to keep. People could sing together even when they didn't speak the same language. Slave owners even encouraged singing because it made it easier to keep track of where their field hands were. Singing and dancing were an easy form of entertainment for slaves. But slaves also heard and even participated a wide variety of "white" music, from songs and hymns, to folk songs, to even classical music.
Again, I'm not saying that jazz is a product of American/European culture - that would be idiocy. I'm saying that it was music, made by African-Americans which brought together elements of American/European music traditions along with African-American culture, which still had some important elements of African music that they'd managed to hold onto. I just think that the emphasis that is often given is lopsided. If I made it lopsided in the other way, I'd be called a racist. So I guess I'll label the standard slanting reverse-racist.
Peace,
KevinLast edited by ksjazzguitar; 02-01-2011 at 03:01 AM.
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I'm not going to weigh in on the "if the European aspect of Jazz is understated, why is that?" matter, and, personally, as a scholar (undergraduate, admittedly, but definitely going on to post-grad work) I don't think that Kevin should, either. Hypotheses non fingo. It is enough to demonstrate a phenomena without going into why.
When people ask if this is a topic worth pursuing in a scholarly fashion, I'd have to say the answer is "Yes". The end conclusion of Kevin's work might not end up changing scholarly opinion in any fashion, but it's a perspective out there, and that is what the scholarly establishment IS. A bunch of people yelling their opinions and citing sources about it in such a way that ends up with a general consensus. Just saying "I thought this was already a given" doesn't mean that the work is any less meaningful or worthwhile.
To Kevin directly- If you're looking at similarities between jazz and European music, I'd say that looking into klezmer is an interesting diversion, if not exactly on topic. The similarities there are rather interesting.
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Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
That's what scholars do.
There are many pieces that don't have blues notes.
...there are heaps of great jazz solos that have no blue notes in them.
Well, if you think that Salsa has swing, then you and I are talking about two different things.
Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
Originally Posted by ksjazzguitarLast edited by JohnRoss; 02-01-2011 at 11:36 AM.
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Originally Posted by JohnRoss
And also Foster is a bad example - he wasn't as much influencing blacks as they were influencing them. He made a living writing songs that were in a "black" vernacular (many of his songs sound quite racist nowadays.) There was two way communication going on at this point. Black music had already absorbed Western harmony, long before, from the psalms and hymns that informed their spirituals.
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
OK, I provided an example of a jazz/blues solo without blue notes. Can you provide an classic jazz solo without a chord progression or meter?
Jazz can exist without blue notes, but it cannot exist without chord progressions or regular meter.
You seem to be caught up on this terminology as if "structural" is more important. But people remember the Empire State Building, not because of the steel girders that hold it up but because of how it looks on the outside. Both the inside and the outside work together to create the overall effect.
I am not trying to overemphasize the contribution of the European/classical/white-American contribution, I am just trying to give it the place it deserves. Clearly some very imporatant elements of jazz come from the African tradition and clearly the work was done by African-Americans. But my point is that that is all that ever gets emphasis.
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
But eyewitnesses can be tricky things. I was just looking up the death of Crockett at the Alamo - I found 4 different conflicting eyewitness accounts.
Originally Posted by JohnRoss
But ultimately it is how these two musical traditions come together to make something new that is interesting. I'm just saying that we should look at the contributions in their entirety, not just ignore one side for the sake of race politics.
And ultimately, I'm allowed to change my mind and adjust my opinions. This is not a doctoral dissertation. This is a discussion. I'm not trying to build a linear and coherent argument at this point. I was sincerely interested in some input. Ironically, some of the "evidence" against my claim has shown some of the bias and hostility to discussion that I was trying to prove.
Peace,
KevinLast edited by ksjazzguitar; 02-01-2011 at 04:05 PM.
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Just thinking here.
Maybe another way to say it is that the theory (chords, chord progressions, meter, etc.) comes mainly from the American side and the stylistic performance elements (improv, group dynamic, HSI, call and response, etc.) elements come from African elements. Really, the blue note (which clearly is not required or it would have to be in every jazz song and solo) seems to be the only theoretical element that comes from the African tradition.
Maybe that is a better way to say it (or maybe not.)
Peace,
Kevin
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Europen or African? Mm..I don't know that... Aieeeeeeeeee!!!
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OK, that was cute.
Peace,
Kevin
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Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
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