How many more of my undiscovered favorite records is DJ Moos hiding over at Global Groove? Great post, great bands. Never heard Orchestra Viva la Musica before this (though I’d certainly heard of them), and now I’m hooked. This Cherie Lipasa song really burns, and the rabbit hole goes deeper.
Author: adamkozie (Page 6 of 8)
Next up is April 1st at The Royal Room, with Maracujá. We’ll have several subs for this show: Sam Esecson from Maracujá on percussion, Scott Teske on bass and Whitney Lyman on vocals and possibly some more percussion. Writing the charts has paid off in this respect; I can have a modular collective band made up of people who read music, and not ask too much of anyone’s time. Scott showed up to rehearsal a few days ago and sight read all the music without even hearing it, and it sounded perfectly great.
I had struggled for months after deciding to start a band, trying to find people who could really be in the group, and that’s gotten impossible as I get older. The days of having a band that rehearses twice or even once a week are over, that’s a game for people in their 20’s. And I play in too many projects to even make that work for myself much of the time. So, the charts were the answer. They’ve paid off big, allowing me to have talented people like those mentioned above in Northern Thorns. I just wonder if it will eventually coalesce into a constant lineup. The guitar parts are more demanding than the other instruments, hence harder to sub out, and I haven’t had to yet thankfully. And I also have to wonder sometimes whether viewing the band modularly comes off as disrespectful to the people involved. I hope not. I got the idea from Mike Sparks (who played bass and sang wonderfully at the Vermillion show), who approaches his project Noonmoon in a similar way. A show gets booked, then he sends out an email and sees who is available and wants to join him to play the music. My band is more particular than his, but I really liked the concept and so I’ve copied it.
In any case, I’m excited to share the stage with all these folks on April 1st.
A couple new 7 inches showed up today, an order I had made from a record store in Kenya on their eBay page. Kiam’s Memi pts I and II and Eboko Ley’s Trahison pts I and II. Memi is one of Kiam’s best, with probably the best guitar work of any of their songs.
Eboko Ley is comparatively obscure. I ran across them while searching YouTube for Kiam stuff; someone had mislabeled an Eboko Ley song called Meya as a Kiam song. I downloaded it and listened to it for months thinking it was Kiam, and it’s a good song. I did find it odd that none of the online Kiam discographies included it, even as a questionable song of theirs. Eventually I went back and read the comments on the YouTube video, in which someone points out (in French) that it’s not a Kiam song at all, and admonishes the uploader to correct the info. It has not been corrected since, and seems to be a part of the English language Kiam web lore at this point. But I thought the song was catchy, if terrible sound quality, so I looked for more from the group. This 7″ is all I’ve found so far. I’ll probably upload it somewhere eventually so others can hear it. As of now I haven’t listened to it yet.
A big part of what I like about soukous music and other Afropop is the contrast and oscillation within it. Rhythmically, each bar of the highlife guitar pattern is a tiny tension and release, the first bar or half bar syncopated and the second half straight quarter or eighth notes.
Harmonically it is typically a similar oscillation between two chords, an ad nauseum simpicity back and forth that contributes to the genre’s dance and trance sound. On a macro level, the best songs are structured with more tension and release within their parts, and as they are generally around ten minutes (four songs would fit on an LP or two halves of a song on a 45), there is plenty of room to build musical tension.
Repetition is key. The solos aren’t really solos generally, but “sebenes,” a term with a nebulous origin that I won’t speculate on. A sebene is an instrumental feature wherein a single player improvises around a theme without straying too far until a new theme comes along. This approach to instrumental sections really appeals to my musical tastes, as I couldn’t care less about the technical ability that solo sections generally showcase. The sebene is more about melody than chops, and the Congo artists were, and are, much more patient than American songwriters typically are.
I read an excellent article in the Atlantic recently, on ghostwriting. About how the vast majority of big radio hits in the US are written not by the big names that perform them, i.e. Beyonce, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, etc. but in fact by professional songwriters that generally happen to be middle aged Scandinavian men. I had heard of Max Martin, and was never assuming that Britney Spears was writing her own music, but I didn’t realize the extent of this pop songwriting pipeline.
While learning of this bit of industry sausage making might outrage some people and make others shrug, my reaction is mostly one of admiration for these songwriters. They’re the true artists here, and the singers and dancers who bring their creations to the stage are really mostly performers in my estimation. Obviously this is nothing new, I am a big fan of Motown and oldies and and lots of the music that The Wrecking Crew played on, and the vast majority of that stuff was ghost written. “Write a word, get a third,” as the saying goes.
This article made me think about my priorities and what I value about art and music, and how these things have changed as I’ve gotten older. I no longer value technical prowess. To me, all that does is provide headroom. That probably speaks to the genres of music I like. If you’re a bebop fan, valuing chops is only natural.
But I love pop music, all genres of it. I love hooks. I love dance beats. I love sing-alongs. I love music that speaks instantly and irresistibly to a large audience. I love pop songwriting. And consequently, I value Max Martin and the Swedish song cabal a lot more than I value Beyonce and the other artists that perform songs they didn’t create. It’s not disappointment exactly, but my admiration has shifted.
Though I am a bit disappointed that Tay Tay doesn’t write her hits. Maybe all she had in her was country music.
I need to remember to feed my creativity. When I listen to music I love, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, that’s when I get new musical ideas. I’ve known that for a long time, but for some reason I just today put together that music sung in Lingala doesn’t help me think of lyrics in English. I was listening to The Rhythm of the Saints by Paul Simon today while driving around, and his lyrical ability inspires my own. So, though I’m not so into most music in English these days (hip hop is an exception but much as I love the genre, I don’t feel any drive to write vocals or lyrics in a hip hop style).
Paul Simon is a favorite of mine. Obviously he bridges the divide between American and African (or Brazilian) music, deliberately so. And he’s one of the greatest American songwriters of the 20th century. Love him.