Stranded. _____ Let Them Sound Like They Sound.

If I were stranded on a desert island and had only one song with me, it would be "His eye is on the sparrow" by Marvin Gaye.



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I had an epiphony today about the drums, specifically drum sounds.

Nowadays with our recording and production skills we can capture the "perfect" sound of any instrument. For drums, this means that we can isolate each individual piece of the drum kit and eq it to "perfection" as a part, then put them together to create the whole range of the kit.

But here's the thing: nothing sounds quite like the drums on motown recordings. There's something about the snare that kicks into "Stubborn Kind of Fella" that expresses emotion - SOUL - like few drums can. Naturally, it has to do with Benny Benjemin playing on the track, but that's not all. The sound of the drum, though not in "ideal" conditions nor "perfectly eq'd," captures a rare quality that escapes most modern drum sounds. Or consider "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," the ticka-ticka-tic on the rim of the snare in the intro. If it were done today (and it has been), it would sound too polished to make the sense that it does on the original recording.
Two of my favorite artists, D'Angelo and Badu, do a rendition of "Your Precious Love," originally performed by Marvin and Tammy Terrell. The cover comes nowhere near the Gaye/Terrell version, and here's why I think it doesn't: the production "perfection" of the instruments and vocals. If they had recorded it in motown's infamous "Snake Pit" studio, no doubt in my mind it would be exponentially better.

Here's the thing about motown drums: the engineers allowed the drums to sound like drums naturally sound. They didn't put limiters, excessive eq on each part of the kit, or gates or filters or any of that jazz. They just let them be themselves, and by doing so created some of the most emotive drum sounds ever recorded. Who doesn't like the motown sound? Professionals today are still baffled by what those engineers achieved.

Or even consider Rudy Van Gedler and the blue note jazz recordings. He may have put two mics around the kit, total. Listen to how Tony and Elvin sound of those recordings! Or Blakey!

I think we need to reenter a sonic world like motown captured - one where each instrument was allowed to be itself.

Or we could go like the Beatles and get experimental with physical dampening effects instead of by tweaking knobs.

I said tweaking knobs.

Sorry.

Trimming the Langugage Fat

Keyno and I were talking today about language.

Language is one of the primary forces of culture, providing its establishment and vitality.

Sometimes we can create a sort of separatist culture with our language, a colony that is only accessable to those who can speak it. We do this with God. We create terms and structures that we think are extra pleasing to God, some call it "Christianese," and yet by boxing Him in we can in essence try to emasculate God's works.
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The way that we christians speak sometimes can sound like a completely foreign language to non-believers. What are we going to do about that?
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Even christian music falls into this trap. I am trying to change that.

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Tradition and the Individual Talent Revisited

At the turn of the 20th century, in what is called the "Modern Era" by those who dictate what periods of time are named, the geist of the artistic world was much the same as what I want to achieve. "Make It New!" They cried. (How unoriginal of me!)

Many aritists, writers, thinkers of the emerging era were dissatified with the results of the 19th Century in society. They reacted against the deterministic perspective that everyone in life is controlled and constrained to the environment in which they live. To find examples of this, check out Emile Zolla's work, or if you want a direct suggestion, read The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Their characters are trapped within the confines of their habitat, and act only according to what their surroundings plot out for them.
What many of the modernists strived for was a transcendence through aesthetic endeavor; an escape from environmental confines toward enlightnment through art. Ezra Pound, Roger Fry, and T.S. Eliot were at the forefront of this movement, among many others who pushed the envelope, and boldly challenged us to rethink the boundaries that we have adopted, urged us to foresake the reconstruction of the past and begin a whole new work.

All of these men were profoundly educated. They both knew the classic and were familiar with the current. Pound urged students to leave their universities and, "Come to me for your education," because he had assimilated all that was important from the masters and employed it in his works. Roger Fry, in his book Vision and Design, lifted the veil of objectivity in art criticism and helped bring to light the value of individual interpretation. And Eliot, in his tretise "Tradition and the Individual Talent," hooked on something that I find is essential for any type of real and current Renaissance to take place.

Eliot's idea was that there is a reason why "Classics" are Classics. And that reason is that they communicate something so deeply entrenched in the human experience that they transcend cultural barriers and speak to us now, and will to future generations. As though all of humanity has a core, and the classic authors knew how to reach through situational, temporal and historical obstuructions and touch that human core in each one of us. That human core, Eliot labels as the "Objective Correlative." It's that string that connects us all to each other through the expereince of being human. It's what allows Shakespeare to be studied and understood in Japan.

His prescription for the artist, then, is to read all the classics - *all of them - and learn *how the classic authors reached the Objective Correlative and communicated to readers across historical lines. But Eliot didn't say, "Copy them." In fact, far from it. What he was saying was, "If you understand how the Correlative can be reached, you can access it in your work assuredly." By beefing up on the classics, you can understand and then *employ communicating to that human core with something *new and *fresh and *alive.

This is absolutely brilliant. Gather from the past - analyze it, test it, understand it - and then create newness, something totally different. Brilliant.

In order for a real current Renaissance to happen, I believe this needs to be understood.

Why NOT Me?

The message that keeps coming to me over and over through different avenues is that CONFIDENCE IS EVERYTHING.

Tonight at the gym I was thinking about how a friend of mine this morning said, "You're going to marry a super-model, dude!"

You know what my first thought was? "No, I don't deserve that. I don't have what it takes to get a woman that beautiful."

Now, understand this: That's not the first time anyone has said that to me.
But why is it that I'm quick to disbelieve other people, write statements like that off as flattery, and adopt a self-deprecating mindset?

And this is where things got a bit deeper...

I believe that the enemy tries to implant in us a sense of doubt in ourselves when we're young. And if we listen to the subtle voices that tell us what we can't do, what we're no good at, what we'll never have, then we have already accepted a great defeat; we've accepted less than what we can have, what God wants us to have!

Why shouldn't my wife be gorgeous? In fact, she should be.

And this permeates almost every other area of life: Why settle for anything but the best?

There's no good reason. So don't do it. Don't settle for anything small, second-rate, ugly, puny, meager. It's not worth you to be anything less than everything you can be.

Building

In his fabulous book BLINK, Malcolm Gladwell explores the power of intuition. He talks about a practice that we all do called "Thin-slicing," where a snap judgment is made with limited information, and how it is usually more successful than long, deliberate decision-making.

Anyway, there's a song out right now that is absolutely fantastic. It's Umbrella, by Rihanna. The first time I heard it, it was about a five second clip, and I was blown away. I looked at Keyno and said, "Yo, who is that!" He said, "You haven't heard that yet?"

After picking the song up, I noticed a technique that the producer uses for the beat: he uses a one-bar phrase, then builds on it, retaining some of the original qualities plus more in the second bar. He basically loops it through the whole song, and it provides a fantastic base from which the song can construct or deconstruct however he sees fit.


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The Ghosts of Generae Past

We've all seen the t-shirts with the slogan, "Rock 'N Roll Will Never Die" on the front, maybe sporting a grinning skull with a rose clenched between the teeth and a snake crawling out of an eye socket. You can probably find one for cheap in a discount department store right down the street. This sentiment is not a new one, nor has it been restricted to Rock 'N Roll alone. It has been the cry of devotees to a genera throughout the ages; people who feel a certain emotional connection to their beloved style stake a claim of eternity on it; it's the ever-human attempt to perpetuate something for generations to come. But what distinguishes the living from the dead in music? Is it how much money that style does or doesn't bring in, or how many people play it? I believe that there is more to it than that, and that many of the generae we claim for eternity have already died in bed next to us.
The great clarinet player and innovator in Jazz Sidney Bichet once said, "Jazz will never die." And if you look at the industry, he's quite right. There is most certainly a niche for the continuation of what we call "Jazz". But consider Sidney's Jazz to what we call Jazz today. He started out as a midwife of dixieland, and continued until his death in the sixties. But can we honestly say that any of the Jazz that's put out now could attain the depth of Coltrane or Holiday? Hardly.


We call Latin a dead language, yet somehow people still make money off of it; they can speak it, and can tell you everything about the culture in which it thrived. These are the archivers of Latin, the "language experts," who look at it as though it were a prized butterfly collection on their wall. There are even five distinct permutations of Latin still in active use today: French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese. Then how come Latin is considered "dead"? What constitutes its demise? Here is where we get down to the essence of the livelyhood of something: The reason Latin is dead is because no one lives it anymore. Like a father, it has had childeren and passed on. Similarly, we need to accept the passing of some of our beloved generae from the present.

Hip-hop is the first type of music whose childeren have foreseen and accepted its demise. Several times lately there have been moguls who have said, "Hip-hop is dead." And it's death is due to the very things that we think keep other generae alive: boosted sales, more artists, bigger niche. What those things have produced is something so far from the heart that pumped life into it, that it has either become a whole new entity, or is a walking shell of with no vital organs attached. This style has gone through the life-cycle more quickly than any other in history.


Our society is one of containment and rehashing. Every new record has its comparisons to other records; every category has multitudes of sub-categoreys; most artists are enamored with the past, and their music reflects that. We are a culture of conflation. Distinctions are constantly blurred at the edges. A wide grey expanse buffers strict white and straight black. Is this a bad thing? Yes and no...

We cling to these types - "Rock 'N Roll", "Jazz", "Hip-hop" - because they're familiar, they're comfortable - they're safe. Who is doing anything dangerous anymore? Something that requires real faith to execute day in and day out...something fresh...something alive.

But there is a New Birth on the horizon...one that gets us back to those "dearest freshness deep-down things" that Hopkins so elloquently observed were interred in the soil - in the soil and soul of humanity.

The Rite of Rhythm

The great drummer Babatunde Olatunji once said, "Rhythm is the soul of life." I believe that is true. But what exactly does that mean? I have been on a quest for the past few years to understand the pulp of that statement, its implications and wisdom. In fact, I hadn't discovered that quote until about two months ago; but I've felt it for much longer.
When someone else articulates the deep things inside of you, when they tune into your frequency (or your rhythm, if you will) and express that which you could never find words for, it's a sweet, sweet thing in life.

If you consider the world around you - for example, the world of humanity - and distinguish a single element of it, you'll find a whole world of rhythm.
Language, for instance. Any native speaker will be able to decipher whether or not someone else is a native speaker primarily by cadence, the rhythmic patterns of the groupings of their words. Basically, the way you say something can have just as much meaning as the ideas behind the words. Think about it musically for a minute: Two people can play the same note or range of notes with vastly different effects, whether due to their placement of each note in relation to the others, or their skill, or their personality, etc. The phrasing of those notes, the way they are played, has the most essential role in their effect on the listener. And "Phrasing" falls directly under the category of rhythm. You could even go as far as to say that melody is a sub-category of rhythm, because without phrasing we simply have notes that endure for unspecified lengths, or ones that carelessly lay on top of one another with no rhyme or reason.

I realize that my approach so far is quite scientific. What I mean is that, at this point, I'm simply making observations with no philosophical conclusions. Those will come later.