Jazz for aficionados

These are some of the best drums I've heard; I can even see that photograph in motion,


              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOY9fLm3eYI


This is the way they use to unwind in the village after a long stressful day;


              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvbXLDcGe0k

New to the site.  Some more recent releases that are really worthwhile musically and sonically. 
Marseille,  Ahmad Jamal. (Vinyl). 
Pure Jamal with complementary vocal tracks.  Just beautiful.

Tierney Sutton Band, Screenplay (CD)
Creative vocal interpretations of mostly familiar tunes from films enhanced by her accomplished collaborators.  Really worth a listen if you love vocal jazz.

O-10, once you backed off of "it was all gone, nothing remained" and went with "it was significantly depleted," my objections to your theory have turned more "meh."

One nagging thought:

You seem to assume that villages averaging 100 inhabitants were totally wiped out by the slave trade.  I'm skeptical because I think sellers and buyers weren't into rounding up every inhabitant (including frail older folks, infants that were unlikely to survive the voyage, and the physically disfigured).  This was Capitalism at its most vicious, and limited ship capacity meant exporting only the more marketable subjects.  If you have evidence that it was common for entire villages to be taken and thus wiped out, I'm all ears.

This all suggests some degree of survival of music and dance traditions throughout sub-Saharan Africa in spite of the horrors of the slave trade, perhaps explaining why we can still listen to current music and know we're hearing centuries of musical culture that was in place long before Europeans arrived.

Phildbasket, welcome to our group. Phil, since this thread began we have included, along with jazz, every subject under the Sun.  The best way to play that is to simply ignore subjects you don’t want to get into and just respond to jazz.


That album by Ahmad Jamal has been well reviewed on this thread and given the highest rating.

I like her version of "Fly Me To The Moon",


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSoAdDlOPiM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jSlDqHqNOM


That CD is on my order list; thanks for the recommendation.

Keegiam, it will not come as a surprise that I agree with what you wrote and this is not intended to pile on against O-10’s theories on the matter. I’ve done plenty of that already because I simply don’t agree with a premise that, as you suggest, defies logic and to me is inaccurate and incomplete at best. It is a fascinating topic that actually deserves more accuracy since it is actually quite relevant to the subject and history of this thread, Jazz. Ironically, and inaccurately, the universally accepted idea that the influence of African musical tradition is one of the key ingredients of Jazz has been staunchly denied by O-10 and another participant here on many occasions. Ironically, this opposing view is in direct contradiction to the much more accurate premise discussed now that those traditions were transplanted to Brazil where they became part of the cultural mix that created “Brazilian music“. Why anyone would think that the same would not happen in America is a mystery to me. Of course, it did happen.

Personally, I think that a closer look at all this is important because the music and the culture of a people deserve a more complete and honest look and not one romanticized by unverifiable personal notions and incomplete “facts“. A very interesting actual fact is that in many African cultures there is no word for “music” or “dance”. One of the main reasons that the way this topic is being discussed here is incomplete at best is that it is being discussed through a Western lens and a Western theoretical framework. Our notion of what music and dance are is a Western abstraction and in many ways is not applicable to a discussion of African music since “music” in Africa was inextricably linked to every day life and utilitarian in nature in many ways.

The idea that there were 120,000 different African rhythms is....well, to quote O-10, “I don’t want to be offensive”; but, then, I don’t have the musical acumen to be able to identify 120,000 different rhythms ☺️. I am reminded of driving North through Portugal to cross the border into Spain’s North Western tip in order to visit distant relatives in the small town of Verin where my maternal grandfather was born. It was fascinating to experience how at every stop along the way from Lisbon to Verin the Portuguese language literally morphed closer and closer to Spanish until just over the border in Verin it was identifiable as Spanish. With many remnants of Portuguese still, but (obviously) still using the same alphabet and syntax . This is probably very similar to what happened from village to village in Africa. The rhythms (inextricably linked to language) in the various villages in Africa while having different “accents” or even being different dialects shared the same “alphabet” and “syntax”. They survived.

As always, O-10, I appreciate your passion for all this and I hope there can be disagreement without drama.