A Spontaneous Discussion of Musical Hybrids
[I recently had a discussion on social media with an iconoclastic instrument inventor who had a lot of strong ideas about the state of today’s music and the industry itself. One thing he touched upon was the uselessness of categorization of musical styles. He didn’t like the term “World Music” because he felt every music on the planet was in a very real sense, “World Music.” How could I not agree? What follows is a short essay I wrote when he suggested that not enough cross-pollination is going on in today’s musical realms. He also asked what it might’ve been like if European composers had, for instance, incorporated Indonesian music in their orchestral works.]
First of all, in my opinion, the term “World music” is a perfectly fine way to describe music from around the globe. I have no problem with it and it sure beats the term “ethnic”. In truth, I consider all of these categories as arbitrary, and are essentially meaningless, as for the most part they don’t convey any useful information, and are created by suits to describe music primarily so they can sell it. A lot of contemporary artists don’t fit neatly in a pigeon hole.
There’s a lot unpack in your comment, but I’ll just say this: cross cultural pollination is exactly what is happening today and it’s never been more vibrant.
And it goes back a long way:
In fact, European composers did exactly what you have suggested – incorporate gamelan music, and as early as the late 19th were influenced by it. Debussy is a good example: when he first heard a Javanese gamelan at the Paris World Fair in 1889, it totally flipped him out and it influenced his work, especially in pieces like Pagodes.
The first wave of the influences of different cultures always seems to start out as a passing, rather shallow toe dip into foreign waters, usually followed by a much deeper dive. For example, in the European dominated symphonic traditions, we later find composers like Colin McPhee, who lived in Bali for a number of years in a hut in the middle of a rice field, with an old upright piano, and wrote some magnificent music.
in the 50s Lou Harrison, who also studied Balinese and Korean music, composed music for both gamelan and western ensembles. He incorporated some of the Balinese techniques such as kotecan (interlocking parts,) into his chamber music compositions. Check out his wonderful Concerto for Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra. Find the CRI version conducted by Leopoldo Stokowski if you can. A contemporary of Harrison, Henry Cowell was another pioneer in bringing the music of Persia and Asia into Western music.
Also, Jody Diamond of Gamelan Sekar Jaya fame comes to mind. Along with Ingram Marshall, she became an important composer of new music for Gamelan. There is also a new generation of Balinese composers who have in turn been influenced by western composers. There are countless examples of this kind of thing. Indeed, today we live in a world where cross cultural pollination is no longer rare, but in fact, the norm. It’s literally everywhere, in pop, jazz, electronica, classical etc. In a way, this hybridization is the cornerstone of 21st century music. It’s a huge subject, and I’m only going to focus on jazz for the rest of this piece.
Jazz is an art form that started right out of the gate as a cultural hybrid, in this case primarily a blend of African music/rhythm and European harmony, and also soon incorporated popular music from the American songbook, which was sourced mostly from show tunes and films. Later, artists like Dizzy Gillespie became fascinated with Cuban music, and thus began a longstanding tradition of cross pollination between two cultures that is still vibrant today.
The same thing holds true of American jazz musicians like Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, who started hanging out and playing with Brazilian musicians in the “first wave” in the 60s, but once again, it quickly became a two way street, morphing into an ongoing feedback loop where at a certain point it became difficult to parse who was influencing whom.
Artists like John Coltrane and Miles Davis experimented with incorporating Indian music into their music in the 60s and early 70s. After all, jazz being an improvisational tradition, it seemed only natural for western jazz artists to start playing with Indian musicians. Later, artists such as John McLaughlin (who seriously studied the Raga and Konecal systems) and Indian tabla master Zakir Hussein, who helped bridge the cultural divide from the Eastern side, came together to form Shakti, a true east/west collaboration that remains active today. Of course there were earlier experiments. The much earlier collaboration between Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin comes to mind.
Another Miles Davis alumni and one of the founding members of Weather Report, Vienna born Joe Zawinul always brought together musicians from all over the world into his bands, which allowed each artist to bring his or her individual cultural voice to the table. I have always thought of Zawinul as a visionary, not just because of his wonderful musical contributions, but because of his utopian vision of a world in which each culture remains unique and distinct, yet comes together to create a harmonious whole.
And any discussion of hybrid music which blends the influences of different cultures would be incomplete without mentioning Paris born Vietnamese virtuoso guitarist/composer Nguyen Le, yet another cutting edge musician who has created a kind of “world jazz” that’s entirely unique, collaborating with African, Moroccan, Vietnamese, Sardinian and American artists (just to name a few,) to create his own unique hybrid.
Cuban piano/keyboardist Omar Sosa, has become an ambassador of unique collaborations with artists from other cultures. Pictured above is his SUBA trio with African kora master, Seckou Keita and Venezuelan percussionist maestro, Gustavo Ovalles. Sosa exemplifies the healthy exploration of searching for and finding common ground between cultures.
Tigran Hayasman is another interesting example. As a young boy living in Armenia, he started off as a classical pianist but soon became fascinated with jazz. He was a prodigy, and while still in his teens, won the Thelonius Monk competition. But Tigran quickly outgrew the constraints of the jazz label and started making music which is impossible to categorize. He loved the complex time signatures of his native country and soon incorporated them into his own compositions, combining traditional folk melodies with heavy metal, prog rock, electronica, hip hop, pop and classical music. The result is hard to describe, and while I realize it is an acquired taste for some, I find it challenging, often quite beautiful and staggeringly original.
Last, but hardly least, Oregon needs to be mentioned. To me they exemplify the essence of intelligent, passionate musical cross pollination. They effortlessly blended western contemporary classical, jazz, free improvisation, world music of all sorts, and in the early days at least, East Indian influences in particular, to create an emblematic hybrid that has stood the test of time. Indeed as the decades have rolled by, their importance has only grown in stature.
In this world of ours, which has gotten so much smaller thru technology, this kind of thriving collaborative community is only natural and ongoing in virtually all genres and subgenres.
The subject of cultural appropriation sometimes comes up in discussions like these. What I have learned regarding whether it is appropriate to borrowing from other cultures has a lot to do with the culture one is borrowing from, and the attitude of the person doing the borrowing. For instance, in Bali, my sense has always been that Balinese musicians are very open, and generally love collaborating with people from other cultures. They not only welcome it, they have a long tradition of embracing it. My own teacher in Bali once proudly played me a cassette of himself playing drums with a gifted young Australian blues guitarist. The whole time it was playing my teacher was proudly beaming at me. The Balinese people have always been open to experimentation; I once attended a performance in Bali in which all the musicians were sitting down at synthesizers instead of traditional acoustic gamelan instruments.
On the other hand, my longtime music mentor, who is friends with a number of musical luminaries and considered to be one in certain circles, once told me a story about a famous artist who had borrowed an mbira part which he incorporated into a contemporary track. Apparently, when the African artist who had played the mbira part heard the finished track, he broke down in tears, because to him this was sacred music, and it was being desecrated by being used in what he perceived to be a secular context.
At one point, I was considering taking up the traditional African mbira myself, and the teacher I asked for lessons snubbed me because she felt that I was going to use it in my own music and that I didn’t show enough respect for the sacredness of the tradition in order for her to accept me as a student.
My take on cultural appropriation is that one should always ask one’s teachers and fellow musicians how they feel about incorporating their music into one’s own. That being said, my own experiences have shown me that for the most part, musicians from other parts of the world are flattered when an artist shows interest in their musical culture.
14 Kommentare
Henning Bolte
Thought provoking, inspiring contribution, touching upon a lot of aspects of what music(making/listening) as a social and cultural interaction phenomenon is, opening up many interesting boxes!
Maybe good to start (my reaction) with this as PART 1:
Music is a fluid, traveling something attracting, repelling or merging (with) other musics. It’s a something migrating through times and along sites and places. It is no reified entity. People/musicians play music but at the same time music is ‚playing‘ people/musicians. It can be both in a certain balance.
Classification/framing and patterning is cognitive and social need with some practical usefulness. It is a social construct. The question is when it is useful, when mind narrowing and when leading into dependence. Totally rejecting it, establishes a counterdependence. Freedom is beyond that.
More will follow. PART 2: When/what for classification? – PART 3: Jazz musicians connecting to musics of the world in different periods (Carribean grounds, Swing, Bebop, Freejazz etc.) – PART 4: folk music as basis for ALL kinds of music – PART 5: What could it mean, genre-defying music?
Nice that the case Debussy was dealt with here. Debussy is also point of departure in David Toops book OCEAN OF SOUNDS. Tchaikosky would also be a good example as well as Bartók or Kodaly.
Here’s a link to something about the PART 4 issue I wrote for Jazzfest Berlin: A Dynamic Process of Continual Interactions – On Traces, Techniques and Tensions in the Encounter of Jazz and Folk (on the site you have to scroll to the bottom to find the article)
https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/jazzfest-berlin/stories/2022/story-outside-traditions
flowworker
Incodental responses coming to mind:
Cross cultural pollinatns has an ancient history….
Whom should keith Jarrett ask for permission acting solo factually wrapping the whole world around his piano, and inside…
Global music is another useful term….
Who should have asked Steve Reih for permission thinking of his influences from Gamelan to the rhythm section of the Modern Jazz Quartet?
A lot pf of Joe Boyds chapter one starts with exploring the dynamics of cross cultural activities (soundwise) with Sout African Politics…. the utopian quantum of graceland vs. Politcal harshness at the end of Apartheid and Nelson being set free…
In the 70s a lot of great music has created, for example by Pharoah Sanders, Oregon, fusion, ECM… with a lots of intercultural textures… old school objections: cultural imperialisms… more reflected: refined chemistry of various sources as a hateway to the new… for example fourth world music a la Jon Hassell….
If you quote a source, play another one’s tune, make him the composer, or co-composer. If you move between well defined worlds of sound (geographically ask for open ears!
m.e,
I would love to do a parallel reading adventure with two, theee Floworkers on chapter 2 of Joe Boyd’s „And The Rhythm Will Remain“…. ca 100 pages, gut to do it in 5 parts…. if you order Joe’s book go for the e book … it is much more cheaper, and easy to handle…. you can read on it in our sideways column…. PROSE
flowworker
I would send the people interested a vety short theme list of every chapter, and if three agree on one of the 9 chapters of Boyd’s heavy weight, , we would have our first parallel reading adventure for ages …
flowworker
When I first heard, quite a while ago now, that Joe Boyd was writing a ‘history of world music’ I remember thinking that there probably isn’t a more qualified person for the task, that the book would have to be enormous, and that it would have to be anecdotal and as informal as possbile to appeal to a wide audience.
So now along comes And the Roots of Rhythm Remain and, happily, I’ve been proved right on all three counts. A caveat though — the book isn’t really a ‘history of world music’ — it doesn’t pretend to be and quite frankly to attempt such a project and condense it into one volume would be quite insane. No, this book is actually much more interesting than that. And that’s down to Boyd’s gift for telling a good story, his own personal experience and involvement in much of what is documented here, and his convincingly argued reservations about modern music-making.
Even though nothing can quite top his account of being caught ‘in the eye of a hurricane’ as stage manager at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 trying to placate the folk music aristocracy of the time while Bob Dylan delivered his short but seminal electric set (see Boyd’s 60s memoir White Bicycles), Joe Boyd’s story of being seated next to Paul Simon at a party in London in the mid-80s while Simon plays him a tape of backing tracks and sings practically the whole of the Graceland album over it to him comes impressively close. And this is but one of numerous amusing and revealing anecdotes, featuring the author, that embellish and give focus to what is an unavoidably scholarly (but decidedly non-academic) and extremely impressive examination of key music from around the world that has cross-fertilised, impacted upon and influenced popular music almost everywhere.
The book is several musical adventures and an education spanning decades. Each chapter covers a particular traditional musical hotbed in the world — uncoincidentally nearly all socially and politically unstable countries — weaving often corrupt and repressive political and social history into the development of music in those countries; celebratory music of defiance and irrepressible vitality intrinsically wedded to the struggle for social justice. As all of the major players are portrayed and contextualised, the focus is sharpened to highlight the particular artists and records that have had the most impact on western, English-speaking culture.
CHAPTER 2……
So we begin with the music of South Africa — mbube, mbaqanga, isicathamiya — traditional Zulu music, the emergence of Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masakela, the Blue Notes (with Chris McGregor) who Boyd managed in the late-60s, and of course Paul Simon’s Graceland which in Boyd’s view ‘more than any other recording of the decade [the 80s], opened Western ears to music from far away’. From there we venture to Cuba which because of its many tangled cultural roots has perhaps the most interesting musical history. Boyd manages to shoehorn Afro-Cuban music, Latin jazz, the Spanish slave trade, mambo, son, Desi Arnaz (of I Love Lucy fame) plus everything else that’s relevant into a chapter that concludes with the phenomenal success of The Buena Vista Social Club, a record so omnipresent that it unfairly overshadowed other more-than-noteworthy Cuban records of the time, Boyd’s own Cubanismo project in particular.
CHAPTER 3…..
Jamaican music is the subject of Boyd’s scrutiny next. An entertaining story involving Chris Blackwell (Whiteworst as Peter Tosh memorably called him) sets the scene for a comprehensive survey of Jamaican history and musical culture, the appearance of Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff, Toots and The Maytals (who Boyd produced and of whom he says ‘no artist has spent more time on my turntable in the last 50 years’) and the trio of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston all three of whom Chris Blackwell, somewhat reluctantly it appears, takes an inaugural meeting with having just ‘lost’ Jimmy Cliff. Serendipity at its most significant!
CHAPTER 4 …..
An interesting strain of British and American pop and rock music of the 60s came under the influence of Indian music, most notably that of The Beatles and The Byrds, but one of Boyd’s discoveries, The Incredible String Band were similarly enticed and this chapter is particularly wide-ranging, taking in the music of Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane, LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, and Nazakat & Salamat Ali (who Boyd produced).
The global peregrination continues via the music of Eastern Europe and Spain to Brazil and the music that evolved from African roots, was shaped by political and social oppression, influenced and was influenced by jazz, blues and folk music and has an inherent accessibility that makes it timeless and universal. Carmen Miranda, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Astrud Gilberto take their place in the pantheon of heroes here, less so Herb Alpert & His Tijuana Brass and Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66. Boyd’s own significant involvement with Brazilian music centres on the wonderful Virginia Rodrigues whose albums on the Hannibal label remain among the very finest of its releases. A quick stop in Argentina for a rundown on tango and the music of Carlos Gardel and then back to Eastern Europe for perhaps the most unlikely music to make its mark on western culture. Bulgarian singing in general made a big impression on the likes of Joni Mitchell and David Crosby in the 60s but the music of the Trio Bulgarka is perhaps the most well-known to a latter-day audience. There’s a great story involving Boyd and Kate Bush going off to Sofia to record with them and theirs is a rare example of traditional music that has been coerced by western sensibilities and not compromised in the process.
The penultimate chapter takes us back to Africa for an extended survey of music from Nigeria, Mali, Zaire and beyond. Here, Boyd’s involvement has again been extensive but also innovative. The collaborative albums that the late Toumani Diabate made with Spanish group Ketama and Taj Mahal respectively and were released on Hannibal Records, are outstanding examples of what can be achieved when music of different cultures but shared values blends and interacts naturally.
Even though, remarkably, there’s no filler here, and, apart from the occasional hard-to-avoid trumpet blowing, no narcissistic gonzo ramblings so often found these days in overblown biographies, the massive 900-page size of this book and its dense, digressive style may well dissuade the uncommitted reader from investigating, which would be a great shame and a missed opportunity. But it really couldn’t have been any shorter without diminishing the importance of its subject matter and compromising its authoritative tone. The appellation ‘world music’ might not be to everyone’s taste, but it has Boyd’s fingerprints all over it.
I’ve been reading And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain (at my desk) for nigh on two months now and, apart from its undeniable scholarly merits and entertainment value, I’ve come to think of it, not facetiously I hope, as a sort of musical AI roadblock, a formidably substantial, defiant, comprehensive and articulate stance against every modern, artificial encroachment on music-making that seeks to duplicate or replace the vital, unique human element that has always given music its magic, its integrity, and its power to connect and change lives around the world for the better.
Thanks to Andy Childs, from the Caught by The River site….
Lajla
Ja interessantes Thema. Musik ist zu allererst Klang. Wir hören den Sound in unserer jeweiligen kulturellen Herkunft. Immer. Egal wo wir sind. Wir hören sie intensiver, wenn wir sie Vorort hören. Santana in Oakland zu hören, ist ein gewaltiges sinnliches Erlebnis. In Amsterdam weniger. In Ghana genuine Trommler zu hören, ist ein tieferes Musikerlebnis als eine CD mit diesen Klängen einzuschieben. Weltmusik ist ein flacher Oberbegriff, der eigentlich nichts definiert als “ Musik nicht von hier“.
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Brian Whistler
Thanks for all your thoughtful comments. It’s funny how a comment on a Facebook post turned into this. Of course mine was just a casual commentary used random examples to illustrate my thoughts primarily focused on living artists who are carrying the tradition forward- never thought it would lead to such a fascinating discussion.
Looking back at my spontaneous comment, I find it hard to believe I left out Jon Hassell, but then it wasn’t meant to be comprehensive in any sense.
And now I have just ordered Joe Boyd’s new book, having had it in the back burner for a while. After this lively discussion and that review, I had to get it. And I loved white bicycles by the way, but this, looks like a reference book my music library can’t be without.
Another interesting hybrid that I didn’t refer to is the one where Russian composer/arranger/pianist and accordionist Misha Alperin collaborated with Tuvan throat singers Huun-Hur-Tu and the Bulgarian choir Angelite, (no not the famous one, but they’re still damn good) The album that best sums up what they did is called fly fly My Sadness. Truly, some of the most exotic sounds I’ve ever ever heard on record..
flowworker
Intersting Jon Hassell dreamed of a music that lost its geographical identity. So there is no best place to listen to , no origin, no real place, except in your own mindspace and its horizons.
Brian Whistler
And exactly, Jon Hassel found his own way by incorporating elements of „world music“ almost by osmosis and is putting together his own thing that is very difficult to pin down geographically.
I don’t put him in the same category as Hassell, but in his own way, Stephen Micus found his way to a similar no. Specific geographical space, although from walking an entirely different personal path
flowworker
Brian: as soon as you have Joe’s book, let us think about the chapter we chose for parallel reading. A third man or woman will be found. Details later.
flowworker
Micus: looking for secret channels between very different origins.
Brian Whistler
Exactly
Brian Whistler
And yeah, I’ll commit to reading a chapter of that book. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to read it through or just graze through it. Either way, I would like to participate in the group reading.
flowworker
We are two, hope for no. 3. or more.