Quote Originally Posted by tripleblessed View Post
I have mentioned in other posts (warning! opinion approaching at full speed)that it can be dangerous to begin to believe your own PR, and think that one's own thoughts are fact and that EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS or THAT. Groupthink begins to create a paradigm from which no deviation can be allowed.

A good example happened earlier in this thread. MacBean wrote,"Let's look at a few archtypally African-American cultural phenomena: jazz, rock and roll,...". This is a wonderful example of paradigm thinking that "everyone" knows to betrue. Jelly Roll Morton, generally said to be the first arranger of jazz, and often credited with taking music from ragtime to what became jazz, said in person and in writings (here I admit I'm taking the word of others) that his family was not black, they were Creole, with box seats at the opera. He relates that at about 12 he began sneaking away to play piano in the bawdy houses, the famed sportin' houses of Storyville, from late afternoon 'til early morning. The demands of time exceeded his repertoire, and once he had gone through the popular music of the day that everyone wanted to hear, he still had hours left to fill. Necessity being mother to desperation, he did a thing archetypally Scottish - made do with what he had. He said he had in his head all these tunes from Mr. Rossini, and Mr. Verdi, and Mr. Mozart, and he just played them with adjusted time, inverted phrases, flipped chord progressions, etc. His version, not mine. In this, he was simply continuing a tradition as old as music and just as widespread. In the 1680s, if memory serves a Dane named Diderich Buxtehude started a music festival in the German city of Lubeck where he was organist at the Marienkirche. In 1705, J. S.Bach walked 250 miles to hear the music, such was his reputation. He was said to sit at the organ and play for hours without music, improvising on the fly, starting with a phrase, inverting it, adjusting time, and so forth. Hisinfluence comes to us through Bach to Beethoven and Mozart and any who have listened to them.

The Irish have been lilting for quite a long time, but we're told jazz singers "invented" scat. Siberian shamanic singers get together still in a tradition millennia in the making and give demonstrations of their prowess. These include songs that require 7 days to sing, splitting the voice into its overtones to provide accompaniment, and breakneck speed, improvised, often non sequitur rants with or without music, but we're told rap grew grew out of the ghetto life of the 70s and 80s.

It can cause consternation to suggest the possibility of a reality other than the one one is used to, but it can open ones eyes to a whole continuum of available variety which comes back around to show us that people everywhere are people, as they have been now for a while, and (rumor has it) in quite a few places. There is no set of rules saying it has to be this way or that, and only we can decide that human hearts might be more important than what's draped over them or how their owners comport themslves.
Am I allowed to just copy and paste and say that I wrote that? Well done!


On another note, I love the phrasing! "In the 1680s, if memory serves..." Oh my, but you are old!