Re: soul coughing

Luke Fletcher (lfletch@u.washington.edu)
Wed, 13 Dec 1995 12:29:18 -0800 (PST)


On Sun, 10 Dec 1995, Agen Schmitz wrote:

> Like Philip, I certainly wouldn't necessarily call Soul Coughing acid jazz.
> This is a band that is influenced by several somewhat disparate genres -
> jazz, dub, Beat poetry, Tom Waits (a genre to himself), hip hop - and isn't
> essentially jazzy. However, I would place them as close cousins to AJ due
> to their spirit of experimenting with samples and noodling around with both
> their instrumentation and wordplay. Lead singer M. Doughty was scatting
> hypnotically during a couple songs, repeating one or two words over and
> over and over until they became the essence of the song's beat. A great
> show and a great band. Looking forward to new stuff in the future. (BTW,
> just picked up their CD-single of "Sugar Free Jazz" with a couple of
> interesting dub interpretations that help to expand the song.)
>
> ags

Soul Coughing was the reason I got interested in AJ in the first
place. Kind of a jumping off point to more jazzy stuff, something I
think is really important if it's ever going to catch on big time. Not
that anyone really wants it to catch on big time mind you...

To me, AJ is defined almost exclusively by its rythms. "On the
three" alone narrows the field to hip-hop, rap, acid-jazz. And the
differences between these are pretty obvious. So since Soul Coughing has
the rythm (and not just the rythm section, but vocals, guitar,
everything) and is definetely not hip-hop or rap, its closest fit has to
be AJ.

The whole idea behind musical genres is not to pigeon-hole
different sounds (though it can be abused in that way), but to establish
a language of convenience when describing sounds. So if we want to think
of AJ as being narrow enough to exclude the likes of Soul Coughing, we
aren't maintaining its purity as much as we're making it a hassle to
describe what Soul Coughing IS.

==============================================================================
Luke Fletcher
lfletch@u.washington.edu
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~lfletch