Re: what is soul? (was RE: what is jazz?)

From: Steve Catanzaro (stevencatanzaro@sprintmail.com)
Date: Mon May 22 2000 - 04:21:58 MET DST

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    someone wrote;

    > The true juice behind real Blues, Soul, Jazz and Gutbucket Funk cannot be
    > explained away by meaningless musical terms that reduce music to math.
    >
    > The roots of the music that this list discusses lie in a culture made up
    of
    > (Black and White people) doing everything they could to survive. Not in
    > middle-class over-intellectualizers cutting and pasting away on samplers
    > thinking they're the next Miles Davis (myself included).
    >
    > P.S.
    > Living in the inner city and claiming that life is hard because you've
    only
    > got one pair of Micheal Jordan shoes doesn't count for surviving, the kind
    > of surviving I'm talking about is just trying to get enough food out of
    the
    > land to feed your family. If the crop fails, the family eats pine cones
    and
    > possums for the winter.

    I wasn't gonna comment on this one, even though it nags me. But, since it
    came up again, I can only say BULLSHIT!!! Poverty has NOTHING WHATEVER to do
    with musical creativity. In fact, since you mention Miles Davis as a
    paradigm of soulfulness, (I agree totally), listen to what he himself
    says...

    "She was up in front of the class saying that the reason black people played
    the blues was because they were poor and had to pick cotton. So they were
    sad and that's where the blues came from, their sadness. My hand went up in
    a flash and I stood up and said, "I'm from East St. Louis and my father is
    rich, he's a dentist, and I play the blues. My father didn't never pick no
    cotton and I didn't wake up this morning and start playing the blues.
    There's more to it than that." Well, the bitch turned green and didn't say
    nothing after that. Man, she was teaching that shit from out of a book
    written by someone who didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.
    That's the kind of shit that was happening at Juilliard and after a while I
    got tired of it."

    Miles Davis (the original one)

    Autobiography, page 59

    --Steve
    cutting and pasting my way to a better world...



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