Michael, Your answers remind me of the Gil Scott-Heron poem used on Moodymann's Amerika record--Bicentennial Blues. That line kills me when he says: "The blues grew up, but America did not." How true .... Cornell West has also discussed the connection between African vocal traditions, slavery, blues, jazz, soul,.... He did an interview on Tavis Smiley's show a few months back where CW said something like: The blues has hope, not the pollyannic hope of pop music, but a mature hope, a blood soaked, tear stained hope. Well, I don't think I could explain any better what I appreciate about Detroit techno/house than that.
Scott Ellis -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 9:38 PM To: Maxim Sullivan Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: (313) Work posts and blank here's a great passage from "Deep Blues" by Robert Palmer that I think can be applied to Detroit techno & house Here he is addressing "blue notes" "This is the expressive core of the hollers, work songs, spirituals that have not been substantially influenced by white church music, and later the blues, especially Delta blues. You can hear it, or suggestions of it, in African vocal music from Senegambia to the Congo, and it has special significance among the Akan-speaking people of Ghana, who suffered the depredations of English and American slavers through most of the period of the slave trade. Akan is a pitch-tone language in which rising emotion is expressed by falling pitch, and in Akan song rising emotion is often expressed by flattening the third. There seems to be a direct continuity between this tendency and blues singing, for blues singers habitually use falling pitches to raise the emotional temperature of a performance. Usually these falling pitches are thirds, but Muddy Waters and other vocalists and guitarists from the Delta tradition also employ falling fifths, often with shattering emotional effect." It's not a great leap to follow the tradition - MEK
