Mike H, if you ever get a chance to catch "The secret lives of banjos," you should. It's a show put together by Jody Stecher and Bill Evans and includes a great story about Arctic explorations, banjos and penguins ... It also shows the broad reach of the instrument. They use something Iike 27 banjos in their show and demonstrate convincingly that the banjo has a wild and well-traveled history.
Meanwhile, for my $.02, I think we can play outside our immediate zones, just as we listen outside those zones, given sufficient will and passion/obsession. It's a matter of relating to the underlying emotion. Music really is generated from just a few main themes -- love, death, god, events, work -- mixed and matched as appropriate, and we can relate to these themes, even if the specifics (collard greens) are foreign. Granted there is music that is outside my ken (Chinese opera, for example), but I suspect that if I wanted to and had a spare lifetime to mess around with it, I could tackle anything that moved me. But being moved by it is the key. Just look at some of our Japanese old-time musician friends who play great, with scrupulous regard for the channels the music has come through. Of course, the farther you are from the source, the harder it is to pick up the nuances, rhythmic and otherwise, but I don't buy the you-gotta-have- been-born-there notion, nor do I think the music died with some past generation. Many young people are playing it well, with great attention to detail and history, and not-so-young people like me are still working at playing it, and that's a good thing, I think. But then I've spent much of my life in zones where the frost-free date skated to the end of June (or where other climatic realities dominate) so I'm hardly any sort of argument for regional authenticity. best, val On Feb 18, 11:19 am, Mike Hoffmann <mikehoffma...@gmail.com> wrote: > Tater tater tater tater tate- > Your post was about ethnic groups and then there was a sentence about > Chicago. I drank a cup of coffee and read a big chunk of a book (Making the > second ghetto - race and housing in chicago 1940-1960) that I really should > have already finished yesterday before working on music. The chapter I left > half finished was on white ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago. Then the coffee > actually started working and I picked up my mandolin and was playing and > listening to stuff on my computer whence I should have been doing homwork. > That lead to reading this mailing list and thus your post, reminding me > about white ethnic groups and Chicago and that I should be reading that > book. I guess I should have just left the response in my head! Sorry for > leading us off track. > > On another note, I was once told that NJ was a hotbed of classical banjo > activity. I also just read an account of a North Pole expedition that > mentioned banjos AND accordions playing home sweet home while in the arctic. > I think banjos were everywhere. Fred Van Eps and Vess Ossman both lived > here and played extensively in Asbury Park, but certainly not old-time > music. My dad always calls our local area banjo land because he gets > frustrated at the inability to think liberally at school board meetings and > such. I always get mad and remind him that it takes a large mind to play a > banjo. The banjo gets pigeonholed as a rural, southern thing. Even a lot > of the minstrel stuff was written in NYC, and it certainly romanticized the > south. There is something about fantasizing about the South for us > Northerners. Even Dixie was written up North. Maybe that is why old-time > music is so popular up North in New England, MN, and Wisconsin specifically. > It's cold and in the south it is so warm. I get jealous when I listen to > Charlie McCoy sing, "in the wintertime I'm doing mighty well, but in the > summertime its a burning hell" because in the wintertime here it is cold! > > On a side note, I am watching Dora the Explorer with my niece right now and > a flower is lost in the snow and they are trying to find their way back to > warmer climates. Perhaps that is the same as us Northern flowers listening > mournfully to southbound trains. Also, in the background I could swear they > keep playing little brown jug. > > need to organize my thoughts better > Mike H --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Taterbugmando" group. To post to this group, send email to taterbugmando@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to taterbugmando+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/taterbugmando?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
