Re: folk musics (seth)

> From: Seth Austen <acoustic@landmarknet.net>
>
> More and more I consider these examples to be distortion as opposed to
> interpretation. I'm hearing way too many folk recordings by modern groups
> whose interpretation is clean up folk music to western music standards. To
> my way of thinking, this tends to dumb down the music, the best folk music
> is not afraid to be edgy and raw.
>

This is exactly my feeling when listenning to the great rural blues players
and singers (Lightnin Hopkins, Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonsy) and some
of the more gritty urban blues artists (Howlin' Wolf) compared to even the
better of the contemporary players. The old cats didn't necessarily stay
on a strict form, tune their instruments, agree on how much (or how little)
swing on the eighth notes, and had systemic disagreements on what the chords
were to certain sections (I mean systemic in that every time a certain point
of the song comes up, the guitarist, and he alone, strums the IV chord in a
sort of blurry polytonality).

But MAN does that stuff express. Music poured out of the soul.

> Interestingly, it's not that I think that
> every instrument playing this music needs to be tuned strictly JI, I love
> the tension created by the juxtaposition between JI thirds and sevenths in a
> voice, slide guitar or fiddle against the fixed 12 ET pitch of the guitar,
> banjo or piano.
>

Yes. In the musics I was mentioning you certainly have many simultaneous
definitions for the thirds and sevenths. Maybe there is a groove or swing
for tuning as there is for rhythm.

> BTW, I offer my definition of folk to describe either traditional dance
> music and/or songs of a particular culture, as opposed to the common
> perception of folk these days as a singer/songwriter playing guitar.
>

I've been thinking of 'World Music' these days. I like the more traditional
'field recordings'. Then I was listenning to a few recordings of U.S. bar
bands and realized that these too were 'field recordings', with the field
being the US. [The recordings were Jimmy Rivers and the Cherokees
which was a great Honky-Tonk swing band in Texas, Danny Gatton live at a
bar in D.C. and Eric Dolphy live at the 5 Spot, where absolute geniuses
are playing for about twenty drinkning patrons].

> Thanks for listening to my thoughts on this cold, windy day in New
> Hampshire.
>

Well, at least the weathers nice in Israel.

> Seth
>

Bob