Pat’s Polemics
My new Web site
In Praise of Afro-Pop
07/06/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentI sent this in when the program requested testimonials for a grant. The music of Africa has formed the base of a good deal of (Continue Reading)
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06/26/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe first 3 have the pulse I am talking about. I have used examples without vocals and the last two are nothing but drumming. The (Continue Reading)
If you cannot show it, is it real?
06/26/2019 Pat Barrett 2 Comments“Show” is not the best word. Thinking about African Diasporic music and the issue of the pulse, I was reminded of the issue of acquisition (Continue Reading)
When it gets good
04/18/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentYou might notice how in many forms of African-derived music, a melody- and harmony-driven music will over the course of the piece devolve into domination (Continue Reading)
Compare this to any Niger/Chad/Congo horn section
04/13/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentAt about 7:05 on this you will hear the horns take over and then play any recording of the music deeply written about by Simha (Continue Reading)
Together – Apart: a view of Western music
04/06/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentWestern Europe and West Africa have a lot in common in their musics and musical traditions but are also clearly distinct. Both regions and traditions (Continue Reading)
The beat of the washing machine
01/09/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentOne of the hallmarks – no, the sine qua nons – of the music of West Africa and the African Diaspora is what is popularly (Continue Reading)
The centrality of music to the Black religious experience
12/10/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentI’m sure I’ve written up this incident here before but cannot find it. It points to the centrality of music and esp of rhythmic music (Continue Reading)
Whither jazz without the church?
10/08/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentNPR played a nice piece on currents in jazz, the dropping of the boundary between different approaches to jazz. They played a piece by an (Continue Reading)
Across time: a favored distortion
09/13/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentMany decades ago I read and heard about the practice in West Africa of drilling a small hole in the shell of a drum and (Continue Reading)
The Musical and the Spiritual
06/09/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentIt has long been my vision of African-American music that the connection between the musical and the spiritual is so tight that this connection extends (Continue Reading)
Then it comes crashing in
11/27/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentA magical moment for me is when musicians are playing a piece of music straight and then, either insinuatingly or with a mighty shift, they (Continue Reading)
Oops! Assumptions about African music
07/31/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentRecently I offered a friend several YouTube videos depicting Cuban street congas in response to our discussion about The Miami Sound Machine’s La Conga. Then (Continue Reading)
“a sort of symphony emerged”
05/23/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentSometimes you come across something that smacks you right in the forehead, something at the back of your mind but never entirely brought out into (Continue Reading)
quick note on clave
05/20/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentWatch the topless man playing clave at and notice how he shakes the claves just a bit to maintain his place in the rhythm. This (Continue Reading)
What are they afraid of? This.
05/20/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentHere you see the combination of music and dancing in huge crowds, dancing with abandon and a lot of sexuality and some fighting, that scares (Continue Reading)
Resemblances between language and music
05/17/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentThese quotes are from Simha Arom’s African Polyphony and Polyrhythm …. for each type of procedure observed, there must be an explanation of how it (Continue Reading)
The Gestalt: from African Polyphony and Polyrhythm
05/17/2017 Pat Barrett Add Comment“I became aware of this music’s paradoxical nature: the patterns performed by the individual musicians are quite different from those which result from their (Continue Reading)
How does it all fit together to produce the superorganic?
05/13/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentSimha Arom is a trained musician in the Western European tradition. In the 60s, as he puts it, he was like most musicians in the (Continue Reading)
Pre-colonial musical history in West Africa
04/18/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentEver since Melville Herskovits’ Myth of the Negro Past gave the lie to the proposition that Africa has no history, researchers have sought the course (Continue Reading)
The inviting looseness of African music
01/11/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentI’m starting a new book, Highway 61 Revisited, about the influence of jazz on American music. My musical interests have tended toward African music but (Continue Reading)
Directionality in music
11/12/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentGunther Schuller’s apt phrase, forward propulsive directionality, while clunky, certainly does the job. The word directionality strikes a chord (pardon the word play) with me: (Continue Reading)