One of the hallmarks – no, the sine qua nons – of the music of West Africa and the African Diaspora is what is popularly (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
My new Web site
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)
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, certain does the job. The word directionality strikes a chord (pardon the word play) with me: (Continue Reading)
Good example of Pentecostal worship style
10/12/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentThis video captures the spirit of the Pentecostal worship service I was exposed to. Notice, too, how many Whites in the congregation know how to (Continue Reading)
How African-American music works
07/18/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn part one of Jazz, a DVD collection by Ken Burns, it is stated that the original blues were slow. When the Black Codes were (Continue Reading)
Cuban music programs
05/13/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentAfropop Worldwide just put up a Cuban Connection page anyone interested in Cuban music and culture will enjoy. It is a number of broadcasts on (Continue Reading)
Repetitive equals non-telic
04/03/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentJust now my wife noted that a song playing on the radio was repetitive. It was one of those numbers from the earlier days of (Continue Reading)
How Music Constructs a World
03/17/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentOne of the most moving scenes, in fact, the most moving to me, in the movie Twelve Years a Slave is when Solomon Northrup is (Continue Reading)
Masked traits, their survival, emergence and absorption
03/11/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentA terminological issue arises whenever we talk about the American culture. What so often happens is that what I call the Norwegian culture gets put (Continue Reading)
What Obama demonstrated
06/27/2015 Pat Barrett Add CommentToday, Peter Greene wrote on Diane Ravitch’s blog about music: “In music, everyone’s a winner. In sports, when two teams try their hardest and give (Continue Reading)