Catty1
01-06-2008, 03:36 PM
http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20071115_114276_114276&source=srch
KENNETH WHYTE | November 15, 2007 |
Q: Where's the audience for jazz?
A: The audience is limited because we don't have the proper education to sustain an audience. It's very difficult to have a huge audience when the audience is mainly dedicated to people who are amateurs, or who can't play at all.
Q: But in the beginning jazz didn't have an educated audience.
A: Yes, it did. There was an intelligent listening audience. In the United States the intelligent audience started to decline in the '60s. Up until that time there was a concentrated music education program. So a lot of early jazz musicians, even though their grandparents were slaves, their parents were not slaves, and the early . . . Don Redmond, all those early guys who formed the music, they were very educated, man. Don Redmond went to Oberlin.
A: Early jazz is polyphonic music. Rap is not. The principal component of early jazz is the improvisation and interaction of drums and melody. Rap, the drum is a machine, it doesn't interact with anything. The other thing about early jazz is Jelly Roll Morton. This one man sat down at the piano with Alan Lomax in the '40s and he played John Philip Souza's marches, ragtime pieces, arias from operas, songs in all kinds of keys. Who in rap can do that?
Q: I don't know. Is there anyone?
A: No...That's not possible...Because there's not enough of the form to create that. It is what it is, it has a lifespan.
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A: I'm always encouraged. I see that for 350 years, people were enslaved in the United States, and then they weren't slaves. So I believe in change, and I believe in ascendance. Of course, if you give younger people trash from the time they're 11 or 12 you can exploit them.
I'll play with any kind of musician. I will not record certain types of material because I don't want that on my legacy, okay? That's my personal thing. But as a person I'm not sitting in judgment of them. If I'm talking to 50 Cent or any of these guys, they're people, you know? "You're getting famous being a minstrel and doing all this talking about how you shot black people, you can make some money off of that, that's okay." With my music I will play with anybody, but with all that "b******" and "n*****s" and all of that . . . Now, I know what it's like to really be called a n***** for real, by black and white people. I'm not interested in presenting that to the world as my expression. And I have to make the point to the younger people in rap, we was black in the '60s, man. We were black in 1974. We wasn't waiting for y'all to tell us what it was to be black. You're a guy from the Something Housing Project with limited education and now you're going to tell me what it means to be a black person in America? Man, you must really think you're in a video.
You know, that's an age-old thing in culture...So this particular version of it is, I'm from the streets, I'm hard, I'm bad, I'm authentic, but the deep thing about it and the point I'm trying to make is that you messed over black people. Who are you calling a b****? Who you been shooting at?
I work with 200 people, man, you know? I never called anybody a b****. Where is this place where people just go in public, they call people b******?
KENNETH WHYTE | November 15, 2007 |
Q: Where's the audience for jazz?
A: The audience is limited because we don't have the proper education to sustain an audience. It's very difficult to have a huge audience when the audience is mainly dedicated to people who are amateurs, or who can't play at all.
Q: But in the beginning jazz didn't have an educated audience.
A: Yes, it did. There was an intelligent listening audience. In the United States the intelligent audience started to decline in the '60s. Up until that time there was a concentrated music education program. So a lot of early jazz musicians, even though their grandparents were slaves, their parents were not slaves, and the early . . . Don Redmond, all those early guys who formed the music, they were very educated, man. Don Redmond went to Oberlin.
A: Early jazz is polyphonic music. Rap is not. The principal component of early jazz is the improvisation and interaction of drums and melody. Rap, the drum is a machine, it doesn't interact with anything. The other thing about early jazz is Jelly Roll Morton. This one man sat down at the piano with Alan Lomax in the '40s and he played John Philip Souza's marches, ragtime pieces, arias from operas, songs in all kinds of keys. Who in rap can do that?
Q: I don't know. Is there anyone?
A: No...That's not possible...Because there's not enough of the form to create that. It is what it is, it has a lifespan.
************************************************** ******
A: I'm always encouraged. I see that for 350 years, people were enslaved in the United States, and then they weren't slaves. So I believe in change, and I believe in ascendance. Of course, if you give younger people trash from the time they're 11 or 12 you can exploit them.
I'll play with any kind of musician. I will not record certain types of material because I don't want that on my legacy, okay? That's my personal thing. But as a person I'm not sitting in judgment of them. If I'm talking to 50 Cent or any of these guys, they're people, you know? "You're getting famous being a minstrel and doing all this talking about how you shot black people, you can make some money off of that, that's okay." With my music I will play with anybody, but with all that "b******" and "n*****s" and all of that . . . Now, I know what it's like to really be called a n***** for real, by black and white people. I'm not interested in presenting that to the world as my expression. And I have to make the point to the younger people in rap, we was black in the '60s, man. We were black in 1974. We wasn't waiting for y'all to tell us what it was to be black. You're a guy from the Something Housing Project with limited education and now you're going to tell me what it means to be a black person in America? Man, you must really think you're in a video.
You know, that's an age-old thing in culture...So this particular version of it is, I'm from the streets, I'm hard, I'm bad, I'm authentic, but the deep thing about it and the point I'm trying to make is that you messed over black people. Who are you calling a b****? Who you been shooting at?
I work with 200 people, man, you know? I never called anybody a b****. Where is this place where people just go in public, they call people b******?