|
I've had a few epiphanies about what Duke Ellington meant by good music vs. bad music, the ONLY two categories he considered as being valid.
The first was at a Gospel music festival I helped record in high school. It was something like two to three thousand people singing together with soloists who literally left every pop singer I had ever heard in the dust. Later on I would hear the same kind of energy from James Brown and Jackie Wilson. The closest any singer at Motown got was Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops.
The second was at a living room vocal concert given by a young woman (whose name I've never known) from India around 1978. I thought I was really sophisticated and had experienced Kahn, Shankar and the other big name Indian performers. In about 30 seconds I realized that every bit of Indian classical music I had heard up to that point was bullsh!t. Here was the very same charismatic energy I had experienced at that Gospel festival in as different a style as is imaginable.
A couple years ago I had a powerful experience hearing the western swing band Dave Martin's wife sings in. Here was that same energy that has been missing in action in most recent pop music.
What all of this had in common was that it was live performance and not a recording. The recordings are really exciting but there is something else going on we never capture, some kind of attunement to the space and the audience. Motown was the closest I've been to capturing it. The feeling on the records was exactly what it felt like to make them.
|