Afram DOS is the goat musically

[Budda]

Aframs were the only new world blacks that used a melismatic/microtonal vocal approach because of their inherited Islamic influenced, mande/senegambian stock

Interesting as always bro, why not the Brazilians as well a lot of them come from Yoruba Muslim stock...?

 

[315]

say brehs, I made a playlist for work the other day and I basically had a lot of 70s soul and r&b like Stevie, Bill Withers, Earth Wind and Fire etc and I also had a lot of neo soul on there(Jill, Erykah, D'angelo..) and I gotta say that the neo soul stuff really pales in comparison to that stuff from the 70s. it's like nowhere near as good, not even in the same universe. looking back on a lot of the neo soul movement I think it resonated so much because of the state of contemporary r&b at the time. but if you wanna compare the arrangements and songwriting and all that it really doesn't hold a candle to the OGs. anybody else feel that way or is it just me?

Who is Jill Scott holds up pretty good tho

I think both eras were great in different ways

 

[LunaticVillage415]

Not shyttin on Ethiopians but you ever heard their music? That shyt sounds Arab as fukk and it becomes very clear that they are some Arab nikkas and nothing like nikkas.

 

[315]

Not shyttin on Ethiopians but you ever heard their music? That shyt sounds Arab as fukk and it becomes very clear that they are some Arab nikkas and nothing like nikkas.

Mulatu is cold. Ethio-jazz

 

[Gold]

I dont think anyone will argue against this

But i haven't read this thread

 

[Black Haven]

Zydeco music:



Gogo music:




So many styles and flavors baby

 

[Supper]

Zydeco music:



Gogo music:




So many styles and flavors baby

Funny thing is Zydeco and Screw diffused organically within the same exact region in the opposite direction. So, it's only natural to marry the two genre. Chris Ardroin puts out official screw remixes himself.

To most people, zydeco appears as quintessentially Louisiana as gumbo. Certainly, the music originated among black Creoles of southwest Louisiana. But the swamps of southwest Louisiana spill across the Sabine River into southeast Texas, and the music originally known as "la-la" quickly trickled west, too. There it fused with blues to create a new sound that came to be known, spelled, and recorded as "zydeco."

Black Creoles from Louisiana began moving into southeast Texas in search of better jobs during the first half of the twentieth century. As they resettled, so did their music. Texas Zydeco describes how many of the most formative players and moments in modern zydeco history developed in Texas, especially Houston. As the new players traveled back and forth between Houston and Lafayette, Louisiana, they spread the new sound along a "zydeco corridor" that is the musical axis around which zydeco revolves to this day. Roger Wood and James Fraher spent years traveling this corridor, interviewing and photographing hundreds of authentic musicians, dancers, club owners, and fans. As their words and images make clear, zydeco, both historically and today, belongs not to a state but to all the people of the upper Gulf Coast.

Texas Zydeco

Lotta people don't know rural SW louisiana has more culturally in common with SE Texas, including Houston, than with New Orleans(trailrides, zydeco, black rodeos, and even slab ridin, poin up, and screw music). Them family ties is strong. 3 of 4 my grandparents are from St Landry Louisiana.

Frenchtown, Houston - Wikipedia

^^^First place my momo landed when she moved to Houston.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Not shyttin on Ethiopians but you ever heard their music? That shyt sounds Arab as fukk and it becomes very clear that they are some Arab nikkas and nothing like nikkas.

Nah sounds nothing like Arab. I actually like Ethio music. Its just their "voice" or "language" which is Afro-Asiatic which "sounds" Arabic tho to being from the same family which originated in Africa.


This...



Does not sound like this.




Also even certain West African countries have that "string based" instrumental sound doesn't mean they are Arab influenced.



Btw... Ironically AA music comes from this type of African sound and NOT the drum based coastal/congolese sound. @IllmaticDelta or @Supper

 

[Supper]

Btw... Ironically AA music comes from this type of African sound and NOT the drum based coastal/congolese sound. @IllmaticDelta or @Supper

The part of West Africa were the blues is rooted from(interior sahel/sudan/savanna) has for thousands of years been a hub for trading networks between sub saharan africa and north africa(southern sahara), and also were the first penetration of islam over a thousand years ago into sub saharan west africa comes from. Thus, IMO it represents a convergence of three major meta-cultural groups which influenced the musical tradition.

1. Native Sub Saharan West Sudanic(senegambians, gur, mande etc)
2. North African Saharan Berbers
3. West Asian Arabic

The cyclic & call and response form is most likely native to SSA, as it's also present in other SSA cultures in deep in the forested regions as well. The shuffled and swung rhythms could possibly be native Sudanic-Sahelian or North African Berber influenced. The melisma(syllables sung over multiple notes) and wavy intonation(notes moving between major and minor scale) are of Arabic Islamic influence, which when super imposed on the native African pentatonic scale, gets you the blues scale. Which is how you get microtonal 'blue notes' not present in the classical western musical notation. Those are just some of the traits. There are others African traits in the blues which will be hard to pin down to any one of those three particular cultural groups.

@IllmaticDelta or @Akan might need to review this hypothesis, though.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

The part of West Africa were the blues is rooted from(sahel/sudan/savanna) has for thousands of years been a hub for trading networks between sub saharan africa and north africa(southern sahara), and also were the first penetration of islam over a thousand years ago into sub saharan west africa comes from. Thus, IMO it represents a convergence of three major meta-cultural groups which influenced the musical tradition.

1. Native Sub Saharan West Sudanic(senegambians, gur, mande etc)
2. North African Saharan Berbers
3. West Asian Arabic


The cyclic & call and response form is most likely native to SSA, as it's also present in other SSA cultures in deep in the forested regions as well. The shuffled and swung rhythms could possibly be native Sudanic-Sahelian or North African Berber influenced. The melisma(syllables sung over multiple notes) and wavy intonation(notes moving between major and minor scale) are of Arabic Islamic influence, which when super imposed on the native African pentatonic scale, gets you the blues scale. Which is how you get microtonal 'blue notes' not present in the classical western musical notation. Those are just some of the traits. There are others African traits in the blues which will be hard to pin down to any one of those three particular cultural groups.

@IllmaticDelta or @Akan might need to review this hypothesis, though.

Agreed. But note Tuaregs if I remember correctly also preform call and response. But my main point is that this type of musical style(which is also found in East Africa) is hardly West Asian.

 

[Supper]

Agreed. But note Tuaregs if I remember correctly also preform call and response. But my main point is that this type of musical style(which is also found in East Africa) is hardly West Asian.

Yeah, I think you're right in that Tuaregs to perform in C & R, but they are also heavily SSA influenced. Whereas you can find CnR traditions all the way in Mozambique and Tanzania which certainly weren't influenced by tuaregs.

Ethiopians certainly play over a pentatonic scale(as do most non-western/european cultures). And they have melismatic singing and microtonal playing styles, which ironically enough is the only region I can think of where non-muslim peoples traditionally sing like that. Which coupled with the fact that hadiths tell of an ethopian slave being the first to perform the adhan(call to prayer), which is what acted as the vessel to spread melismatic singing, lends evidence that melismatic singing might have originated from the horn of africa and difussed to the arabian peninsula, and from there to north africa, and from north africa to west africa, and from west africa to the US via the slave trade.

 

[K.O.N.Y]

Not shyttin on Ethiopians but you ever heard their music? That shyt sounds Arab as fukk and it becomes very clear that they are some Arab nikkas and nothing like nikkas.

And oddly offbeat

 

[Phitz]

I see your Miles Davis and I raise you John Coltrane.

*pops collar*

 

[Supper]

reminds me of how the amen break spawned jungle and drum and bass

The first artist to sample the amen break were Afr'Am hip hop artist if I'm not mistaken, and from there it blew up in the UK and spread worldwide. And isn't Jungle literally defined by it's use of the Amen break? And the creator never received any royalties and died homeless? Damn shame. Criminal in fact.

Yep, I can see the similarities with how screw spread to non-hiphop scenes already. And it's crazy, cuz the hipsters that originally ran off with the style weren't even DJs who mixed pre existing records for mixtapes and live performances, they are producers using the C&S technique to create new records from samples mostly. And these days the vaporwave and seapunk scene is just a bunch of DIYers using basic kiddie music software to chop and screw records and adding some visual aesthetics to it. At least the witch house artist still produce actual original music by incorporating C&S for the most part.

It also reminds me of how J Dilla's sound basically pioneered what is considered "chillhop" or "lo fi hip hop" among hipsters(which also tends to use a lot of C&S with the low bpm and chopping).

At least the chillhop guys pay respects to the originator, though.

 

[Samori Toure]

Interesting as always bro, why not the Brazilians as well a lot of them come from Yoruba Muslim stock...?

The answer is Sahelian music. African Americans are heavily from Mande stock, which are a people from the Sahel, specifically Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Gambia. The USA brought in a large number of Mande over a relatively very short period to grow rice and indigo in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The Mande people had paid musicians (Griots) going back over a thousand years and they played instruments like the Kora, djembe and the banjo.

Music of Mali - Wikipedia.

Most Brazilians are Yoruba, Congo, Angolan, Hausa and some Mande. So they all brought different musical forms with successive waves of people from different regions.