Afram DOS is the goat musically

[Samori Toure]

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.

I don't think that the Arabs influenced that music. Do you mean Berbers? Berbers are not Arab; they are African.

 

[Supper]

I don't think that the Arabs influenced that music. Do you mean Berbers? Berbers are not Arab; they are African.

Arabs have been trading and living in Africa for thousands of years. Particularly in the magrehb where they've been living along side(and conquering) native berbers and mixing with them for as long as well hence the dominate Arabized berber hegemonic culture and identity in the region. And of course there are even some berbers, arabs, and arabized berbers that inhabit the SSA sahel as well such as the Abbala and Baggara people.

Arabs and Arab identity in North Africa is similar to Hispanic or Latino identity in Latin America as in that it's not mutually exclusive to the native berber or amerindian identity and it many cases people claim both as a hybrid identity.

Arab-Berber - Wikipedia
Mestizo - Wikipedia

But some people also claim one identity exclusively from the other(Purely Arab/Spanish or Berber/Amerindian). But, these people tend to make up the minority most places in the respective regions.

Anycase Arabs and Arab culture most certainly did have a large impact on the culture of the magreb and sahel, an the melismatic form of vocalization and wavy intonation in the music likely did come from the Arabian Peninsula via the spread of islam by use of the adhan.

According to Kubik, the vocal style of Muslim West African singers "using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Arabic-Islamic world of the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries."

Music of Africa - Wikipedia

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Arab influence only came via religion.

 

[Supper]

Arab influence only came via religion.

Yeah there's no denying that Arab influences in the Magreb and Sahel came via the spread of islam. But, not all of the influences are necessarily islamic/religious in nature, such as the music in question, the language, or the written script. The local people of the region came to interpret and utilize many of these influences secularly.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

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.

yea. The Amen break was first used in HipHop. NWA used it. Jungle and Drum and Bass were both spawned by the break.

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.

yup

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.

dilla spawned a whole sub-sound called post-dilla, glitch hop, wonky etc...

A Generation of Donut Addicts: J Dilla's Legacy



even impacted some of the modern jazz guys


NPR Choice page

 

[FocusedDaily]

No shyt
Can we stop this AADOS shyt tho, mad corny to me

Super corny.

 

[Samori Toure]

Arabs have been trading and living in Africa for thousands of years. Particularly in the magrehb where they've been living along side(and conquering) native berbers and mixing with them for as long as well hence the dominate Arabized berber hegemonic culture and identity in the region. And of course there are even some berbers, arabs, and arabized berbers that inhabit the SSA sahel as well such as the Abbala and Baggara people.

Arabs and Arab identity in North Africa is similar to Hispanic or Latino identity in Latin America as in that it's not mutually exclusive to the native berber or amerindian identity and it many cases people claim both as a hybrid identity.

Arab-Berber - Wikipedia
Mestizo - Wikipedia

But some people also claim one identity exclusively from the other(Purely Arab/Spanish or Amerindian/Berber). But, these people tend to make up the minority most places in the respective regions.

Anycase Arabs and Arab culture most certainly did have a large impact on the culture of the magreb and sahel, an the melismatic form of vocalization and wavy intonation in the music likely did come from the Arabian Peninsula via the spread of islam by use of the adhan.


Music of Africa - Wikipedia

I have never heard of a Berber that claimed to be an Arab or even influenced by Arabia. There maybe a conflating of the fact that people practiced Islam or wrote Arabic with the Arabs having influence in cultural matters. It is pretty clear that the Berber and Mande people had a long trade and cultural history with each other, before the Arabs ever arrived.

Chinese can speak and write English and some Chinese are Christian, but that doesn't mean that England influenced Chinese culturally. Arabic just like English is the language of business.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

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.

blues slide style (diddley bow) = bantu african


blues notes = sudanic africa

melissma of the afram variety = arabian vocal style imposed on sudanic african vocal styles

 

[IllmaticDelta]

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.

ethio music sounds arabic if you compare it to polyrhythmic niger-congo music because...

The parts of Africa that are AfroAsiatic or border near the Afro-Asiatics, melismatic vocals, pentatonic scales and lack of over complex polyrythyms and string based instruments (exactly why the Blues doesn't sound like Afro-Cuban music)

0->:25



What they say bout Ethiopian music..


"At Friday's event, Gershon lectured on Ethiopian music with demonstrations by Atanaw, Dagnew, Shenkute, and Lebron. Ethiopian music, Gershon explained, is based on four five-note scales (pentatonic). Tezeta is a scale associated with "nostalgia and longing, the equivalent of blues or soul." Anchihoy is employed mainly in wedding songs, and as a jazz musician Gershon said he finds this scale congenial because of its inherent dissonance.

The song the group played to illustrate the scale bati had a propulsive, danceable beat. Shenkute snapped her fingers to it before reaching for the mike and beginning her vocal, which seemed to dive porpoiselike in and out of the instrumental accompaniment, sinking at times almost to inaudibility, then surging upward to a full-throated wail. The fourth scale, ambassel, also fits comfortably with modern jazz harmonies, Gershon said."

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/10.04/15-mulatu.html

 

[IllmaticDelta]

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

brazil got dominated by it's bantu component

 

[315]

 

[315]

Happy Birthday!

Sam Cooke (January 22, 1931 – December 11, 1964)

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I like the Piedmont Blues too, which is generally from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. That is the version of the Blues that Country, Bluegrass and Folk music is from. People didn't even know that Etta Baker was Black until they saw an album cover with her and Taj Mahal. She and her sister played the banjo and acoustic guitars.

Then there is Lesley Riddle. He was a Black man hired by the Carter family to catch songs (Blues songs), which the Carters reworked for the White audiences. Riddle ended up teaching Maybelle Carter how to play a style of guitar. The Carter family is now considered the "First Family of Country" sort of like Elvis is considered the "King of Rock and Roll." Then there are the folk singers that steal so much from guys like Mississippi John Hurt that if guys like Bob Dylan and that crowd don't acknowledge it then people don't even realize that Folk music is just a rework of Blues, specifically Piedmont.



Piedmont blues - Wikipedia

yea, what came to be popular folk music and folk rock guitar style was nothing more than the old african american alternating bass-finger aka fingerstyle










vs

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Prince was Italian.

Prince was 100% southern afram stock

• As with other gifted musicians such as Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Prince has a concentration of Louisiana roots. In fact, all four of his grandparents were born there, though Minnesota, Georgia, Arkansas, and North Carolina can also claim a piece of his heritage. Within Louisiana, Prince has roots in Claiborne, Webster, Bienville and Lincoln parishes. More specifically, the towns of Homer, Cotton Valley, Arcadia and Vienna, are all ancestral hometowns.

• Due to the Great Migration, his once mostly Louisiana-based family dispersed to Arkansas, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey and Tennessee. His maternal grandfather, a "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px);">Pullman porter named Frank Shaw, went north to Minnesota by way of Iowa. Though this might sound like a peculiar route, this same pattern can be seen in the family tree of Cory Booker, whose ancestors were drawn from the South to Iowa for mining jobs. As a result of all this meandering, one of Prince’s great-uncles is buried at "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px);">Burr Oak on the outskirts of Chicago, the same notorious cemetery where one of Michelle Obama’s uncles is buried.
• Prince’s paternal grandfather had 11 children by two wives over a 36-year period. This same grandfather’s parents also had 11 children, but in a more concentrated 14-year period. 22 offspring from just these two generations means that Prince undoubtedly has dozens, if not hundreds, of Nelson cousins in both Arkansas and Minnesota.
• Six of Prince’s eight great-grandparents were born into slavery, and as was unfortunately so common, one of his great-grandmothers was apparently the daughter of her one-time owner.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

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.

it's native african + influence from west asia (direct and indirect) for Tuaregs and Horners

and

Afropop Worldwide | Susan Rasmussen on the Tuareg

Music of Morocco

Afropop Worldwide | Interview: Dwight Reynolds: Al-Andalus 1: Europe

I don't think that the Arabs influenced that music. Do you mean Berbers? Berbers are not Arab; they are African.

it's both direct and direct influence from arabs to north africans and then to black africans from the sahel/senegambias, mainly through north africans/berbers