Month: August 2019

Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?

Wesley Morris: Without improvisation, a listener is seduced into the composition of the song itself and not the distorting or deviating elements that noise creates. Particular to black American music is the architecture to create a means by which singers and musicians can be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation: through art, through music — music no one “composed” (because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope.

What you’re hearing in black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that can really happen only once — not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. The attempt to rerecord it seems, if you think about it, like a fool’s errand. You’re not capturing the arrangement of notes, per se. You’re catching the spirit. More here.

discussion with iraqi young leaders exchange program

excellent discussion about racism, islamophobia and anti-semitism with iraqi students who are here as part of the iraqi young leaders exchange program. such a bright and engaging group of young people from all over iraq. thank u to the brilliant Halima Aweis and Nate Baldo for continuing this important conversation that started at the islamic center of rochester, and thank u Rochester Global Connections for facilitating this meeting.