What makes American music great?
African Americans, creating a musical language out of their collective experiences of slavery and oppression, are the source that raised American music to greatness in the 20th century. As each new style emerged into the larger culture, it was initially denigrated and criticized, much like society denigrated the black men and women it had forcibly brought into its midst. The loudest critics were not always whites, though. Churchgoing blacks once upheld a dichotomy between gospel (God’s music) and the blues (the devil’s music). Continue reading →
Isolated examples of concept albums appear from the 1950s on, including efforts by Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles, but the idea really took off with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles in 1967 — not surprising given how it was a time of great cultural and creative experimentation. Paralleling the rise of the singer-songwriter in the 1960s, the term “concept album” became imbued with the notion of artistic purpose.
Gemini Soul just returned from three days at Sea Ranch, where we recorded a new CD to be titled “The Nefertiti Xperience.” Instead of going to a recording studio, we decided to rent a house in the quietude of Northern California’s wild and scenic Sonoma coast. Rain greeted us, the first in a parade of winter storms sweeping in from the north. We set up our instruments in the second-floor living room, where two large windows looked out over the Pacific. Deer cavorted in the meadow beside the house.