[Dixielandjazz] Making the music relevant to Kids

[Steve barbone]

How to make the music relevant to the kids. Well, here is how one band does
it. Admittedly, you have to use your imagination, draw a few parallels and
read between the lines, but it is all there in the below article.

Paragraph Numbers & quotes from them that are relevant.

1) "part ritual, part comedy and all about momentum"

3) "hypnotic & relentless" "drums & cyclical riffs"

4) "changing textures"

5) "vocalized in shouts, grunts, whoops and shrieks"

6) "drumbeats derived from Asia, Africa . . . New Orleans funk and beyond"

What could be simpler?

Cheers,
Steve (just add beads and shake well) Barbone


A Band Alive With the Music of Sound

By JON PARELES - NY TIMES -  Published: May 28, 2005

There's a wing of the avant-garde that keeps searching for the primal, using
all its analytical and technological resources to deliver deeply visceral
effects. Charter members include the Boredoms, the Japanese band that played
a pulverizing, ecstatic set at the Bowery Ballroom on Wednesday night. Its
performance was part ritual, part comedy and all about momentum.

The Boredoms started out in the 1980's as a Japanese twist on a hardcore or
no-wave band, playing tightly composed songs full of sudden tempo changes,
guitar blasts, bursts of noise and the manic vocals of the band's leader,
Yamatsuka Eye. 

By the end of the 90's, the band had grown more expansive, seeking a
different kind of impact - hypnotic and relentless rather than wrenching -
with steady-pounding drums and cyclical riffs. The current band, in New York
on one of its rare United States tours, no longer uses a guitar. Mr. Eye
sang and played a synthesizer. He was backed, most of the time, by three
drummers pounding away in unison. One of them, Yoshimi, occasionally played
keyboard or sang. 

Changing textures are still vital to the music, but the latter-day Boredoms
give them time to sink in. The set began with Mr. Eye alone, holding lighted
gizmos in his hands that triggered sounds as he made balletic motions: a
bell-like tinkling with one, whooshes and crashes with the other. He was
producing consonance or noise with each gesture, as if he were an alchemist
summoning elements.

He howled amid the sounds and moved to his synthesizer - an assortment of
knobs and cables, not a keyboard - as the drummers joined him: first for
heaving, crashing slow beats and then for rhythms that accelerated to
breakneck speed and stayed there for an hour of muscle-driven elation. The
drums stomped, they swung, they clattered and they hurtled the music
forward. Above the beat, Mr. Eye played repeating chords and electronic
swoops and quavers; he also vocalized in shouts, grunts, whoops and shrieks.

It was carefully plotted music, switching beats instantly and precisely as
Mr. Eye's synthesizer rode the rhythms and his voice cut loose. Over the
course of the set, the Boredoms suggested dub reggae echoes, a grand rock
anthem and the stop-time chords of a big band; Yoshimi crooned like a jazz
chanteuse and belted a house-music hook. There were drumbeats derived from
Asia, Africa, breakbeat electronica, New Orleans funk and beyond; there were
parts where the beat stopped dead and Mr. Eye repeatedly barked what could
have been incantations. At one point he seemed to be chanting, "Sound!
Sound! Sound!" If he was, he had every right to exult in it.