Roots and Threads

<p>I've been thinking, as always, about pulling the threads, digging down to the roots of my own musical interests and passions, prompted most recently by some of Vesa's terrific style recombinations and Rapster's evident fidelity to being open to new styles, genres, and tools. These guys and a host of others have wildly ecclectic tastes and a fearless drive to experiment. They're also blessed with a broad knowledge of what music is and can be -- art, self-expression, emotional amplifier, medicine, metaphor, inspiration... and a few hundred other functions and rewards that may suit a particular time or place or person better that those. They've cultivated what I think of as Great Ears, which I'm betting grew out of a lifetime of listening carefully to everything they can get their hands on, seeing the connections, filing the sounds away consciously and unconsciously.</p>
<p>I'm not trying to get all mystical here really... my own love of making music came out of a desire to sound as much as I could like the Rolling Stones as a teenager. Noticing that someone named Willie Dixon wrote Little Red Rooster, i started pulling my first threads more than thirty years ago and ever since have dug down through the roots of rock to the blues and beyond. Eventually I dug back to the very earliest recordings, where the lines between between traditions blur. Blues and Jazz are one. Blues and Country are one. Cajun, Acadian, Celtic and more are one. Skip James, Hank Williams and hard labor chain gang hollers on the Alan Lomax field recordings are one. Hopi drummers and Highlanders in New Guinea banging on logs. Joni and Mingus. Johnny Cash and Beck. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello -- not just collaborators, but soul mates deep inside. Heck, Forest Pygmy singing sounds a whole lot like Tuvan throat singers. And on and on...</p>
<p>It truly is a wonderfful thing that the music of solitary musicians, crafting alone for personal enjoyment and fulfillment -- alongside the music of humanity's heritage -- can be heard and enjoyed on a global basis from right there where you're sitting.</p>
<p>Pull the threads. Listen up, ya'll.</p>