Frank Zappa once said that “Without music to decorate it, time is just (you fill in the blanks here)”. What is it you remember about the first time you heard a song? Was it where you were, or maybe who you were with? Maybe it was about where you were going or even how you got there. If you’re like me, it is likely that it struck you like a drop of condensation from on high, fluttering down from some compartment of sound and emotion, cheating time by way of the radio airwaves or the streaming ether.
Whether you’re a fan of world, classical, eastern, or modern Americana music, it is no doubt that your mood might sometimes dictate a shift outside your comfort zone to find a break from the repetition. Sometimes our moods demand that we listen to music in a free form manner, allowing us to revel in the many contrasting sounds that may push our boundaries of musical discretion. It’s good to stretch a bit, don’t you think?
When I find myself stretching, I get curious. I might want to know more about the lineage of a given piece, its fundamentals, its story, its performer and so I find myself following a thread. Rarely is it a story that starts with a beginning and concludes with “The End”. More often than not, it involves finding something new in the middle. Once I’ve found some common pattern that connects one musical piece to another, I often discover something that leads me to a current release. There are also those pieces that can be become something to sit and revel with like a passage in a book that you might return to someday for solace. Simple nostalgia sometimes drives the curiosity, but not always.
When assembling playlists for a Deeper Roots’ show, I’m always struck by how a 1932 Lonnie Johnson can be so easily bookended by pieces from a different time, say from The Band or even The Staple Singers. These threads of sound, these flotsam and jetsam on the waters of time, are often easily woven together even though the stories they tell may be so different. They are declared linear only by the blinking of the cursor, the hands of the clock, and the rotation of the Earth.