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On the left is the record where the break first appeared, and on the right is DJ Kool Herc.
You could also call the Apache break the national anthem of drum n bass and all the other electronic microgenres based on sped up and scrambled hip-hop beats.
Today the Michael Jackson fan art I have on my mind (and on the ipod) is “Please Don’t Stop The Music,” sung by Rihanna and produced by a couple of Norwegian guys. It includes a samples of MJ singing “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” The sample includes both his quasi-Swahili chant and his unearthly woo-hoo. It runs under almost the entire song after the first minute, with dramatic filter sweeping and what sounds like some vocoder.
MJ never made a video for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” leaving a vacuum that the fans are only too happy to fill. This video even includes footage of MJ’s video game.
This MJ song has inspired a lot of fan art, maybe because it is itself fan art. The music industry likes to send lawyers after people who make fan art, which is dumb and self-destructive on their part. No fan art, no art.
The most-sampled album in history is probably James Brown’s compilation In The Jungle Groove. It includes the original “Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” along with a sampling-friendly remix. It also includes some other much-loved funk tracks. None of them have been sampled as heavily as “Funky Drummer” but there are some contenders.
The compilation is named for a breakdown section that appears in “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” James Brown quiets the band down to handclaps, footstomps and congas played by Johnny Griggs. (more…)
My friend Leo told me that he always faces a conflict when shopping for jazz records. He wants to show love for working musicians by buying their newer recordings, but then, he could always just pick up another Miles Davis album and know it’s going to be ridiculously good.
Probably my favorite Miles album out of many close contenders is In a Silent Way. It’s one of his first jazz-funk records, and there are no traditional songs on it. Each side is a single long track, pieced together by Miles and producer Teo Macero from excerpts of long improvisations. Earlier Miles albums had used tape editing to create seamless suites and to composite different takes of the same tune together. In A Silent Way was the first Miles album to use the mixing desk as a fundamental compositional tool. Miles and his producer remixed the improvs into something unambiguously new.
Say “oooh” as in “noodle.” Then say “aaah” as in “park.” When you say “oooh” your mouth is more closed, with less resonating space and a smaller opening. This configuration blocks the higher overtones of your voice. When you say “aaah” your jaw and lips open, creating more resonating space and letting more high overtones through. Now glide from one to the other. The resulting “ooohaaaah” is the sound the wah-wah pedal is named for. By selectively filtering an electronic instrument’s overtones, the pedal can make it sound more vocal. It’s only two vowel sounds out of the dozens your mouth is capable of producing, but it’s a start toward making a more human tone.
