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Music has always been a powerful emotive force that is able to explain events that words alone cannot. Because of this, it has the ability to shed light on some of the darkest and most feared issues in the world. “Strange Fruit,” sung by Billie Holiday in 1939, brought attention to one of the most horrendous moments of American history: racism and the unfair discrimination towards African Americans.  

As an African American artist in the 1930s, Holiday had experienced racism throughout her career. She had performed in mostly “high-society,” white venues but wasn’t allowed to even enter the front of the house. She had to take a freight elevator up to the stage because she was not allowed to share the elevator with white patrons. Although she was one of the best jazz vocalists of all time, she truly understood and experienced the heartbreaking reality of racism in America.

The birth of “Strange Fruit” occurred after a Jewish white school teacher, Abel Meeropol, saw a horrific photograph of a lynching of two black men in Indiana.

Outraged and upset, he wrote a protest poem that was later used as lyrics for Holiday’s song. The lyrics depict the lynched black men as “strange fruit” hanging from trees as they rot in the sun for birds to eat. The song uses physical imagery and strong metaphors, making the scene come to life in the listener’s mind.  

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

[Verse 2]

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

[Verse 3]

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

The song debuted in New York’s first integrated club. Holiday’s manager knew it was extremely heavy and programmed it at the very end of her performance. Waiters stopped serving before the performance of the song, and no encore was performed. Holiday’s dramatic and heart wrenching interpretation continuously left all of her audiences stunned, and most responses included silence followed by a tremendous applause of approval. 

The song was extremely controversial, and Holiday’s regular recording label refused to record it.  She was released from her contract and forced to find an alternative record company to complete her recording. It was eventually produced and sold over 1 million copies, making it Holiday’s most sold record.

The recording of “Strange Fruit” was the first time a black artist had ever released something so controversial, and some consider it a contributing factor to the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.  Artists such as Nina Simone and John Martin went on to record it, and Time Magazine named it the Song of the Century in 1999. It has continued to impact people today and has been inspiration for a novel by Lillian Smith, an opera  by Chandler Carter, and a song released in 2014 by Kanye West, “Blood on the Leaves (Strange Fruit)”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPhsSzfAoBA

Every musical creation has a history and story behind it, and it is an integral piece that must not be forgotten. Even if a work has a strong political message, it should not be overlooked or hidden from its audience. If no one had paid attention to the political issues in “Strange Fruit,” the Civil Rights Movement may not have developed as soon as it did. Billie Holiday’s song changed history, and all artists should have the desire to change the world the way she did. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Fruit_(novel 

Jazz music has historically been a part of a much broader culture, specifically with African Americans. The music has unified communities, protested injustice, and most importantly been a vehicle for self expression.

Integration in Jazz Bands

While jazz has influences of spirituals and work songs, it also has a heavy influence of western European harmonies. However, it started as mainly an African American art form. As technology prevailed in the early 20th century, the recording studio and invention of the radio became a significant way for black musicians to be heard. “Opportunities were given to black musicians by the radio and recording industry and popular black bands were promoted as long as there was a demand for jazz music by white Americans.” This was an important leap forward socially for black Americans, as the demand for jazz music was high. Another thing that occurred in the realm of jazz was the integration of orchestras and bands. Back then, it was common to have all white or all black jazz bands. However, these bands started to become integrated around the 1920’s. Black musicians would play in white bands and vise versa. One of the earliest examples of this integration was when Jelly Roll Morton, a famous creole. pianist, recorded with the Rhythm Kings, a white jazz band. This was an extremely unusual since people of any color in America were harshly discriminated against. Jazz culture was a beautiful thing because in a world where there was crude social injustice against the underrepresented minority Americans, jazz culture began to promote unity in some ways.

Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement

In the 1960’s Jazz had collided with the civil rights movement. Jazz had gone through many transformations by this point since the beginning of the 20th century. The evolution started mainly with New Orleans  jazz, then evolved into swing/dance bands, and then bebop, cool jazz, and hard bop. In the 1950/60’s, an emergence of free and avant garde jazz occurred. (This is a generalization). One of the main leaders of this new music was Ornette Coleman. Free jazz was all about the individual, and the freedom of expression as it delineated from traditional forms of jazz and music in general. In the 1960’s the civil rights movement came into place. There was a huge reaction to this movement in the jazz community, as many black musicians made their voices heard through their music.

 

An example of a musician reacting to this was John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” which he wrote about the Birmingham church bombing in 1963. 

In 1959 bassist/composer Charles Mingus recorded an album entitled “Ah Um.” This album had a track on it called Fables of Faubus, which was a response to Orval Faubus’ prevention of nine African American students’ attendance of a school in Arkansas, even after Eisenhower integrated schools in America. Fables of Faubus was a part of the civil rights movement, and here are the Lyrics:

Fables of Faubus:

Oh, Lord, don’t let ’em shoot us!

Oh, Lord, don’t let ’em stab us!

Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!

Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

 

Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie

Governor Faubus!

Why is he so sick and ridiculous?

He won’t permit integrated schools

Then he’s a fool!

 

Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists!

Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

 

Name me a handful that’s ridiculous, Dannie Richmond

Faubus, Rockefeller, Eisenhower

Why are they so sick and ridiculous?

Two, four, six, eight:

They brainwash and teach you hate

H-E-L-L-O, Hello

Musicians like Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, and more made their voices heard through powerful music that was written in response to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s.

Unfortunately, there is still a great deal of social injustice against African Americans today, and we keep seeing responses to this all over the place. Recently, the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers ,Colin Kaepernick, sat while the national anthem was played. He said that “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” This is an example of a modern day response to the injustice at hand. Kaepernick wanted to make a statement, so he refused to stand during the national anthem. This is not unlike how certain people reacted through music during the civil rights movement. “To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder,” Kaepernick said. Whether it is through sports or through music, it is important that underrepresented Americans of color have their voices heard. We have seen this been done through music during the civil rights movement, and in protests worldwide. Through media, more and more people are being informed of the problem at hand every day.

It’s well known that the 1960’s were a unique and crazy time in United States history. The civil right’s movement, the assassination of President Kennedy, the controversial policies of President Nixon, the Vietnam war, the space race/moon landing, the complete overhaul of the popular music world as Rock and Roll swept in from England, and many other phenomena set a political stage where controversy roared. It seemed impossible to make a meaningful statement that people would listen to.

Amidst all of this, on August 18th, 1969, Jimi Hendrix did just that. On the final day of Woodstock, towards the end of his set, he played a distorted, extended, somewhat mangled version of the star spangled banner. If you haven’t seen and heard it before, check it out before you read any further.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwIymq0iTsw

 

 

Hendrix plays the melody painfully slowly, lingering on every moment and letting his guitar feedback into his wall of amps. He is accompanied only by drummer Mitch Mitchell-http://www.drummerworld.com/drummers/Mitch_Mitchell.html. Throughout the entire song he lets his vibrato pedal create a churning effect on his sound, almost like the whirring off helicopter propellers starting up-http://www.rockprophecy.com/shop.html. Following the lyrics-”rocket’s red glare” he uses his tremolo bar and string-bending to morph his guitar’s feedback into a violent visual. After “bomb’s bursting in air” Hendrix uses his guitar’s whammy-bar to drop the high note down over two octaves, crashing into harsh noise as bombs dropped in Vietnam across the world. He even quotes “Taps”, the bugle call played at military funerals, so as to lament the military lives being lost in that same conflict http://www.music.army.mil/music/buglecalls/taps.asp. Regardless of one’s opinion on it as a piece of history or a political statement, I don’t think anyone can deny that the performance is encapturing.

New York Times writer William Robins points out that the Star Spangled Banner has a “long, polarizing history” in which Hendrix’s performance is only a chapter. There was a harsh parody of the song made in 1844 criticizing the lingering institution of slavery in which the last line is “O’er the death-bed of freedom/ the home of the slave. –https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/colin-kaepernick-and-the-radical-uses-of-the-star-spangled-banner. Since then it has long been a target vehicle for critiquing the state of the nation, as is true today with the Colin Kaepernick/NFL protests.

And it’s in light of the recent political climate that I believe that Hendrix’s interpretation of the anthem is as meaningful as it has ever been. Instead of bombs dropping on Vietnam it’s on the middle east. Instead of Nixon’s hardline republican policies it’s Trump’s heartless and insane policies. The anger in the performance could just as well be directed at the killings of Trayvon Martin or Philando Castile as it could that of Martin Luther King Jr. The patriotism in Hendrix’s beautifully powerful sound as he screams the melody still applies to those who are able to look past the numerous deep problems the U.S has and appreciate the beauty of the nation. Woodstock attendee said that Hendrix’s performance “was the most electrifying moment of Woodstock, and it was probably the single greatest moment of the sixties. You finally heard what that song was about, that you can love your country, but hate the government”-https://hooksanalysis.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/improvised-jimi-hendrix-star-spangled-banner-1969-and-john-bonham-moby-dick-1970/. I believe that in current times, as a misogynistic narcissist runs the country, and every American lives with the knowledge that our private information is legally sold from corporation to corporation through questionable means, that message holds up powerfully. 

On the Dick Cavett show  in 1970, Cavett remarked that Hendrix was bound to recieve some “nasty letters” about his performance of the anthem, which Hendrix quickly shrugged off saying “I thought it was beautiful.” And to me that inner confidence that Hendrix had about his work is part of what makes it so great. I personally hear it every time I listen to the Woodstock national anthem performance, and I hope it inspires any listener to have that confidence in the beauty of the USA, while acknowledging it’s flaws and struggles.

.

Considering it’s morally ambiguous past, Carl Orff’s Scenic Cantata Carmina Burana, can be heard by the general public everywhere from Ozzy Osbourne, Old Spice ads, and even Domino’s Pizza Commercials. Premiered in 1937 by the Frankfurt Opera and Bertil Wetzelberger and supercharged with conflicting undertones, Orff’s explanation of Carmina Burana created lots of conflict between the Axis and Allied powers of the second world war regarding Orff’ political standings.

Part of the reason Carmina Burana was such a success was because of it’s accessibility. Orff utilized a large modern orchestra, full chorus, and solo voices. The music has been shown to emulate and be derived from Stravinsky with maximalist Wagnerian features. Originally Orff was accused of using undesirable jazz-like rhythms in a Stravinsky-esque style, but Nazi Officials overlooked this fact once they realized the piece’s potential for propaganda. Another reason this was overlooked was by the common folk and dance elements also found in the piece.

One interesting tidbit of this history is that Orff was supposedly one quarter Jewish, making his political stance in the Nazi party particularly interesting. He was known to be friends with prolific Jews such as Kurt Weill and Franz Werfel while living in German. The most common explanation is that Orff simply took advantage of his popularity among both sides and used it to make money, and an interesting example of this can be seen in Frankfurt when Orff was documented in taking a commission to rewrite Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream score. He later denied this when the Allied powers were determining his employment status after the war ended. By believing his lies, his status was made “Gray-Acceptable”, and made him eligible for work in the Allied military government. Another way Orff’s employment status was hazy during the war was his actual employment in the Nazi regime. For multiple years, he was awarded a job composing music for the Hitler Youth and teaching music. He tailored the curriculum and music to align with the Nazi ideals, stressing folk music and emphasizing the negative impacts of jazz and atonality.

Finally, the most ambiguous part of Carmina Burana is the music itself and the undertones presented within the score and text. The title translates to Songs of Beuren (a Benedictine Monastery in Bavaria). The entire scenic cantata contains a total of 24 songs set to music, the text itself came mainly from the Burana Codex, a compilation of medieval poetry, speaking of sin, passion, lust, and even gambling and drinking. This is the first layer of of confusion as to why the Nazi’s used it as propaganda. The reason ties into a deeper meaning below the surface. The music contains many folk melodies and dance rhythms making it very easy to listen to. It also describes pastoral images of the forest and the Earth in a Wagnerian manner similar to that of the Ring Cycle. Hitler was a supporter and fan of Wagner’s music because it appealed to his ideology of the ancient forest and timeless German landscape for the perfect Aryan soldiers. While this was obvious to Hitler and the Nazi’s, it was not obvious to everyone, and Orff never clarified what his intent behind the piece was. In the end it seems like Orff was just an opportunist who slyly got away with appeasing both sides of the war depending on who was in power.

In quite a different situation and a different time, Colin Kaepernick has been doing quite the opposite of Orff in his stand against standing for the anthem. While Orff shied away from the fact that he was potentially part Jewish and still made money off of the Nazi’s when he might not have believed in their ideas, Kaepernick has taken a stand against the ideas he disagrees with and openly risks his career and public image for it. Perhaps Orff had a little more on the line, but racism in America now has become violent, so perhaps Kaepernick is risking more now than ever.

With the vast quantity of recorded music, now in an ever more accelerated pace of expansion with the music sharing sites such as Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and technology (logic, ableton, pro tools) in place to quickly download, move, and tamper with audio files, the question arises, is there any point to creating new sounds or composing new pieces, of utilizing analog sources to create familiar sounds and songs of all too familiar character? The catalog of recorded material is already so great that it would take thousands of lifetimes to listen to it in its entirety, but perhaps even more exciting or intimidating are the countless ways in which to alter and create entirely new purely from this great catalog.

 

While the radical idea of all modern music being entirely created from past records hasn’t taken hold, sampling in fact entered into the mainstream years ago and has remained there today. For example the music of artists like Kendrick Lamar includes samples, and his new album is on the billboard top 200. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the music on the billboard 200 includes samples, as samples are ingrained into the way a lot of pop music (primarily black music) is produced. While the process and utilization of sampling has changed, its popularity has remained constant in changing populations for roughly 40 years.

 

This idea to create music purely or partially from previously recorded material began in the late 1940s with a man named Pierre Schaeffer. He spliced together and looped different tapes together to create music. Schaeffer’s believed that classical music began as an abstraction that was later produced as audible music. He strove to start with “concrete” sounds and late abstract them into music. This began the term “musique concrete”.

This process of tape loop sampling was taken up by a wide range of artists from minimalists like Terry Riley to people like John Cage to jamaican dub producers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. All of whom utilized tape recordings in their own unique and preconditioned musical language.

 

In the 1960s a new process of sampling emerged, this was digital sampling. The most notable early samplers were the Mellotron, the Fairlight CMI, and later the Akai MPCs. The digital samplers took pre recorded sounds into an interface which could be played with ease; the musician could play and sample he or she want to with the push of a button. The earliest innovators with this new technology were bands like Yellow Magic Orchestra and Big Audio Dynamite.https://www.dawsons.co.uk/blog/the-sampler-a-history-in-5-landmarks

Sampling however became most widespread and popular not in synth based pop music but in hip hop. In fact, sampling has been engrained in hip hop from the beginning, hip hop has a history not of analog or digital instruments, but of utilizing turntables and samplers to create music from pre-recorded sounds. The beats in popular hip hop from the 70s to around the mid 200s centered around break beatsl; beats taken from isolated drum sections of funk songs and looped. For example, the isolated drum beat from the James Brown song “Funky Drummer” has been sampled countless times in both hip hop and jamaican drum and bass and jungle music.

Not only were break beats sampled though, hip hop producers looking for melody and harmony as well as good bass lines turned to whatever they had in their record collection in order to create good music derived from a patchwork of previously recorded material.   

Today sampling is more fluid and there are mountains sampling software. Altering the sample is also very easy- there is software for it. At this point one finds that as a composer it’s equally acceptable to be fluent in the language of theory as it is to be fluent in the language of the sample.

 

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/albumsbands-who-use-lots-of-samples

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)

http://120years.net/musys-and-mouse-audio-synthesis-language-peter-grogono-untied-kingdom-1965/

On V-Picks and Why They Are Overrated 

By Garrett Mader 

 

The pick, or more formally plectrum, is a small, generally triangular object that a guitarist, banjoist, or mandolinist holds in/attaches to their dominant-hand to strike their guitars’ strings and create sound from the instrument. Picks date back to the start of recorded history, with writings about music from ancient greece recounting that Lyres had picks attached to them by a string(https://www.premierguitar.com/articles/25204-the-surprisingly-long-history-of-the-guitar-pick).Those picks were made of ivory, bone, or wood, while since approximately 1922 the most common material for picks has been celluloid (http://surfpick.com/history/). Today the market for picks is massive and varied from brand to brand. For the purpose of this blog, however, I would like to narrow in on V-Picks.

 

V-picks are the creation of amatuer guitarist Vinni Smith (v-picks.com/v-picks-about-us/). They are produced in Nashville, TN and Modesto, CA. They’re made sheets of acrylic instead of celluloid, giving them a sleek, glossy look, and smooth feel. Acrylic is essentially a tough plastic used for windows, taillights, and bulletproof “glass”. For a brief chemistry lesson, Acrylic sheets are made by “reacting a monomer, such as methyl methacrylate, with a catalyst,” such as organic peroxide (madehow.com/Volume-2/Acrylic-P lastic.html). I discovered a video on Youtube called “How It’s Made-V-Picks”, in which some fans of these picks visited Vinni in his home and recorded him making a pick. The process is as follows; Vinni takes a sheet of acryllic covered with evenly-spaced V-Picks logos/labels into a laser cutting machine. The laser cutter cuts the acrylic into pick-shapes around the text. The rest of the process is done by hand-a point of pride in V-pick advertising. Vinni takes a pick cutout and puts it to a grindstone to craft the edges to be smoother. After this the pick is too hot to continue working with, so Vinni takes it to his backyard and leaves it in his dog’s water bowl to cool down for a few mins. Once its cooled he dries it on his shirt then puts a hydrogen flame, the clearest known combustible he says, to it to take away the roughness from the grindstone and the V-Pick is finished.  

 

A V-Pick is more than just the sum of it’s materials and processes though. Guitar-gear culture is a sprawling universe full of kingpin brands (fender stratocasters and telecasters are arguably as standard as TV sets in the American home) as well as niche corners, and V-picks are a relatively new phenomenon (the company started in 2004) that has quickly made itself a widely esteemed product (wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Picks_Guitar_Picks)*. There is a certain reverence for them in the guitar-iverse that doesn’t exist for most products. I believe this is derived from their unique, shiny look and the fact that most people believe they’re made of glass, which seems much classier than plastic. That last bit comes from my own experience; the first several people to mention V-Picks to me all told me they are made of glass. There is also some celebrity endorsement-Carlos Santana and Billy Gibbons have both officially endorsed V-Picks as their main pick brand. Not to downplay the contributions of those guys, who do you know who’s all-time favorite guitarist is Gibbons or Santana? V-Picks are also pricier than your average pick, with a single pick costing upwards of 5 dollars. I believe the elevated price, general esteem, and celebrity endorsement are as much parts of the product as the acrylic and the logo at this point. When a guitarist buys a V-Pick they aren’t just buying a pick but they are buying what hundreds of youtube/guitar forum commenters have told them, and buying the idea that because they are paying more for a pricy, celebrity-endorsed pick that they are buying a more high-end product that will make them a better player in record-time. In the aforementioned Youtube video Vinni himself says of one of his products “I guarantee you this pick will make you a better player”.

 

I personally think V-Picks are sorely overrated. To me they generally don’t give your sound much mid-range or warmth, and they got scratched up fairly quickly when I tried them which made them sound worse. I respect that some people swear by them, but I believe that they have fallen under the hype surrounding them in the guitar-world. I do respect V-Picks for the brand they’ve created for themselves and the esteem they’ve created for their product, but  when it comes to picks I think it’s always imperative to remember that some of the most iconic guitar solos in the world were recorded by Brian May of Queen using a sixpence, so sometimes simpler is better.

 

*I understand that generally Wikipedia is not a reliable source, but the V-Picks website explicitly refers those interested in their product to the wiki page, giving it legitimacy in my eyes.  

 

Links to Media

 

http://www.guitarmania.co.uk/ekmps/shops/guitarmania/images/assorted-medium-guitar-picks-plectrum-pk-of-12-for-acoustic-or-electric-210-p[ekm]300×229[ekm].jpg

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urywl-Jy4yo

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71eysAIzVAL._SL1000_.jpg