Skip to main content

Swing Out Sister - Certain Shades of Limelight

Strong trembling sounds, melisma, changing the note of a syllable while it is being sung, wavy intonations, elongated notes, long pauses between sentences, glissandos, and a certain nasality are characteristic features of reciting and singing in the Islamic world... Middle Eastern singing is tense sounding and has a harsh, throaty, nasal tone, with a certain flatness.

Unsurprisingly, music was among the cultural exchanges that took place between North Africa and the western Sahel, defined here as the area stretching from Senegal/Gambia to northern Nigeria. Music in North Africa was distinctly different from music in the Middle East, having been influenced by the indigenous black populations living in the southern parts of the Maghreb and later by non Muslim victims of the trans Saharan slave trade. Often employed as musicians, these enslaved West Africans brought their music and rhythms to North Africa. In western Sahel, especially in the urban zones, Muslims adopted, adapted, and transformed the Islamic musical style. Much cross fertilization occurred on both sides of the desert.

In the Muslim areas of West Africa, the lower caste of professional musicians attached to courts or wealthy families developed a repertoire of genealogies, praise songs, and epics. They sang solo, or sometimes in groups, in a declamatory style, with wavy inflections, melisma, humming, tremolo or vibrato, and throbbing or quavering effects. This style, centuries old, continues to be heard in contemporary music. Professional singers accompany themselves or are accompanied by musicians playing string instruments, such as lutes, one string fiddles, the kora, a twenty one string harp, and balafons, xylophones.


Swing Out Sister - Certain Shades of Limelight
  • Released on: Where Our Love Grows album
  • Released: 2004
  • Genre: Electronic, Jazzdance


"The group presently comprises Andy Connell and Corinne Drewery, though it began as a trio in the United Kingdom, formed by Connell and Martin Jackson in 1985."

See previous Song of the Day

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Moondog - Behold

The history of jazz has been one of fusion. Its musicians and composers have continually drawn upon a huge range of different musics to create the rich and diverse tapestry that is world jazz today. Jazz is an evolving tradition of music making. And how often, in the life stories of individual jazz musicians, do we see these same patterns operating at microcosm? The richness of Turkish music and culture sometimes seems at odds with its turbulent and cruel history. In 1979... the country suffered its third military take over in thirty years... Every kind of music was in Turkey at that point. But it was not appreciated. To understand the culture of the country, with those three military takeovers, Turkey could not go anywhere. Musically, it was very difficult. But things were beginning to happen. Traditional Turkish music is essentially monophonic, rich in melody and rhythm but with little by way of harmony. The contrast with western music, with its beautiful harmonies but rhythmic weakn...

Veronica Swift - A Little Taste

There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.  Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing, other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of Amer...

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday Genre: RnB Released in: 1984 Duration: 5:14 "The Gap Band was most successful when working with producer Lonnie Simmons, with four consecutive gold records. Their party train soon slowed to a stop. They reformed in the 90s and occasionally toured and attempted a comeback album." See Previous Song of the Day