Skip to main content

Bennie Green - Cool Struttin

Today, young African Americans find strength in hip hop music, which I consider a modern evolution of the blues. Hip hop was born out of the same conditions that gave birth to the blues. Poor and disenfranchised black and brown youths were seeking ways to express their humanity amid poverty and abandonment. If the blues was our healing, today, hip hop is a more potent medicine meant to help cope with today’s societal struggles. The line that connects blues and hip hop is strong and clear.

It was not uncommon for me to perform Blues festivals as the only African American act on the bill. Many times I’d see major Blues events featuring acts that are not even blues, much less featuring African American acts. That’s not to say non African Americans shouldn’t participate in the celebration of blues culture, but imagine having a Celtic music festival without featuring a traditional Scottish, Irish or Welsh act or a mariachi music festival without a Mexican mariachi band. Ideally, blues festivals should be settings meant to celebrate and showcase the music and its rich culture. Admittedly, I made the mistake of thinking African Americans had abandoned the blues genre.


Bennie Green - Cool Struttin
  • Recording in: New York, NY
  • Genre: Jazz
  • Release on: September 27, 1960

"Bennie Green was featured on recordings made at the Newport in New York festival in the early '70s. He recorded as a leader for Jubilee, Prestige, Blue Note, Enrica, Time, and Vee Jay."

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