Music: Queen Of My Soul -OR- Who Am I? (Part 4)

(suggested music pairing:  Queen Of My Soul - Average White Band)

A few weeks ago, I had a friend ask me about the influence of music in my life, in life in general, and why and how we as humans are drawn to music. As I may have hinted, and as those who know me know, music has and still does have a major influence in my life. This topic cannot be adequately explored in one post, so this post will be more of an exploration of what music means to me. I’ll attempt to make broader connections with music in later posts.

As I wrote in my Father’s Day post, I “inherited” my base love of music from my dad. My dad had a huge record collection, which is direct predecessor to my CD collection. My dad was of course into the Motown sound of the 60’s, but he was also into the socially-conscious performances of Marvin Gaye, Earth Wind & Fire, Sly & The Family Stone, James Brown, and Donny Hathaway. My dad also liked some of the classic rock sounds of The Doobie Brothers and Steppenwolf. Finally, my dad was into a lot of the fusion jazz of the 70’s, such as Grover Washington Jr and Wes Montgomery. On top of that, my maternal grandfather and his brother (my grand-uncle) performed for decade in a band, the Verda Tones. The band featured Cape Verdean traditional and jazz music. My grandfather played the upright bass; my grand-uncle played the maracas. Growing up, on  Saturday afternoon when my mom worked, my dad always had his records on, or we would watch the music trifecta of Soul Train, Dance Fever, and Solid Gold.  Music was always on in our house, or in the car.  To this day, I am still very much the same way.  The MP3 player is the greatest invention since sliced bread! I have my MP3 player with me at home, at work, and on the road – it’s is probably on and playing an average of seven hours a day, every day of the week.  

Then, my parents had two friends in particular who were also big into music, and at times they performed music. One was my “Uncle Bob” who was also big into jazz. Whenever the two families would get together, he would inevitably sit down at the piano and just start riffing, just improving off the top of his head, which I found fascinating. Then there was my “Uncle Jim,” who was a member of a doo-wop group in the 1950’s, and wrote a book chronicling his experiences:  Hear Today! Here to Stay!: A Personal History of Rhythm and Blues, by James A. McGowan.  He and my dad had the same music tastes, and (again) inevitably the conversations they had during visits would be centered at times around music.

Next, as I was encouraged to play an instrument in grade school, I chose the trumpet, and stuck with it through graduation. There was something about playing and performing that really resonated within me; the peak of which was being able to create and perform a pair of improv jazz solos in the HS jazz band.  To be able to follow instinct and play notes and rhythms that just came to me, and to hear that what I created fit in with the rest of the song, was powerful for me.

Finally, growing up in a rural-turned-suburban town, the “music of my youth” in addition to the above was very wide and varied. There was another family friend that came down from Queens, NY, to visit once a year, with a kid just a couple of years older than me.  He always brought with him the latest New York City rap music. There was group of guys I hung out with who got into the early Gangsta Rap stages of NWA and Dr. Dre. Then, my main group of guys, lifelong friends, all brought different music tastes together and they all merged into our combined tastes of 80’s metal (Motley Crue, Van Halen), Classic Country (Charlie Daniels, Merle Haggard), Classic Rock (ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd), Blues, Old School Rap, and true “road-trip R&B” (Chuck Berry). This was all in high school.  

And when I went away to college, my college roommate and best friend at school was into Techno music, and we went clubbin’ quite a bit – cue footage of “A Night At The Roxbury.” My close friends in college were into some of the alternative music of the 80’s and 90’s, and I picked that up as well. 

But all the while, deep down inside, the influence of jazz was still there and growing. It was in college that I first started having the opportunity to see some of the big names in jazz:  Dave Brubeck, George Benson, Wynton Marsalis.  I had a chance one summer to see Spyro Gyra perform in an outdoor concert and was totally awestruck.  

So, in short, I have a wide, wide, unique range of music tastes.  My music tastes are a combination of my inheritance growing up, plus the memories of whatever “soundtracks” were playing during the positive experiences of my life. I believe this is true for a lot of people.  I also believe that there is just something built within us as humans that are just drawn to music. How often have we seen babies at a very young age  that react to music, whether it’s playing a little music box to soothe a tired little one to sleep, or watching a baby “dance” whenever happy music is played? There are all kinds of studies about the influence of music in the positive development of babies as music taps into that “gene” built into all of us at some level.

But for me, there’s something deeper…I love the art of expression in general. I love when people are able to express themselves in creative ways. My tastes in music, which does include some mainstream music but also includes a lot of lesser-known stuff, has one thing in common – each performance seems to hold some level of creative performance within it. Even in some of the vulgarities of Gangsta Rap, there is still a level of creativity, of performance, of putting pieces of culture together in a creative way to connect to an audience – whether you agree with the type of connection or not.

When it comes to music, I am attracted to how the different elements of each song interact to each other. I pay attention to more than just harmony and melody; I pay attention to the deeper details of a song – the instrumentation, the backgrounds, little unique fills and phrasing and counter-play, etc. If there are lyrics, I tend to ignore the actual meaning of the words, but instead look at the poetic rhythm of the words chosen, the vocal inflections, and how the voice or voices are another musical instrument.  

And this is truly the essence of me:   I am drawn to taking an object, whether concrete or abstract, and figuring out how that object as a whole is related to the parts that make it up, and then look at the parts that make it up, and connect that back to the object as a whole. It’s what I do as a career in Accounting – taking a journal entry and tracing that all the way up to the total company financial statements’ view of the health of that company; and then taking that financial statement and breaking it down to its parts. As humans, we are single whole individuals, made up of a collection of experiences and influences, and in my opinion, life is understood by taking the whole of us, breaking it down to that detailed list of events, and then placing those back together to explain each of us. Even the human race, our society, our community, can be viewed as a whole that exists as a collection of many different and unique individuals, whom for some reason have connected in a specific way to form that community. This concept of the whole being the sum of its parts, and the combination of parts becoming a whole, is the running theme in this blog – the connectedness of us. I’ve been exploring this in writing, which in and of itself can be expressed the same way – a connection of words and phrases, placed together in a specific way, to create a post, or a poem, or a single item. Even my photography is the same thing…looking at a subject, and finding the right combination of foreground and background elements, which are in focus and which aren’t, what is included in a shot and what is excluded, from what angle, lighting, color; all of which are combined to create a single picture.  

When it all fits together, whether a song, a blog post, a photo, a person, or a community – when it fits, when all is in harmony – is there anything better?