polishcomedy -> RE: Anoushka Shankar , raga flamenco music . (Nov. 17 2011 18:53:20)
|
You guys just reminded me why I stopped coming here. I just caught wind of this album. I'm a huge fan of Indian Carnatic Music and of Anoushka Shankar. Thought I'd come to the forum and see if the album had gotten any buzz here. I'm quite disappointed with the reaction. It seems the stench of elitism is still ripe. I don't care for "fakemenco", either. However, fakemenco is generally a guy who noodles around with a harmonic minor scale over some Spanishy sounding chords and rhythms and passes it off as flamenco. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. No one goes from listening to Metallica to Paco Pena. There generally is a gradual acclimation to the style. Maybe the listener hears a passage in a Metallica song that drawn him into the "Eastern sound". He then may discover Strunz & Farrah or the DeLucia/DiMeola/McLaughlin albums. Gradually his tastes adapt as he is more welcoming of strict flamenco. In any event, this is not the case with the magnificent Indialucia album (anyone who doesn't like that album/group should be hung, drawn, and quartered, in my opinion) or with Anoushka's new album. In these specific cases the artist has fully studied the respective styles with utmost diligence and respect, and deftly combined them in the most palatable way while still remaining true to both forms. It seems every forum I'm on has a group of traditionalists who scoff at the slightest deviation from their rigidly set narrow mindset of purity in the art. I love Carnatic music. There are literally thousands of albums by musicians playing Carnatic music, but guess what, they by and large all sound the same. I like Anoushka, because she is very diverse and is a big fan of other genres such as jazz and trance. She thus finds her own unique way of incorporating those elements while being careful not to totally water down the music. A true watering down are those lame yoga CD's and Indian dance music CD's that have a Sarangi playing off in the distance with some corny keyboard beat. Much is the same with flamenco. It seems on this board everyone is obsessed with every guitarist sounding the same and never venturing past a set of strict boundaries. Anything to the contrary is met with pessimism. I listen to a lot of forms of music and play a multitude of instruments. I'm on forums for all kinds of instruments, and unfortunately this attitude is exemplified on all of them. "This isn't country!!" "This isn't metal!!" "This isn't jazz!!" "This isn't bachata!!" I guess there's no real solution. /rant
|
|
|
|