Writings About Music

Sensational Super Sessions

I found much of value here – this is an impressive take on music today. My belief is that American jazz superseded European classical music as the preeminent Western classical music of the time from roughly 1940 to 1970, followed by various forms of rock and pop doing the same to jazz beginning around the time of the Beatles, with some overlapping of dates, of course. After roughly 1970, things are truly up in the air! In addition, the evolution of Indian classical music brought by Ravi Shankar and his followers greatly inseminated both composers and improvising musicians in the West beginning during the reign of jazz, rock and pop, demonstrating an intellectual and expressive domain second to known. These, I feel, are the reasons why questions of genre have been obfuscated, and individual artists today draw upon myriad pan-global classical traditions. At the same time, the true significance of American jazz, rock and pop, and Indian classical music, is often unconsidered or unacknowledged beyond false subjugation for culturally indoctrinated racial reasons, referring to the African American origins of jazz, rock, and pop, and the equally obvious South Asian origins of Indian classical music, over aesthetic merit.

- Michael Robinson, September 2017, Kula, Maui

 

© 2017 Michael Robinson All rights reserved

 

Michael Robinson is a Los Angeles-based composer and writer (musicologist).