Re-Creating Paul Bowles, the Other, and the Imagination by Chandarlapaty Raj;

Author:Chandarlapaty, Raj;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Thus, the artist’s moment of peculiar antipathy was expressive and creative. Written Western music such as jazz or rock express the panoply of feelings and voices, a moment of supreme individuation that was shared by artist and audience through song, lyrics, and improvisation. What is more contentious is the instruments’ simple arrangement to illustrate sonic leverage and agency: Davis is puzzled, but the learning widens his grasp of playing and the effect of new lyrical styles. Indeed, the artist’s growth or stretching becomes a foil from which preliterate music could change perspectives at the critical level: within this rapidly changing context, Western pop would adopt an astonishing range of history-bound, and therefore extinct, music forms that possessed no true agency.

Bowles’s 1965 recording of Jilala featured a near-complete recording of occult ritual and so poses a unique example of Afro-ethno-musicology, an ebullient moment that advanced heterogeneous transformation through the art of sound. Mrabet, quick to claim credit for the recording, asserted that it was he, and not Bowles, who arranged the performances. The series of songs include yodeling, drumming, and the use of percussion instruments including the darbouka and the bendir, and flutes such as the raspy and discordant rhaita. Jilala suggests a roundly transcendental essence, abandoning any kind of vocal refinement or lyrics except for brief interludes of chanting. Still, the flutes and vocal segments initiate and continue the spiritual moment, pushing it forward in a moment of lyrical (human) into its powerful and rapid supersession by the rhythmic (supernatural). At many points in this recording, the flute playing appears fragile, transitory, and momentary: the drumming, having been keyed up, builds a monolithic and powerful pentatonic scale of thirds, fourths and fifths, along with scales performed in a muted form analogous to that of jazz drummers alternating between the snare drum and toms.

Again, the assessment of Africology would cause us to recognize jdab’s special, and maybe crucial, status, and the ideality of special, closed communities. In contrast, the taraab music of southern Africa includes the use of darboukas and tambourines, yet subjugated them to songs and lyrics, and maintains a distinctly social history that conformed to the realism of everyday, nonspiritual content. Fargion states: “The word taraab comes from the Arab abstract noun tarab meaning ‘joy, pleasure, delight, rapture, amusement, entertainment, music,’”[119] Of the diverse and lyric-oriented music that is more strictly secular and Arab in its historical form, he adds: “Music is not notated. Poems are written down in the club’s book and often the first note of the melody is also given. For the rest, musicians rely on memory.”[120] Bowles first anticipated the supernatural form’s basic revelation through Westerners’ complete incomprehension of it in The Sheltering Sky, when Port and Kit hear a drum gathering outside their Bou Noura pension.[121]

If anything, the drumming rhythms and form of pieces in Jilala illustrated sophistication and unmediated focus on the supernatural. The drumming is firmly entrenched in this pattern, with the darboukas pushing them forward and the yodeling, which evinces even greater speed.

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