We cherish, sentimentalize, are humanized by these relationships-perhaps more zealously in the last half century, as anxieties about the loss of local authenticity run parallel with anxieties about globalization, and what sometimes seems the attenuation of the bounds of culture and kin. And yet we remain so charmed by the connections, by the genius of adobe in the desert, of mint mashed in liquid in muggy climes. Substitute any other human creation and you’ll find the same-food, dance, story, architecture, a child. The idea that music is affected by its place is so self-evident, it hardly seems worth commenting on. The middle-class suburban boy burns the contents of his wallet before vanishing into the Alaskan wilds. Not that rock stars are unique in trying to solve a formative problem with geography. Bob Dylan turned his body into a vessel for voices across time, space, class, gender-nearly the whole American saga coming through in chorus, save for the voices of Duluth, Minnesota, that northern town at the accusing end of Lake Superior’s finger: the birthplace to which his midnight deal at the crossroads forbade him ever return. The Rolling Stones went to Muscle Shoals to absorb some authentic Americana through their boot heels chilly London produces no such swamp. Music evolves within ecosystems just as birdsong adapts to its landscape: canopy birdsong is adapted to canopy foliage, savanna birds to grass.īut adaptation can also mean moving far away from the places that formed us. His own songs owed their je ne sais quoi to the intimate acoustics of scabby punk venues, rooms where lyrics were legible and percussion “concise.” He connects Gregorian chants to the vaultings in Gothic cathedrals and Mozart’s sound to the tapestry-softened rooms where he composed and performed. David Byrne of Talking Heads has made a study of spaces and their influence on the music that’s made within them. Musicians are always on the hunt for the real, and they’ll take it however it comes-whether by some happy accident in the recording process (wind frisking a tree outside, shouting voices on the street below) or by the capturing of ineffable ambience through skill, will, or divine intervention. Music evolves within ecosystems just as birdsong adapts to its landscape: canopy birdsong is adapted to canopy foliage, savanna birds to grass. “It’s about turning metal-the iron in the ground, the rust-into gold,” one interviewee says. The musicians grasp for description, for the secret ingredient in the mix. A Tsoyaha descendant tells a story about a singing woman in the Nunnuhsae, a river commonly identified on maps as the Tennessee maybe we should thank the singing river for holy vocals drawn from the throats of Mavis Staples, Paul Simon, Etta James, Otis Redding. Maybe it was the industrial exhalations of freight trains slowing through the rail yard that produced those rhythms on Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man.” Maybe we should credit the Alabama humidity for the sex and swelter of “Mustang Sally.” Jimmy Cliff, who made his records there, invokes the concept of special energy fields. In the 2013 documentary Muscle Shoals-so named for the little Alabama river village where much of the great American music of the twentieth century was recorded-musicians struggle to describe this very phenomenon. And sometimes the loudest sound is neither large nor small, but rather an atmosphere that permeates the range. Of course, sometimes the loudest sound comes from within, and is totally inaudible to the outside world: an earworm, a hitch in the heart’s giddyup, the overtures and castigations of the inner voice. In listening for the smallest sound, one made contact with the loudest sound, and all others between. A FORMER TEACHER of mine used to ask his students to close their eyes and “listen for the smallest sound.” To listen that closely, he explained, was a fast track to heightened awareness.
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