Warning: I am not a musician. Many years ago, my Latvian piano teacher told me I had the musical skills of a potato. Had I at the time known that Latvia worships the potato, and her comment was in fact the highest praise she could offer, I might be doing something very different with my life right now.
But I had a thought on music, one that’s probably very intuitive: different cultures produce different music.
But even within styles that originated from a very specific geographical / cultural environment, like rockabilly, rock and roll, swing, jazz, etc., they mutate dramatically upon encountering a new culture.
For my example, I’ll use ska, a brassy style of rock&roll-ish music which came from 1950s Jamaica. Here is a classic example of original Jamaican styled ska:
And here’s what happened when it came to Russia:
While it’s a bit early for me to form a conveniently sized theory of musical nationality, and there’s doubtless many more examples I can bring up from different genres, I thought it worthwhile to post my thoughts, because for some strange reason some people want to hear them out.
What do you think about this? What are your imagined characters of different cultures’ interpretations of musical styles?
From the City on a Hill 