ON AMERICAN MUSIC AND ITS ROOTS

S: I think after you've been playing for a while, or even listening for a while, if you care enough about what you're playing or listening to,you start looking back to where the music came from. Like, where'd this music COME from? This guy played it, but where did he get the idea? You go back to the guy before and just keep going back.

When I came into my music thing. My cultural preconditioning at the time when I was impressionable was rock n' roll, and I dug it, right, so I'd listen to rock n' roll and hang out with people who listened to rock n' roll, and then, it's like oh, these guys got this from blues, and then you're like...so after years of listening to rock n' roll, I started listening to some jazz. And when I'd listened to enough jazz (how much is enough I don't know), but I listened to enough to realize that a lot of the good jazz was very heavily African influenced.

So I skipped way back to African music and those cultures back far enough in time that I watched that music turn into blues which kind of then turned into this rock n' roll stuff. All the music that I think we like---popular music---be it R & B or Motown or rock n' roll or rap or jazz or whatever...in America the music is all straight from Africa and you can't really come to grips with our musical culture...where we're at with our whole music trip without going back and seeing that it's all from Africa. Eric Clapton...Bonnie Raitt...or the Grateful Dead you know.

I mean, fuck, if you're into the Grateful Dead---what are you listening to really? Some blues and blue-grass influenced stuff which was obviously heavily influenced by African music and you're listening to small band improvisation and the small band improvisation that preceded the Dead was Jazz. That's where it's coming from. The Dead are in that tradition of small band improvisation. It's not Italian polka music. It's not fucking opera. It's not Indian. It's not Native American. Lots and lot of great improvisational music.. I mean Lowell George. Little Feat? He did not get his concept of intonation from listening some blues guitar playing. I mean his intonation is so good it could only be based on some other culture's ideas of how you intonate stuff. He didn't play any slop at all. So musically, I think it's significant to recognize this about the roots of the music we are enjoying---how heavily influenced it is by Africa. I'm not sure why. But it is. :)

Influences Steve On Improv