So we're going to do something very different today and talk about our first non-classical musician: Manu Dibango who died today of coronavirus. One of the truly great creators of Afro-Jazz, which is one of the truly epochal movements of music in the late 20th century, in many ways picking up the reins from Miles and Coltrane when Jazz began a long decadent period in the late 60s that it only seems to be coming out of recently. Decadence can, of course, produce fascinating things, but there was a time when decadence was taken to mean the breakdown of consensus, so even if so much modern jazz, like so much modern classical, is not indulgent or self indulgent as so many critics claim, instant communication will never be its great strength.
But the rhythms and timbres of Afro Jazz, of Manu Dibango, Fela Kuti, Hugh Maskela, Geoffrey Oryema, Mulatu Astatke, Abdullah Ibrahim, communicates instantly. Is it the jazz tradition, gumboed in the 300 year American tradition, and then re-connected to the folk roots of its origins in a joyful reunion.
What I'm about to do is so heterodoxical that it might piss off some people, and after I do it, I'll try to say something else that pisses off everybody else...
Dibango's most famous piece, Soul Makossa, was Billboard No. 1 in 1972. It was, in fact, one of the first disco hits, in the era just before Disco became the most evil music that ever took a shit on America. But this, and so much else by Dibango, is so much better than the crap we generally call dance music in America. More lively, more complex timberally, and seemingly without any use of drum machine, rhythmically precise in ways that defy human mechanics, and therefore could be exciting as very few dance musicians ever could be. But I prefer Sun Explosion. The precision of the musicianship on here is literally awesome. This is 'light' music, there's no question, not too different in its way from Offenbach or Rossini. But light music, like comedy, is if anything harder to do well, because there is no gravitas to give the subject weight. The enjoyment is provided by the pure dexterity of the performer, and they have to work literally every day for decades to be skilled enough to do it right.
I was a semi-pro non-classical musician for a number of years, and while I was something resmbling an artistic populist before I went in, I came out of the experience a hardened back into artistic elitism. The sentiment of artistic elitism has absolutely nothing to apologize for. The right to appreciate whatever music you want is of course inviolate and remains inviolate in all circumstances, but to believe that all music is equal is not democratic, it is cultural libertarianism, directly connected to willful incuriosity about ideas and history which has currently brought the country to the precipice of what is potentially worst event to befall the entire American experiment. Democracy only works with an educated populace, and the cultural incuriosity of modern Americans is connected at the umbilical cord to its incuriosity about science, and its deep curiosity about authoritarianism. In previous generations the ignorant public could be explained away as having no opportunity for better education. Today, it can only be explained as willful ignorance that is completely intentional, a dodging of responsibility to learn human thought so that the world may not fall under the spell, yet again, to destructive thoughts.
But we in the 'high' world of artistic canons must do our part in a world where interconnection is exponentially expanded to admit a hundred times more great art (and it is great) into our sacred canons, and in music, these names and pieces are to be found both in the traditional 'classical' forms, and in what was until now thought of as popular music.
Is Manu Dibango as great as Beethoven? Of course not. Are there non-classical musicians who are? There are a number about which you could at least make the argument, even if the argument isn't necessarily true, the achievement is such that it would be a valid belief. And we will talk about them in due time.
This is music that has become classical. It is most certainly light classical music, in its own way in the spirit of Arthur Sullivan and Johann Strauss, but the quality speaks for itself.
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