BIG "Z" MUSIC I like to listen and to move about to the sounds of "zydeco" music. I can name it, specifically, largely because was, for so long, it remained, for me, strange,foreign-flavored - even flawed.
I didn't even know what it was called until fairly recently. How could I like a thing which seemed to be incomplete, raw, unfinished and ever-moving before my pursuit? Yet, today, when I hear it, see it being done, or, actually participate in the making of the thing, I hear, and have to deal with a tug of consciousness with which I must deal personally as it grabs at my inner being.
In some, strange way "Z" seems to be at the lower of things musical. It rates far down, if at all, with serious musical preferences lists,I'm sure, yet it has strange, compulsive
appeal for me - as if it were telling me "this is truly where
you are musically.
As is, I think, true in so many cases, the difference found in this and another type of musical composition, has a great deal to do with with instrumentation, too. Bluegrass -for instance - traditionally demands set selection of instrumentals. Zydeco, in like manner, demands certain physical equipment to remain authentic. There is always a fiddle, for instance, played by two names - a rollicking, jaunty fiddle at times and yet, as background coloring, violin sounds prevail. Players meld such styles change instinctively, often without being aware of doing either as a strict discipline. The soul of zydeco may well be in that subtle area - the mindset of the fiddle player. If so, it would be, I think and hold over from conventional Bluegrass and other folk music types.
A rhythm board is another requirement. This is, to some, a mundane aspect they had rather not see around because
it is a common,conventional home-use, corrugated metal wash board. Fancier styles are refashioned as a garish vest worn by the performer with brightly corrugated areas on rhythm panels. Th "instrument" provides a steady, easily acceptable beat which is part of zydecos structural makeup. It is played with thimble-tipped fingers and the ultimate result is a "mushy" sound which can be likened to the ultra-mod electronic imitations of a triple paradiddle sound from a well-touched snare drum. The sound has static edges but fluid entrails. While being, in reality, made up of parts it sounds as a unified segment background - a kind of slush not unlike a composer's use of a solid shelf of full chords upon which to rest a harmonically augmented lead line - thought of as being a melody or tune.
Zydeco exemplifies "corn" to many critics. That's an understandable feeling, I'd say, because it does, at times, resemble the "ticky-tacky-too" element heard by many earlier jazz forms of our l920's. With understanding of the social source of each type of music people get over such feelings of disgust.
Additional instrument requirement was added in the l840's when Germanic are developed the accordion.. It found
its windy way into zydeco bands as a small, mushy, modified,
version also know as a harmonium, a bandalore, a squeeze box, and some mis-named it completely by think it to be a concertina. The usual instruments so often seen today is limited to use, in the main, and we seldom see nothing other than an octave-and-half version always triggered by buttons to the left and right. Advanced models play in several major and minor keys.
The "accordion" and the fiddle share melodic duties and back each other. Other instruments may vary - six-strings guitars, mandolin, dulcimer, five-string banjo,reeds, bass viol any one of which can influence the overfall feel of a specific zydeco band to give it a "style". This variation, plus exceptional musicianship and technical abilities of many individuals so involved, keeps the genre awake and growing.
Even if "just for fun": listen in on this zydeco sound.
A.L.M. May 12, 2006 [c673wds]
