Music and Us

 Alright it's the moment you've all been waiting for, I'm gonna talk about Japanese jazz fusion. 

BUT FIRST !!!

I wanna save the best for last, and I want to start this blog In 19th century Brazil. This is the musical style of Choro. Choro is said to be the father of samba and the grandfather of bossa nova, and it's very easy to realize that very fast. the word choro translates to lament, but a lot of the music is pretty upbeat and cheery. Typical ensembles involve a flute, guitar, and a cavaquinho, and sometimes the Brazilian tambourine called the pandeiro. Other instruments have joined the fray such as the trombone, accordion, mandolin. It's improv based and it just sounds really cool. Here I have a choro ensemble made up of all plucked chordophones, and a pandeiro. This specific recording features a mandolin too !

I found women hitting drums ! Traditional Jamaican music is pretty similar to traditional African music. A heavy focus on percussion, call and response vocals, and the dancing is hugely important. This recording was really fun to watch for me, I liked watching the dancers spin around and them holding their dresses out and making it look all flowy was also really cool. For a minute I thought it was gonna be percussion only, but I also really enjoyed their singing. It's fun to listen to !

Alright, now we're on to modern music, this will be fun.

This is a pick that honestly might not even count. But I want to talk about the music of Video Games. It's possible that some of you reading this have gone your whole life without even touching video games. One thing i very seriously doubt despite that, is that none of you have ever heard music from a video game. The music of video games is incredibly important to so many people, and many people today are taking their favorite songs from games they played as a child, and remixing those songs into another style, and making it their own. This is very similar to what happened to the great american songbook and jazz. There is a huge community of people today who make jazz covers of video game music online, while it isnt the norm yet it's definitely approaching a more mainstream audience. I included a video of Carlos Eiene (insaneintherainmusic) playing some music from Super Mario 64. I also included a video of the original song, so you can see how he adapted it. 

Alright here it is y'all ! Japanese Jazz fusion, Japan was hugely inspired by jazz (as everyone should be) and this stretches even beyond this genre, it bleeds into Japanese City Pop, another great genre which is much more "mainstream". I truly can't get enough of this stuff, everytime i find a new band or recording I just loop it arguably way too many times, it's one of my all time favorite genres. I'm noticing now that I don't really have the words for it, so i'm gonna include a few different recordings from different people and let the music speak for itself. Please enjoy, this stuff is really fun.

(yes that is a giant surfboard guitar)

Thank y'all so much for taking the time to read my blog, I really hope y'all enjoyed the music, and I even found some extra to play y'all out ! This is another instance of video game music being adapted into jazz, but in a different way, it popped up on my youtube recommended right after I finished finding all the music, but it's a great recording so I wanna include it anyways, so im going to. Thank you !!!!!!!!