The past couple of weekends we've been back on the recording saddle. Much of the material has been from me in this early phase; the guide vocals, congas, and bass. The good thing about the playing hiatus was that return to playing music was very enjoyable, the downside being blisters and other incovenient non-tone-enhancing wounds.
We're a little behind schedule due mostly to fluctuations in (my) performance, but I hope to have caught up by this evening. Then it's to laying down the hand percussion and doing a mixdown to help with the arrangements for the melodic instruments. All very timely really, considering that I'm jetting off to Penang for Chinese New Year.
The other upside is that Jeremy's found the time to provide me with the timing tracks for the Salsa Ear Training tutorials on Congas indicating clave orientation and dancing to Rumba clave. I was glad to make them live yesterday; the material had been written for more than eight months; a measure of how busy we've been with the band.
I don't anticipate that there will be additions to the website at the same rapid pace in the near-to-mid term, now that the restructuring's finished. The strategic decision I took in positioning the content of the site has paid off, and I'm looking forward to filling in the current gaps before expanding it further.
Now, on to more music.
Loo Yen Yeo
Hi Loo Yeo,
ReplyDeleteI'm a student at a university in the U.S.A. and for a research paper, I was interested in researching the history of salsa. Judging from your website, I can see you've spent a lot of time researching this topic. The question I need to answer though is "Why should I study this? How will this help perfect me as a person? How will this knowledge allow me to reflect on the present?" So I'm actually wondering what your answer to those questions would be. Why did you spend all this time researching salsa history? I'm not looking for a whole essay as an answer to this question, just a few sentences. If you wouldn't mind posting something answering my question or just e-mailing me the answer, I would greatly appreciate it. My e-mail is carlym@student.franciscan.edu
Thank you!
Carly
I'll take each question in turn.
ReplyDelete"Why should I study this?"
For the dancer/musician, it adds a depth of understanding to your art that evolves it to becoming more than a mechanistic activity. If you agree that performance of an art is to illicit an emotional response, then this evolution is an essential part of the process.
For the not-yet-participant, the history of salsa is a compelling glimpse into another culture. And through this you can come to an undertanding of an other as well as your own.
"How will this help perfect me as a person?"
All the circumstances, all the conditions that brought this phenomenon to pass demonstrate the extremes of the human condition: brutality, resilience, cruelty, dignity. If anything, it will cause you to understand that humanity has its nobility and its flaws. This won't make you a perfect person, it will go some way to perfecting your understanding as to the nature of a person.
"How will this knowledge allow me to reflect on the present?"
It provides an elucidated context upon which some events of today can be juxtaposed and hopefully understood.