Archive for the ‘Celebration Iowa’ Category
My Quest for Music without Soul or African Influence
I have been searching for some time for a way to get in touch with my roots as a white person by finding a musical form that is purely white and not influenced by African music and especially soul. Now, this is not racist. In fact, African-American influence has done so much for music that it’s very difficult to find a musical art form that remains exclusively white and not influenced by other African culture. Now, it isn’t true that white people do not have soul. Somebody like say, Van Morrison has a lot of soul. Here is Jon Cleary, a piano player giving an example of a white guy with soul:
He’s not making fun of black musicians or trying to sound black. He simply is somebody with a lot of soul. Unfortunately, the African-American influence is very clear in his piano playing and his singing. My quest to find a whiter more Caucasian musical style brought me far away from the Creole influence of Jon Cleary’s New Orleans to America’s heartland. It is here that Celebration Iowa takes incredibly talented high school students and shows them how to sing and perform while removing all remnants of distracting soul from their music. I believe I have found my cultural heritage with Celebration Iowa 2007′s performance of We Built this City:
