The Urban Pulse

Often a landscape's sounds influence its music.  It's well documented how the early Sun Records artists derived their chugging rhythms from the clack of passing rail cars.  Think Johnny Cash, Elvis, Roy Orbison, or Carl Perkins who more often used the guitar as an instrument of rhythm rather than one of melody.  If you delve further into the American songbook, you can find pieces like Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold the Ground" - a sparse, blues adaptation of a 1700s hymn.  Likely due to Johnson's blindness, the piece evokes the sounds of unimpeded wind and rolling pastoral prairies of the rural, Central Texas landscape where he was from.

Central Texas, March 2012

for a fresh take on fusion jazz/funk, try On the Corner
Columbia Records, 1971

But what about cities?  Would it be sensory overload to process their sonic chaos into something resembling a musical experience?  Miles Davis' oft-panned On the Corner album deconvolutes the sounds of traffic, the scrapes of steel and concrete, the urge of the urban sidewalk into a vital pulse.  Though Davis plays very little on the album, it's successful in transforming city sounds into a throbbing, insistent groove - reflective of the dynamic times in late 1960s-early 1970s Harlem (a region noted for dynamic times)  - involving a highly mobilized political and social culture, high style, and heroin. It's one of my favorite works by Davis.

DNA on DNA No More Records, 2004

Farther down the island, the late 1970s sonic art form called No-Wave emerged out of Manhattan's lower east side.  Differentiating itself from the punk music scene that was happening in the same neighborhoods at roughly the same time, No-Wave artists seemed to be responding to urban aesthetics rather than challenging socio-cultural norms.  DNA, one of the scene's better known groups, recorded "Grapefruit" a piece that culls the drones, grumbles, and squeals of the city.  Amid skewed time signatures, the guitars' atonal noises become pitched subway brakes, the trapped, droning echoes of diesel trucks, the voices of the passing crowds whose collective din resemble a continuous, indiscernible mumble.

ESG: A South Bronx Story, (Universal Sound, 2000) is a
strong compilation, but for the band's best recording
check out Come Away With Me, Fire Records, 1983

By far my favorite story of urban music is the story of ESG from the projects of South Bronx.  A band composed of the Scroggins sisters equipped with instruments paid for by their mother as a means to divert them from the vices of the streets below, ESG (Emerald, Sapphire, Gold - each sister's birthstone) is a gumbo of polyrhythm and minimal funk.  If you've heard any Hip-Hop over the past 20 years, chances are you've heard their music sampled countless times.  I spoke with Renee Scroggins last year about ESG's music and its deep connection to South Bronx.  While I'll push off the nut and bolts of the interview (and her enchanting stories therein) onto the book, I will briefly relay a magical story she conveyed.

- It began in the summer when she was a girl.  Their apartment had no air conditioning, so at night she and her sisters slept with the windows open.  From the park many floors below, the sounds of the street musicians reached up into their window.  The instruments they played were plastic tubs, spoons, and coke bottles.  Each summer night Renee was treated to this concert as she drifted off to sleep.  She acknowledged the beautiful sensation of the rhythms breathing into her dream space.  What came out, years later with the care and support of their mother, was the singular and infectious sound of ESG.

Renee, Valerie, Marie Scroggins
photo courtesy of Renee Scroggins