On his book Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz
Cover Interview of December 05, 2008
Lastly
I’d like the book to be seen as a love song of sorts to the immense achievements of Afro-Latin music. Its pervasive, and still invisible, presence in so much of everyday life in America is still not fully appreciated, I think, even though this state of affairs has finally begun to change. We are talking here about an extremely supple music, classical, serious, ecstatic, playful, operating in myriad genres performed everywhere from the street corners to the concert halls. Its enormous influence at all levels is still, even now, written out of most musical history books. But I see the book also as trying to establish that even enjoyment and leisure can be forms of protest when they bring us face-to-face with the clashing outlooks of former colonial encounters that are continually replayed in code, and at the level of musical form. People never entirely forget the traumas of the past. They are looking for salvation from the dreary pursuit of spoils. The African presence in the new world has found a way to live, and is profoundly ethical in its resistance to the big commercial now. In a world of religious extremes, it gives us a different kind of ritual – the rituals of secular pleasure.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
Lastly
I’d like the book to be seen as a love song of sorts to the immense achievements of Afro-Latin music. Its pervasive, and still invisible, presence in so much of everyday life in America is still not fully appreciated, I think, even though this state of affairs has finally begun to change. We are talking here about an extremely supple music, classical, serious, ecstatic, playful, operating in myriad genres performed everywhere from the street corners to the concert halls. Its enormous influence at all levels is still, even now, written out of most musical history books. But I see the book also as trying to establish that even enjoyment and leisure can be forms of protest when they bring us face-to-face with the clashing outlooks of former colonial encounters that are continually replayed in code, and at the level of musical form. People never entirely forget the traumas of the past. They are looking for salvation from the dreary pursuit of spoils. The African presence in the new world has found a way to live, and is profoundly ethical in its resistance to the big commercial now. In a world of religious extremes, it gives us a different kind of ritual – the rituals of secular pleasure.
© 2008 Timothy Brennan