If you’ve been following our new blog for the past week or so or seen one of our ads someplace, you may have noticed us referring to our upcoming Concert Under The Stars on April 27th in a never-heard-of-that-before kind of way. I’m referring to our marketing and promotion of the concert as being an evening of “blue-jazz pop-grass” with The Duhks and the Alison Brown Quartet.
So… what is blue-jazz pop-grass exactly?
Tell us what you think “blue-jazz pop-grass” is in the comments below!
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The short answer is that it’s how banjo virtuoso extraordinaire Alison Brown describes her own musical genre as being a unique fusion of jazz, bluegrass, pop and folk brought together to create something new, fresh and original.
Consider that… and then consider that The Duhks take it a step further and refer to their music as “a folk-rock, bluegrass fusion of Afro-Cuban soul and jazz,” and voila! Now we’ve really got something here.
According to Wikipedia: A fusion genre is a music genre that combines two or more genres. For example, rock and roll originally developed as a fusion of blues, gospel music and country music. The main characteristics of fusion genres are variations in tempo, rhythm, and style.
New genres can arise by developing new forms and styles of music and also simply by creating a new category. Although it’s possible to create a musical style with no relation to existing genres, new styles usually appear under the influence of pre-existing genres. If two or more existing genres influence the emergence of a new one, a fusion between them has taken place.
Just for fun, I found a list of “10 Obscure Fusion Genres” online and thought I would share. Anyone ever heard of these before?
10. Stoner Rock – a blend of psychedelic music from the 1960s, heavy metal from the 1970s, and grunge and sludge metal from the 1980s and ’90s.
9. Dubstyle – comes from a combination of the genres dub step and hard style. It takes two-step beats from dub step and distorted leads and hard kicks from hard style to create an entirely new type of sound.
8. Folktronica – as its name suggests, a combination of folk and electronic music
7. Psychobilly – two genres are at the core – 1950s rockabilly and late 1970s punk
6. Drone Doom – an interesting sub genre of heavy metal created from doom metal and drone music
5. Jazz Rap — rap which has replaced its usual hip-hop backings with instrumental jazz tracks
4. Slowcore – based off a fusion of indie rock and sadcore – sadcore being a slow type of alternative music
3. Anti-Folk – a fusion of classic folk music from the 1960s and pure sarcasm
2. Glitch – a fusion of electronic music and the idea that sounds that normally show up as errors on a computer are pleasant to listen to
1. Drag – largely a blend of house music, hip-hop, industrial, dark ambient, and noise music, often being played in the formulaic, indifferent style of shoe gaze music. It often also incorporates the occult in some form into its songs, taking influence from many early goth bands
So there you have it. Is blue-jazz pop-grass here to stay? We can’t know for sure, but it has a pretty good chance if Alison Brown and The Duhks have anything to say about it!
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