...as my grandfather used to say, with his corn-pipe hanging from his mouth, in the days of reel-to-reel, eight-track and early cassette tape, music had a different sound. Some called it “Analogue.” Others called it just “plain good music”. Then we looked up to groups like The Temptations, Gladys Night & the Pips, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Three Dog Night, etc. At that time, we danced to the tune of real instruments, I mean like electric guitars, bass, drums and of course, to add to the excitement, a horn section (and strings if you really wanted to get crazy).

At that time, we could take music as an elective in school, because music courses were as plentiful as there were starving artists and musicians. Students were taught the importance of reading music, as well as playing an instrument. We learned that there is a real balance between Music & Art, Math & English, Sports, etc.

One day after a high-school football game, myself and some of the members of the band rode the bus home with our instruments. One of the musicians took out a Bari-Saxophone and began playing a horn line of a popular group. I then took out my trumpet and joined in, playing a harmony line. , as everyone else joined in one by one. Soon we had an eight-piece “Tower of Power” style horn section entertaining the whole bus with our music. While we were playing, the bus driver looked in his mirror and kept driving, as the sounds of horns flowed throughout the bus.

Now, in the days of CD.s, DVD.s, MV.s, PC.s, MP3.s, etc. students are given a shallow chance at learning any kind of music in schools today, due to government cutbacks. So therefore musicians had to become creative. And partially because of this, a new style of music was being reborn, so we thought. It happened one Friday night on the way home from a gig. It was about seven of us band members riding in a van listening to the radio. There was a song, by a popular group in the 70.s, whose music was the background to words spoken in rhyming rhythms while trading "mixed phrases”. This style is called “Rap.” The group was called The "Sugar Hill Gang.” Everyone in the van was excited to hear these spoken rhythmic rhymes to a beat. New groups popped up everywhere and all of a sudden, everybody was doing it.

This new music's lyrics spoke about innocent subjects like friendships and forgiveness and some occasional scatting. Some called it rap. The only violence in this particular song is when the food tasted bad and someone got sick from the food, and of a popular antacid got free advertising for being mentioned in this rap song. 

But as rap caught on, we began to hear the sounds of booming bass over the stereo that was becoming louder, guttural and full of violence, drugs and abuse. Then artists of these rap songs began calling women out of their names and offering idol threats. By then rap became widely unacceptable, because of its bad reputation on account of its contents. After people begin to protest rap music as a whole, some changes came about.

Rap has captured the attention of children, teens and young adults and has bridged all nationalities to listening to this new style of hip-hop. I heard a rap song in Spanish. Although I couldn’t understand the words that were being spoken, I heard rhythmic rhyming syllables at the end of each sentence. Now rap music is more accepted, since that same rap has incorporated into gospel music and to somehow redeem itself.

Of course, these days people dance to the sound of this modern hip-hop style called “Rap”, a synthesized beat created by a DJ operating a turn-table adding scratching record sounds (Back in my day we got in trouble whenever we scratched a record), and people talking this rhythmically spoken style of rhyming rhythms and trading mixed phrases. Most of the music was borrowed from the 60.s and 70.s era, and it became as popular as street corner singing in the 50.s.

Some 30 years later, a record collection was given to me from my father, which featured such music greats as “Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, Oscar Peterson, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, etc. There was a song sung by Louie Armstrong. He was speaking song lyrics in rhyming rhythms to a beat. This brought back an old saying “History repeats itself.”

But of course, we can say the great like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn is where rap all started. We called it scat. (We can go even further back than that). Louie Armstrong rapped in the beginning of “It don.t mean a thing... At first rap didn't mean a thing. It was a style many thought would disappear with the times, but a noted arranger/conductor / producer and musical virtuoso Quincy Jones once said “Rap is here to stay”.

The style of rap has made it full circle, when it became a part of Gospel music, Rock, R&B, Jazz, Country & Western, children’s songs and commercials. Rap has also become one of the biggest products in the music industry. But of course, we can.to compare any of it to the music back in my Grand Fathers. day, from ragtime to the big-band era, which in my opinion is even better than the music from “Back in my day.”