Does Houston Music Have a Particular “Sound?”

Does Houston have a cohesive sonic identification? In a global metropolis, the place one can hear an awesome variety of equally great types of each conventional and forward-thinking music, it appears not possible to outline the canonical “sound” of Houston.

However what if we shift the main target from a singular style of music to a roll name of sounds one hears performed within the Bayou Metropolis and alongside the Gulf Coast? We would uncover some stunning cultural connections, perhaps even get somewhat bit nearer to figuring out what the “sound” of Houston may very well be. Doing so would possibly get messy and congested, however hey, these are quintessentially Houston descriptors.

The Accordion

Houston’s Gold Star Studios. Legendary bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins units apart his guitar and commandeers the studio’s organ to document a casual tribute to a brand new model of music known as zydeco. This phrase is unfamiliar to the audio engineer, who misspells it as “Zolo Go” on the only’s document label. “ younger and previous likes dat!” says Hopkins at first of the observe, enjoying some proto–storage rock riffs emulating the sound of the accordion, zydeco’s signature instrument. Listening to the observe, one can visualize {couples} blowing off steam in Houston’s golf equipment and dance halls, the place Hopkins almost certainly first heard this sound.

The arrival of the accordion from Europe to Texas may be traced again to the 1860s, when German, Czech, and Polish immigrants constructed railroad traces from central Texas to northern Mexico. They introduced the accordion with them to play their favourite polkas, and the instrument finally discovered its manner into Mexican string bands and mariachi combos. Musicologists aren’t positive who introduced the accordion subsequent door to Louisiana, however they agree the instrument was first adopted within the late 1800s by Black Creole musicians, and the Cajuns after. By the point of Lightnin’ Hopkins’s recording, the model of music had remodeled into zydeco in such Houston venues as Fifth Ward’s Membership Matinee and the Bronze Peacock, in addition to Third Ward’s Eldorado Ballroom.

In the meantime, within the Latin music scene, polka-influenced conjunto begat norteño. This in flip led to Tejano, a posh, ever-changing alchemy of mariachi, rock and roll, jazz, polka, bolero, and different musical types. Accordions remained elementary to the instrumentation.

Texas Tenor Sound

Within the Nineteen Thirties, at Jack Yates and Phillis Wheatley excessive faculties in Third and Fifth wards, respectively, scholar orchestras and marching bands developed a raucous model of jazz good for soccer video games, road parades, and crowded ballrooms. Celebrated jazz, swing, and blues musician Arnett Cobb initially joined the Wheatley band as a violinist in 1932 earlier than switching to tenor saxophone, an instrument he practiced open air in a prairie close to his house so he may play as loud as he wished. Over time, Cobb’s model and showmanship would earn him the nickname “Wild Man of the Tenor Sax,” and his declamatory tone and sense of rock-style rhythms would distinguish the sound of Texas jazz.

Visible artist, historian, and DJ Tierney Malone first encountered that sound in 1989, when Cobb carried out at a gap on the Modern Arts Museum Houston. Listening to Cobb in particular person, and shortly after assembly and starting a years-long dialogue with Cobb’s daughter, Lizette, expanded Malone’s information of and appreciation for the historical past of jazz in Houston, which profoundly impacted his personal artwork. He additionally got here to grasp that the musicians he revered have been “on a regular basis cats with unconventional occupations who have been having to take care of the conventions of their actuality,” he says. Particularly, the each day humiliations and risks of life within the Jim Crow South.

“Arnett Cobb’s daughter advised me when she heard large band music, it was by no means ‘pleased’ music to her,” Malone says. “It was all the time indignant music.”

The bandstand, he explains, was the one place the place Black musicians may specific their frustration with the world they lived in.

Over time, Malone has made it his mission to rejoice the wealthy musical historical past of Houston by way of his common KFPT present, Houston Jazz Highlight. Initially of every broadcast, you’ll hear Cobb’s large, soulful “Texas tenor” sound. And with the high-profile success of such Houston musicians as pianists Jason Moran and Robert Glasper, in addition to a brand new incoming era of gifted practitioners, the world past Texas’s borders is lastly recognizing Houston’s historic and modern contributions to jazz.

Metallic

All through the Nineteen Nineties, the sound of Houston metallic trended extraordinarily darkish, with the bands Useless Horse, Imprecation, and Crucifixion gaining audiences and acclaim exterior of Texas. This was the time Dobber Beverly, drummer and founding father of Houston’s critically acclaimed prog-metal band Oceans of Slumber, made the pilgrimage at age 18 from the small city of Huge Creek to Houston to carve his area of interest within the metropolis’s underground metallic scene.

“All people was attempting to determine tips on how to make that sound,” says Beverly of that point. “There have been sure distortion pedals and the Ibanez RG collection guitars that everyone performed, nevertheless it had extra to do with folks attempting to combine Crowbar and Slayer, who’re polar opposites.”

Whereas some might think about the extraordinary, double kick drum blast beats and drop-tuned guitar sound of metallic in all of its scary incarnations diametrically against that of zydeco or jazz, there’s an intangible and mysterious high quality to music one hears alongside the Gulf Coast. For Beverly, who additionally drums within the metallic bands Necrofier and Terror Corpse, Houston shares the identical “charms” as these different cities, and a ritualistic and “bewitching” sound in its music, no matter style.

“Now we have a little bit of the darkish grit, a little bit of the swampy soul,” Beverly says of Houston. “It’s sort of infused in everyone and every part down right here. So the music has somewhat extra soul to it, even metallic. The groove remains to be there!”

That “grit” and “soul,” together with a really Houstonian spirit of invention and willingness to carry all of 1’s influences into the music, may be heard on Oceans of Slumber’s 2024 launch “The place Gods Concern to Communicate,” and within the spacious, Southern-goth sound of lead vocalist Cammie Gilbert’s solo album, Home of Grief.

“There’s sort of like a tangy grit to this space,” Beverly says. “And your influences aren’t simply what you’re listening to. It’s the place you reside.”

Slowed and Throwed

You’ll be able to’t discuss Houston with out acknowledging the “chopped and screwed” sound of the late, nice Robert Earl Davis Jr., higher often known as DJ Screw. To create his immensely common “Screwtapes”—cassette tapes he bought by the a whole bunch out of his house in South Park—Screw would document himself at two turntables, utilizing his formidable DJ abilities to cease, begin, and in any other case “scratch” a second vinyl document towards the primary, then decelerate or “screw” the performances to a last tape. The method not solely fully transforms the important thing of the music, however your entire emotional temper of the observe. In the meantime, “chopped” or “throwed” refers back to the repeated phrases and phrases Screw generated by stopping, reversing, and replaying vinyl in actual time, using the somnambulistic tempo of the music.

Screw, who studied classical piano as a child, had a really eclectic style in music, and his chopped and screwed mixes of Tupac (“So Many Tears”) and Phil Collins (“Within the Air Tonight”) revealed new layers of which means in what have been already nice hip-hop and pop track lyrics.

A lot has been written about how the sedate, hallucinatory sound of those “Screwtapes” mirrors the extraordinary warmth and languid tempo of life throughout Houston’s hottest months, with bass frequencies as deep and expansive because the rumble of thunder. Screw’s mixes are additionally saturated with the “soul” and “tangy grit” Beverly speaks of due to the freestyle raps of members of DJ Screw’s Screwed Up Click on (S.U.C.), a formidable crew of MCs who included such legends as Huge Hawk, Huge Moe, E.S.G., Huge Pokey, and Fats Pat.

Since his passing in 2000, DJ Screw continues to affect hip-hop producers throughout the Soiled South, in addition to a number of Houston visible artists, together with El Franco Lee II, Tay Butler, and Kaima Marie Akarue. Lee’s monumental DJ Screw in Heaven 2 is a modern-day historical past portray, portraying a celestial imaginative and prescient of Screw within the afterlife, turntables on the prepared, giving blessings to a crowd of household and pals both on their option to be a part of him, or giving thanks for an additional day of life above floor.

Sounds of Nature, Sounds of the Metropolis

When Montreal-born interdisciplinary sound artist Lina Dib first arrived in Houston in 2005 to do her PhD in anthropology at Rice College, she was struck equally by each its sounds and close to silences.

“Issues simply felt form of sparse and unfold out,” says Dib, who remembers standing on the nook of Washington and Montrose and questioning, “The place’s the town?”

Inspired by her professors to, as she describes it, “push the boundaries of the self-discipline,” Dib started recording contrasting sounds, together with Houston’s screeching birds and leaf blowers. Murmurations, one among her earliest works, was put in within the stairwells of Lawndale Artwork Middle and featured recordings of Houston visitors, development, conversations in English and French, and a pattern from Texas-born nation blues singer-guitarist Henry Thomas.

“I can’t bear in mind precisely how I found Henry Thomas’s music, however his track, ‘Texas Straightforward Avenue,’ caught with me,” Dib says. “I really feel like his music embodies a mixture of restlessness and homesickness abruptly, and he nonetheless comes throughout as relaxed and pleased.”

Her 2023 sound set up North to South and Again: Flights, Flood Fills and Sticks contains each hen sounds from species that migrate yearly all through the area and hen sounds carried out by Houston immigrants, together with the half-Lebanese Dib.

“The world is gorgeous, poetic, messy, and so interwoven and interconnected,” Dib says. “Listening to different species and being attentive to the best way the sounds round us are shifting can inform us loads about these connections.”

Interwoven and Interconnected

What higher option to describe the “sound” of Houston than “interwoven and interconnected?” Open your ears and also you’ll hear the reedy tones of a push button accordion within the amplified suggestions of a metallic guitarist, or the holy scream of a tenor saxophone contained in the honking visitors of our freeways, or the down-pitched throb of a “screwed” mixtape complementing the hum of a prepare within the distance. Houston might not have a single, cohesive sonic identification, however there’s nonetheless a lot to take heed to and luxuriate in.