Led Zeppelin: Crossing cultures

[Chunk]

It is interesting to see how far reaching their music was and is.

 

Led Zeppelin

[Zephyr]

I'm not getting anything...

[Zuben]

Works fine here but took a bit to load.

 

A possibility the site is blocked if your are at work.

 

Peace

[Kramer Ferrington III.]

Erm... if the site was blocked you'd get a message from your work's server as soon as you tried looking at the site. And yeah, it takes forever to load.

 

For those that are wondering what the article is about, here's an excerpt:

 

 

Most rock legends mined the blues, but the bends in Jimmy Page's guitar solos and Robert Plant's vocal melodies stretched beyond the "blue" notes I heard nightly while performing as a young sideman with artists like Johnny Copeland and Dr John.

 

As I studied Arabic music I realised that the band had dug deep beneath the Mississippi Delta to the roots of the blues found in the chants and prayers of Muslim Africans brought to America as slaves.

 

 

Which is a fair enough comment, Page has long been interested in Arabic music, and you can hear some of the results in the "Page and Plant Unledded" album.

 

 

 

The author explains his background as

 

 

Where Page and Plant had immersed themselves in the blues, I studied with the qawwali legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who offered a similar message of harmony and brotherhood.

 

With such inspiration I formed Junoon, which became the biggest rock band in Asia.

 

 

ADDED: I have mixed feelings about this.

 

On the one hand, I'm inclined to rubbish the concept that the slaves brought to America were actual Muslims. They don't seem to have brought a lot of Muslim ideas with them, whereas there DOES seem to be a big chunk of African animism running through Afro-Caribbean culture.

 

On the other hand, if the author wants Al Jazeera's public to turn on to Led Zeppelin, and if this helps us all to finally become friends and brothers, I can't see the harm in it.