As part of the 2009 International Folk Alliance Conference in Memphis, the Red Bull Music Academy put together a creativity workshop session featuring ?uestlove (the drummer for The Roots) and jam-jazz-folk legend Bela Fleck. During the weekend presentation at Ardent Studios, Quest addressed a series of questions from moderator Lucia Kaminsky about both his personal background in music and the state of the music industry over the 22 years in which The Roots have been together. Now, if y’all haven’t ever heard Quest talking about anything before, you really ought to listen: he offered up to the tightly-packed audience a lot of good insights and information. His insights are always on point and on time.

One of the pieces of his dialogue that stood out was his ability to recognize and connect the similarities between folk music and hip-hop music. There remains, for whatever reason, a sense of separatism between these two types of traditional music, mainly because of the impact that mainstream/commercial success has left on them. As Quest pointed out, he saw the Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, and recognized a key event in Dylan’s history that rang true to him. “When Dylan went electric in ’64, people wanted to kill him. They were angry.”

Prefacing with an explanation about first-timer Nas’s Illmatic‘s traditional street credibility vs. Puff Daddy & Biggie’s almost purely commercially-intended first album Ready To Die, Questlove fast-forwards from Dylan to what he referred to as “the funeral for hip-hop”, the infamous 1995 Source Awards (in which Notorious B.I.G. won “Best Lyricist” over Nas). Though this may seem like a stretch to the untrained, make no mistake that each of these events carried the same weight for their respective music communities. Quest clearly illuminated, by example, the passion with which proponents of traditional folk music seek to protect themselves from the demons of commercialization and its undeniable similarity to the passion with which proponents of traditional hip-hop music are loathe to embrace the commercial aspects of rap.

The fascinating two-hour session wound down with a question and answer session followed by a jam between Bela Fleck and ?uestlove (see the video) which was nothing short of spectacular. The Red Bull Music Academy-sponsored event drew a crowd of nearly 90 people and was followed at Senses Nighclub in Memphis with a three-hour DJ set by Questlove.

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