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Only when caught first waking up in an airport will you gain a whimsical insight into the vibrant mind of a musician. Aside from the slight grogginess and a hilarious fascination with a deformed Siamese cat with two faces, Jeremy Sole is a really cool person with a great passion for exploring people’s reactions to music.
The entire conversation was amusing, but, most importantly, it shined light into the soul of Jeremy’s music. Speaking almost poetically about his musical collages, called musaics, one can see how his charm and grace is reflected in the cultural diversity of his pieces. Like mosaics, musiaics are taken from different music forms from around the world, and are pieced together to create a mind blowing melodious journey. This is clear by his “weekly Afroboogie ritual” at Zanzibar in Santa Monica. “Like L.A.,” he explains, “[music] is a melting pot. If you put them together and heat it up, it’s going to melt down into something.”
Jeremy Sole comes from a huge hip hop influenced background, but has come to learn the beauty of interlacing multiple music forms. He also recognizes that in mainstream music and mainstream DJing, everything is becoming homogenized. As he puts it: "if I just did what people want, I would be lost. I wouldn't be lost, I'd be following." To escape this monotony, Jeremy goes to far lengths to find new, obscure music. "I hear something new and it opens my mind more than just musically."
Refusing to be classified only under one specific genre, which really would be underestimating his talent and belittling his music, Jeremy Sole adds something different to each of his sets. The courses of his sets are largely based on the mood of the crowd. Spinning harmoniously to the crowd's body language, "dancing tells me where to go. When you have a lot of people dancing in unison, it's a beautiful thing."
Check out the continually changing, ever evolving, Jeremy Sole at www.myspace.com/musaics or at www.musaics.com. Also catch his live set, Afro Funkē, every Thursday night at 9pm at Zanzibar in Santa Monica.
Photo by Streetpreacher via flickr
