Ron: Perhaps it goes back to your roots analogy. Roots are what nourish and inform everyone's approach to life and music. The mature plant has a root system that has grown and expanded into new volumes (which may or may not be the same material in which it began). But the best way to transplant a plant is to take the roots with it, not chop them off and throw them away.

It may be that turning your back on your home traditions is necessary (or at least common) as a development stage, in order to experience the new. Like the scientific/philosophical approach of thesis then antithesis leading to synthesis. But anyone who stops at the antithesis is stopping in the wrong place.

Yes, a singer/musician can stand up and deliver a blues, then a Scots ballad, then an Irish jig, then a touch of kletzmer. But isn't this just mimicry? A stage show, full of sound and fury but delivering - what? A passing entertainment, not in itself to be mocked, true.

If a musical tradition really does reach deep into the hearts, minds and souls (whatever we may understand by the term) of the people to which it belongs, then it is not capable of being picked up in a moment of study and the copying of a characteristic or two. What we absorb in our childhood we carry for our lives: it takes much more effort in adulthood to learn or change our ways. Perhaps it is true, if you stay and work hard for forty years then you can be fully accepted (as described above). You've then grown a new set of roots: but until then you are not experiencing or reproducing the music in the same way as you would have done growing up there.

I think that anyone, musician or otherwise, will do a better job by building on their past life and experience rather than starting again with a blank slate. To reject your early experience seems foolish, and unlikely to produce worthwhile results. Though, to be fair, this may be underestimating the adaptability of human beings.

Or are different forms of music just something superficial, to be taken up, worn seemlessly and then tossed aside?