Thought I'd share these fantastic new videos of Swedish Blues maestros Trickbag courtesy of Jyrki Kallio because they deserve to be heard! Fabulous band and outstanding harp as always from Steve Weston. One of the best Blues bands in Europe. Just wish they'd come to the UK but the pound is not working in our favour thanks to Brexit!
I do love me some Steve Weston. Thanks for posting this Adam. Great stuff! ---------- Ricky B http://www.bushdogblues.blogspot.com RIVER BOTTOM BLUES--crime novel for blues fans available at Amazon/B&N, iTunes, iBook THE DEVIL'S BLUES--ditto HOWLING MOUNTAIN BLUES--Ditto too, now available
Thanks, Adam. Fine stuff. I've only listened to the first but will enjoy the others.
I'd be interested in knowing what BBQ Bob thinks of the drummer. I like him. My quick intuitive sense is that he is the kind of drummer who shades things just a hair behind the beat, a guy who definitely feels like it is his job to anchor things and not let the emotional blues guys up front speed it up at all. My kind of drummer!
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Dec 01, 2016 4:29 PM
They have a couple of fantastic CD's out. They managed to lure the who's who of (blues) harmonica to sit in on them. Absolutely fabulous stuff. ---------- Skinny Dog
As for the drummer, he's not playing behind the beat the way most drummers would think of it, instead this drummer plays an unusually lazy (open) ride pattern on the cymbals, putting a certain part of his ride pattern too far (to my ear) behind everything else going on in the band.
It's tolerable (to me) in the first video, makes the guitar player sound like he is rushing during his entire solo in the second vid, and by the third video, when the drummer continues to play that very open ride pattern on loose hi-hats, it's torture, because loose hats sound slower than closed hats so now the ride pattern is even further behind. Ugh.
Adam, I'll be interested to hear if still like the drummer's playing after watching all three videos. For me, by the end, it felt like the drummer was constantly at odds with everyone else in the band - they're all playing on the beat and the drummer's ride pattern always dragging behind. During solos the drums never feel like they are coming along with rest of the band, which makes it harder for the solo to generate the excitement it otherwise would. Worse, it can make a soloist with good time seem to the audience like they are rushing, because the soloist is now louder and therefor the timing distance between between the ride and the soloist can become more apparent, even though the soloist isn't rushing.
The drummer's ride playing could work fine in circumstances where the rest of the band is also shuffling in the same, very open, way, but in these clips that isn't the case. I assume this is the band's regular drummer, in which case they'd obviously be used to this playing, but I can't help feel rather strongly that the band would be much more effective with with a different drummer.
I too will be interested to hear BBQ Bob's thoughts.
Last Edited by LSB on Dec 02, 2016 6:27 AM
To my ears, the drummer's snare hits ARE a shade behind the beat. Can't really hear what his foot is doing in these clips. The loose ride cymbal stuff does not bother me personally—he's playing with a standup bass and is obviously very conscious of not speeding things up and letting the low end subtleties come through. I really enjoyed the 2nd video—that was a definite slow burn and it worked for me. Awesome harp solo. The 3rd video's first clip(“She’s a Killer”) is supposed to be a sort of Texas style shuffle, right? His high hat work in conjunction with the snare isn't working somehow, I'm not informed enough to know why, perhaps it is the open high hat which has a more aggressive feel than the ride. Has kind of a washy “strip tease” feel more than a solid shuffle, perhaps? Perhaps only Kim Wilson could create excitement over that one. But the 2nd tune in the 3rd clip rebounds for me. Overall very entertaining, old school combo. Thank you!
Oh his snare IS behind the beat .....sometimes, but not consistently within a tune. I don't know what his actual intention is, but if you're going to play behind the beat as a drummer, your job (as always) is to create a GROOVE for, and WITH, the band, and for that to happen your snare has to be consistently placed, unless you are super advanced and very purposely pushing and pulling the time, which is absolutely not what's happening here.
I want to be clear, I'm not trying to rag on the guy, I'm just making observations as a former drummer, since the subject was broached.
I didn't make it all the way through the third video, 1 minute in I had to bail, the drummer was just not happening and I couldn't take any more, which is a shame, because otherwise I found the band enjoyable.
Last Edited by LSB on Dec 02, 2016 7:47 AM
In just giving these clips a listen, the drummer is most DEFINITELY playing behind the beat, but very slightly and there are several different delineations of just how far behind the beat that kind of playing is. The farthest behind the beat groove isn't even an actual blues groove because that belongs in the sounds of old school reggae ala Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, Johnny Nash, and that's so far behind the beat that if you pushed further back, you'd wind up behind way ahead of the following beat and then right after that, the farthest behind the beat would coming from the Chicago blues sounds of the 30's to the 60's from the South Side of Chicago, ala Muddy, both Walters, Wolf, Elmore and Jimmy Reed.
The drumming here reminds me of the late 70's/early 80's T-Birds, when Fran Christina was their drummer at the time, so there's a tad more of a push but not enough to step all over things (which is what rock drummers would be notorious for doing).
A thing he shows here is the one single basic requirement for every blues drummer (and for that matter, EVERY musician on the bandstand regardless of what instrument you happen to play) is that his time is dead on the money and you music ain't gonna be groovin' anytime soon if anyone on the bandstand, especially the drummer AND the bass player's time sucks and when this happens, if your band likes to take long solos, that's a sure fire guarantee your band will bore the crap out of the audience and they'll either tune you out and ignore you completely, or worse walk out of the club and by the time the middle of your second set starts, you've lost 50-85% of the crowd because they've left it.
Is he on the level of some classic blues drummers like a Fred Below, Sam Lay, Earl Palmer, Richard Innes, Jimi Bott, June Cor, SP Leary Steve Ramsay, Marty Dodson, or guys like that??? IMO, my answer is no, but I could gig with him but I would want to tweak his playing just a bit and he's FAR better than 98% of the drummers you're gonna be running into in 99% of the open jams anywherre in the world.
The loose hi hat sound is a big part of the Oscar Lee Bradley drumming sound on many of T-Bone Walker's recordings, especially for the uptempo flat tire jump stuff, but in this setting there is a VERY slight rockier edge to the sound.
It's really more of the Texas sound rather than the Chicago or West Coast sounds.
Even if you weren't a drummer, I'd be tearing you ten extra ones if you even screwed the time up for a freaking nanosecond!!!!! ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
Thanks, BBQ Bob. It sounds as though you're saying that his drumming isn't quite as bad as--and maybe quite a bit better than--LSB thinks it is. Me, I went back to the second video with LSB's critique in mind and I sort of liked the tension created between the drummer's groove and what the guitarist was trying to do. It felt like a constructive tension to me, not a problematic one. So, for example, I really like that moment when the guitarist suddenly repeats the same bluesy lick about 20 times. At that moment, he surrenders completely to what the drummer is doing and they really lock horns.
All I knew is that SOMETHING worth commenting was going on with the drummer here.
I remember an article in a book called MUSIC GROOVES by two cultural anthropologists, Steven Feld and Charles Keil (author of URBAN BLUES), in which feld describes, in amazing detail, the subtly different ways in which famous jazz bass/drum pairs create the groove. His point, as I recall, was that magical things happened when one of them was pushing the beat and one of them was pulling it back. The best pairs did NOT keep the beat the same way. I believe he said that it was best when the bass pushed slightly and the drums held it back slightly.
Harp players and many musicians regardless of what instrument they play in general really needs to spend TONS more time learning about the groove and its many different aspects and most jammers, to be very brutally honest about it, tend to listen to the solong 80-99% of the time first and far too often little else beyond that and a big part of the problem is that too many of them are too damned lazy to get their own time straight and once you get yur time straight, it's damned near impossible NOT to notice these things. If they ever get together with a real good recording engineer or ecord producer or a REAL pro for that matter, they would be forced to pay attention to these things and often times they do more to make a band great than a great solo ever will but to a jammer, especially one who has never bothered to get their time straight, they'll never be able to wrap their minds around the truth.
BTW, another Texas drummer this guy reminds me of of Jimmy Vaughn's regular drummer George Rains.
There's many more ways to play shuffles or blues grooves than one thinks but you gotta really pay EXTREMELY close attention to the tiniest of details, something jammers NEVER do!!! ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
