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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
whats the LONGEST SOLO you have ever played?
whats the LONGEST SOLO you have ever played?
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SonnyD4885
36 posts
Jul 05, 2011
6:30 AM
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i wanted to know about how long has someone ever played a solo and if theres a world record for it i played about an hour and i stared to get dizzy so i wantto here the storys
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toddlgreene
3108 posts
Jul 05, 2011
9:16 AM
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I've played some pretty damn long ones, but not necessarily planned. I've done extended solos when a guitarist has to change a broken string, or when a band I've been in played a long set with no breaks(so as to not lose the crowd), and we'd all take turns leaving the stage to visit the rest rooms-that's the ideal time to solo!
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Todd L. Greene
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LittleBubba
69 posts
Jul 05, 2011
12:19 PM
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I got up with some friends who were playing a few weeks ago, and my wife thought I sucked bad (and she's a fan of mine), so, for her, it was the longest solo I ever played.:)
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kudzurunner
2578 posts
Jul 05, 2011
1:48 PM
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@SonnyD:
This thread has great potential, but only if you define what you mean by "solo." Bonny B., the Swiss player, played solo harp nonstop for 24 hours to set a world record and raise money for charity. But "solo harp" isn't necessarily the same thing as a solo. When you say that you played for one hour, I'm assuming that you did what Bonny B. did, only for 1/24th as long: you kept blowing in and out, repeating and cycling patterns, but not necessarily hewing, for example, to an internalized chord progression. You made semi-disorganized harmonica sounds for an hour, playing bits and pieces of various songs and occasionally dropping and restarting the beat. You didn't keep an even beat for one hour while playing to an internalized chord progression. Am I right?
Or did you do what I did in "Down Ain't Out," a cut on my solo album, KICK AND STOMP, where I kept a steady beat played solo harp in a 12-bar pattern for one second short of 6 minutes, with the focus on a single-note instrumental line. It would be fair to say that I played a 5:59 long solo, as Little Walter, for example, plays a 2:49 long solo on "Back Track."
http://www.amazon.com/Down-Aint-Out/dp/B0042FDBPA
Kim Wilson, on most of his gigs, has the band leave stage while he goes off on an extended rhythm riff. It doesn't necessarily hew to a 12-bar pattern--in fact, most of it doesn't--but it's certainly all part of the same song, and many people would call it a long solo. Not everybody would, though.
Many kinds of jazz encourage extended solos. In blues, solos are grounded in two competing imperatives:
1) the need for solo country blues performers to keep people dancing all night long...to just KEEP IT GOING
and
2) the 3:00 single, which was the standard for for blues recordings between 1920 and 1960.
In the first case, live performance, a solo could go on for a minute or two minutes, and the history of black music on the plantation encouraged what was called a "breakdown"--a specific kind of dance, but also the idea of stripping the music back to the bare-bones rhythm, the drum section as it were, and then letting dancers go to town on that for a while.
In the second case, extended solos were not allowed--EXCEPT, of course, for instrumentals such as "Juke," "Hideaway," and the like. Still, those instrumentals had a 3:00 limit. A very few instrumentals, such as "Honky Tonk," were six minutes long and were split into A and B sides on 45s.
We're the inheritors of those two dynamics: breakdowns (Kim Wilson on a tear) and the three-minute single (one or at absolute most two instrumental choruses between vocal stanazas). Plus whatever we've gotten from the jazz tradition.
I believe that any workable answer to your question will have to orient itself relative to these three inheritances, these three modes of "solo" performance.
(Of course white/country/bluegrass traditions have their own versions of breakdowns: long instrumental breaks. Usually it was the crazy old coot with the fiddle who got to go off.)
You might start by taking a listen to James Cotton's "Creeper Creeps Again" and telling me whether you this is qualifies as a solo, or merely as a harmonica instrumental.
Last Edited by on Jul 05, 2011 1:56 PM
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SonnyD4885
37 posts
Jul 05, 2011
3:36 PM
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@ kudzurunner
thanks it put alot on my question put you right i didn't think about what i meant by solo and creeper creepes again is both a great instumental and a solo but i played a version of whammer jammer with my guitar friend and it was the longest i have ever played but thanks
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Jehosaphat
71 posts
Jul 05, 2011
3:47 PM
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To me playing 'Solo' is just that..your on a stage by yourself playing harmonica.
Playing 'A Solo'is taking a lead break during a song backed by other musicians.
In this case my own longest solo would only be two or three times through the changes with no break.
I wouldn't call Juke a solo as such but a Harmonica centric instumental.One band i was in for a while did it as a Guitar track with the harp only playing 1 or 2 'solos' throughout.
All just semantics in the end perhaps?
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jbone
565 posts
Jul 06, 2011
12:24 AM
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i have done solo- by myself playing- early on for hours. walked along fire trails and rural roads and just explored what the harp could do and what i could make it do. that was along time ago.
the usual format in bands i've worked in and at jams has usually been 1 or 2 turnarounds. sometimes longer if it was a designated jam type song where the band all takes turns showing off and filling up an hour to the next break.
some 7 years ago we drove over to West Point MS to catch Slick Ballinger with Kinney Kimbrough and Terry Bean, who is a huge chugger harp player. i swear he has an extra lung in there someplace. being that it was my birthday, and i had a couple people with me who manipulated the situation, i ended up on stage with Slick and Kinney. Terry sat down i think to see if i had any "stuff", and shortly got back up and grabbed a vocal mic. we swapped turnarounds for about 1/2 hour, the bar- and the roof- got raised every time around. the crowd ate it up. Slick and Kinney kept the thing going like the energizer bunny, and Terry would not let up! i used about every trick i knew during that long moment. at the end i was excited and oxygenated, but not really winded so much. the trick is to use your air column and your throat and mouth, and sort of breathe separately from what you are playing.
occasionally when we play the farmers' market- wife and i have the duo- she will head inside for a drink and some cool air, and i'll hold our spot out with the vendors and tourists, noodling around by myself, just the harp going. it's usually a very laid back approach and if anyone wants to really hear me they have to come over close.
i'm much more used to more structure. either with one partner on guitar, or a whole band. usually i don't play steady for lengths of time except for the rhythm stuff, doubling with the guitar and accenting vocals, which to me maybe doesn't really count as soloing or playing solo either one.
todd has a great idea there, keep a song going and let the band hit the facilities one at a time while keeping the crowd's interest!
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toddlgreene
3110 posts
Jul 06, 2011
4:53 AM
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On one such occasion where 'potty breaks' were occuring, and we usually had at least the bass player, keyboard player or guitarist still onstage-, all but myself and the psycho drummer made a mad dash for the men's room all at once. So, an impromptu jam turned dual and speed competetion commenced. The crowd went insane! My lips stopped bleeding after a while.
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Todd L. Greene
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Diggsblues
876 posts
Jul 06, 2011
5:54 AM
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I played over 9 minutes on a tune call Santosh with
a Koto player. It was a demo I still have it.
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Emile "Diggs" D'Amico a Legend In His Own Mind
How you doin'
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SonnyD4885
38 posts
Jul 06, 2011
6:02 AM
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is rice miller i soloist when he hads no band or is he just that good
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walterharp
645 posts
Jul 06, 2011
6:30 AM
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probably the first extended breakdown harp solo that made for a popular recording, and got me, as a young man in a guitar centric world, thinking harmonica might be cool after all was on room to move, by mayall.
that move away from the 2-3 minute radio format in popular music the early 70's allowed for that kind of thing to be widely heard recorded
that also might be one of the earlier versions of beat boxing during a solo, or at least one of the most widely popular versions
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jbone
567 posts
Jul 06, 2011
7:55 AM
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Rice Miller did pretty much nothing in his life but play harp from an early age. he learned a lot if not all that could be done with a harmonica at the time.
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garry
65 posts
Jul 07, 2011
3:57 PM
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i started one in 2004. i'll let you know when i'm done (typing one handed right now).
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chromaticblues
910 posts
Jul 07, 2011
5:16 PM
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The band I was playing in back in the mid ninties was playing a little place called Trackside in Westport NY on 4th of July weekend and we were playing a song at the end of our first set. Well I started getting in to it and was just playing. They stayed in one key for a little while untill one of them just stopped then another then they all just walked of stage. None of this was planned, but we all had been to many shows together and were very much awhare of the showman ship aspect of playing. So I thought they would have there little laugh and come back and then we would end the song. I was thinking while playing that would be cool! Stay focused and keep playing.
They come back, after there 15 minute brake!
They jumped back into the song, sang another verse, I played a 12 bar solo and we ended it.
So I'm just guessing, but it was about 18 minutes. After awhile I did start going thru chord changes.
It was pretty fun have 200 people on edge hooten and hooleren for 15 minutes.
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