Truly great stuff. Thank you for posting it. So much valuable knowledge in that video for every player to learn from. Much of what Jerry is saying are things I discovered myself the hard way too. Most beginners today have no idea how easy they have it, with all the resources available to them.
I learned the same way and have the same views. Walter ---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year. " life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
I agree with him. Learning how to listen is extremely important. You can't learn to "play what fits", if you don't have immersed yourself into the language of the music and studied it.
I think all of instructional material that is available today is great, but if a person doesn't have the passion or the drive to learn, they are simply wasting their time. Listening and absorbing the music is part of that process.
I think people spend way too much time obsessing over small details that they miss the bigger picture. A harmonica is nothing more than a tool that allows the operator the means to create art. Technique is only a small portion of the equation.
Jimmy Reed, Junior Wells, Slim Harpo and Lazy Lester laid down some super powerful music and used very little harmonica.
I agree wit Joe L--and with pretty much everything else here. Notes (and the technique behind the notes) are only a way of getting at music. Notes (holes, bends) aren't music. What this means is that phrasing is crucial--your choice of notes, your choice of precisely where to place your notes relative to the beat, your choice of how much space to leave between phrases.
That space is a way of getting at music, too. Many music students don't realize this. They're so focused--and not surprisingly!--on learning what notes TO play that they don't take the time to learn what notes NOT to play: i.e., when to take a pause for the cause of phrasing.
Too, as humans, we're easily distracted by flash. If you're not aware that notes aren't, in themselves, music, you might be convinced that the person who plays the most notes is making the most/best music.
Of course, some people--and some harmonica players--who play a lot of notes are making a lot of music, just as some sax players who play a lot of notes (Coltrane in "Giant Steps") are making a lot of music. But the point remains: notes aren't music. They're a way of getting at, creating, music. They're one tool, and only one tool, in that creative process. For "notes," you're welcome to substitute "scales." But scales bear even less relationship to music, finally. They're a crucially important element of the process, but any computer can be programmed with the proper scales to play over a given chord progression; it can't be programmed to swing, or to suddenly quote a passing phrase from some familiar nursery rhyme, or to signify on the solo that the previous improviser has just played, or to vocalize a response to the two-bar bit of singing that the singer has just tossed out there, or to dig down a little deeper in response to audience urgings and come up with something inspired that shows this "deeper" side partially through tonal roughening, or to shape a solo so that it ends with an unexpected twist that makes everybody shout "Yes!" All of those things lie at the heart of serious musicianship, and no amount of familiarity with scales can teach them to you.
A good improviser, no matter the instrument, know how to shape space by using the silence between phrases.
This is why jazz folk say that the true test of an improviser is his/her ability to play a ballad. In order to play a ballad well, you need to pause between phrases. You need to learn how to "sing" the melody on your instrument.
Last Edited by on Oct 24, 2011 11:26 AM
Most play, play, and then stop, waiting to play some more. This is passively playing silence, as you are just killing time.
If you actively play silence as forceful as you play a note, you are adding another element to your arsenal - way more important than learning 5 new riffs.
The tightest bands have learned to play the silence together. Siegel/Schwall were masters at this with their shuffle groove and would get the whole audience, without the crowd consciously realizing it, to rock back and forth as one. ---------- The Iceman
Good stuff. But I wish they'd move the camera back a bit. Reminds me of that Waldo kid in Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher" video. http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Third_Party_Photo/2008/11/14/vanhalen__1226675859_2919.jpg
jerry gave such a great presentation seeing vs hearing blind lemon jefferson,blind willie mctell,sonny terry,ray charles depended on their hearing and their instincts which I truly believe become much stronger when you are blind-this post was very valuable to me thanks again
I suppose that's one way to go about learning/teaching how to play very traditionally. Though, it seems limiting to only learn this way. And yeah that camera is all up in his face and making me feel like i have fish vision.
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~Ryan
"I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car going really fast, and stick it out the window." - Steven Wright
Pennsylvania - H.A.R.P. (Harmonica Association 'Round Philly)
While it may seem limiting to learn that way, most of the players of any historical significance learned exactly that way. All of those guys played thousands of gigs and there is no substitute for performing experience.
"While it may seem limiting to learn that way, most of the players of any historical significance learned exactly that way. All of those guys played thousands of gigs and there is no substitute for performing experience."
That is one of the key differences between most of todays players and those of thet past. Not only did they play more live gigs but the audiences were much more committed to being a part of the music. This created a culture of highly competitive players that had no time to write books, give lessons, film instructional videos. They were out on the scene full time. The junior wells instructional video is laughed at by most young players. What they fail to realize is that is how out of place such things were in his day. They did it onstage and your lesson book was sitting yourself down in front of them and absorbing it.
Younger players have no idea of what it was like to be in a club where the women were at the foot of the stage dancing sexually with their men, other musicians in the front tables screaming you on, women making love to you with their moves, and the scene regularly pushing the music level to intensity levels I haven't in todays club scene. Todays audiences tend to be very reserved, and performers very self concious about saying and doing the right things. One bad word today and it spreads all over the blues world via the forums. That is why very few pros frequent them. All this stuff adds up to a new culture of how to do music which amounts to mostly very technical but void of the factors that were the norm back in the days of when music was a wild thing in the clubs. My dream for the young players is to step up and strut their stuff like they were the baddest cats on earth instead of being politically correct. Forget what the world thinks. This is nothin new. Just get out and do it and the scene will follow. Do your thing like it was the last thing you were gonn do. That was the much the norm when I grew up because that simply the way it was. Walter
---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year. " life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
If you demonstrated a passion for the music and weren't an idiot, people were generally accepting. Once, you were given the opportunity to be on the bandstand, you needed to bring your "A" game every time out. If you didn't, you wouldn't be asked back for a long time and people didn't have any problem telling a person that. It could be a very tough road to travel, but it produced some fantastic performers.
Today, a person can sit around in their grimy underwear in front of a webcam, play a little, put it on youtube and ask for feedback. Quite often, people will be nice and only say nice things, but that won't force a person to get better. If a person really doesn't know how they sound, they aren't doing enough listening.
It's sort of like telling a high school athlete that they are special. If you tell them long enough, they start to believe it. When they go to the next level, they might be in for a shock to their ego.
"Do your thing like it was the last thing you were gonna do."
Eventually, that will come true. You're only as good as the performances that people remember. Quite often, that ends up being the last time they see you.
The thing I'm getting out of this ( and please tell me if, or where I'm wrong) is that in the pure sense of the thing - no one can really ever teach me how to play music. Although the teachers are qualified to teach in the end they are by and large reconciled to guiding. In the end I am responsible for informing and teaching myself under the teachers guidance. The teacher teaches me music but I must teach myself what my music is and in this way all musicians are "self taught"(?).
I wonder if this unteachable aspect of music somehow drives to the heart of what music is. Me and a lot of other people have never heard a very satisfying explanation of what music is or where it comes from.
It seems like in it's essence it always has to be from that ineffable domain.
To me music is a language. It comes from the same place as your speech.
Its learned in the same way too.
Notes are letters. Letters make words. Words make sentences. Sentences make paragraphs,chapters and stories. As your vocabulary expands, your sentences can be more expressive. ---------- The Pentatonics Myspace Youtube
"Why don't you leave some holes when you play, and maybe some music will fall out".
I'm thinking yeah, BUT...,and I would say more but I don't want to deflect your excellent thread. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing what Jerry Portnoy and the posters had to say about learning music.
Oxharp tipped me off about Harp Junction way back when Jerry was handing out free memberships to get the ball rolling. I tried to join up twice, filling in all the registration stuff online but i never got a reply so i just forgot about it, then i saw this post and watched the Early In The Morning lesson and the lyrics of a new song of the same name litterally fell into my mind so i wrote em down and started looking for a backing track that i could use but with no luck. Last night i was drawn back to the Harp Junction site and discovered a bunch of freely available jam tracks one of which is PERFECT for the new song! It really felt like some sort of other world intervention the way the lyrics and the backing track were just handed to me so I am gonna try and get it down on video over the next few days to see how it works out. Very spooky but exciting to experience. Cheers Jerry.
Sorry to hear about your troubles trying to sign-up for Harp Junction online. I work with Jerry on Harp Junction and would be happy to help you or anyone else that's had an issue. My email is mike @ harpjuction.com (without the spaces).
For me, Jerry's approach resonated highly as I found myself (in guitar) stuck playing scales, riffs and patterns ... instead of really digging into the melody, phrasing and emotion of the music. For any of you that haven't see it, Jerry's video on Nature of the Blues is really powerful. He talks about his views on the core conceptual elements of the blues .. then follows with a live performance of Blues in a Dream
Last Edited by on Oct 24, 2011 8:37 AM
