Ditto the congratulations, lovely tone and control and all that, but may I say, in the nicest way possible, that both you and the guitarist are under-achieving.
The singer is striving to get a gritty mood going and you guys are just playing nicey-nice, all plink-plunk and tongue-trills, you're not pushing him. You need to want to fight him, kick his ass. He pushes you, you give him a shove. He takes a swing, you bust his lip. He whacks you with a pool cue, you give him one with a tire iron. Make him put the scream in Screaming Rooster. That will take the good music and make it great.
Thank you so much for all your very kind comments! The rest of the vids are here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL65EB8767D70976F2&feature=edit_ok
The happy honker: yes you are absolutely right! I have to try that. Before this gig I had only jammed twice with the guitarist and bass player, only one time with the singer. And I hadn't met the drummer before this evening. So after this session I feel more confident how I should play next time.
As a remember the bass player, Peter Boon, had feedback problem so he had to stand there.
One of my favourites is Shame Shame Shame, a slow blues. I really love to play slow blues. It's a nice feeling just to sink into it and follow the band:
I'm curious. When you speak, you have an accent; but when you sing, there is no accent. Same with your singer in this instance. Do you ever sing blues songs in Swedish? Is there such a thing as a Swedish blues song? I'm sure Swedes get the blues, too.
FMWoodeye: Yes we have swedish blues songs too, but it's not very common.
I think the first swedish bluesman was Carl Mikael Bellman who lived about 1740-1795 in Stockholm, Sweden. He sang about bad women and vodka and he lived that life too and was put in prison because he could'nt pay his bills. He died in prison of some disease. Of course the music was not blues but the content was.
He became a role model for future trobadours in Sweden. One of them was Cornelis Vreeswijk who came from Holland to Sweden during the Second World War. In the 1960s he had a big brekthrough in Sweden with his trubadour songs built on older Swedish tradition, probably Holland tradition and also american musicians like Josh White and Leadbelly. Cornelis wrote some songs that could be labelled "swedish blues" but a great deal of his music was colored by blues music. Cornelis died in the 1980s.
Nowadays Rolf Wikström is the leader of swedish blues since 20-25 years ago. He sings his own blues songs in swedish but the music is steadly grounded in modern american blues.
@FMWoodeye: You can rest assured that quite a number of Swedish blues singers perform with a heavy Swedish accent while singing as well when speaking. To me (as a Swede) I´ve always found that disturbing: you try in every sense to imitate perfectly a musical style from another country but fail miserably when it comes to delivering the vocal pronounciations. Some people find this quaint and even, in a good sense, funny; as for me I´m always disturbed by it. It gives me an impression (well founded, in many instances) that the singer doesn´t understand what s/he is singing about and that detracts from the performance. At times, when I´ve performed with people and realised that they haven´t a clue what it is they´re singing about I´ve tried to make a point about this, -- but that´s a VERY delicate subject.
What Håkan says about C M Bellman is quite to the point, except that the "bluesman" analogy is severly strained (and more a reflection of how important the "blues" has become as a sort of legitimising label, ironically concomitant with it´s lessening musical importance), and a pointer to a really fascinating Swedish cultural treasure -- but I´m afraid he´s not translated in any greater extent: had he been French or English he would have been in the world heritage. These are the things you just have to live with coming from a small language group.
