I don't believe the following video has ever been discussed here. It's Cotton live in San Francisco with Matt Murphy and the band back in 1973. Take a look first, then talk about it:
I'm struck by a couple of things.
First, it's full of feeling. Cotton isn't just going through the motions; he's all in. A great model for any of us.
Second, Cotton, at least here, isn't a great technical singer. His mastery of the blues microtones--what Robert Palmer called "deep blues"--doesn't begin to approach the mastery of one of his mentors, Muddy Waters. In fact, what I see here is what I've seen a number of times in my life with guys I knew in an earlier phase of my life: he's a sideman still in the process of becoming a front man. I realize that he'd been a frontman for a while here, but he's still trying in some sense to EQUAL Muddy. He's trying to fill the same shoes AS A VOCALIST that Muddy fills, and he's not quite good enough technically to do that. Specifically, if your ear's good enough, you'll hear that almost every time he reaches for the octave, he's off. He can't nail the pitch. (The same is actually more true when he reaches for the root of the V chord in bar 9. He doesn't quite nail it--at 1:38, for example.)
Third, none of that really matters, because he's singing with total commitment. Unless some blues nerd like me points out his pitchiness, you're simply not going to hear it. He's like a great magician whose moves aren't technically quite up to snuff, but because he's a master of misdirection--using emotional commitment to compensate for technical inadequacy--you never miss what's not there.
Fourth, the moment he starts blowing harp, he IS a master and his vocal failings simply fall by the wayside. He's a decent but not great technical blues singer, a fine blues stylist (as a singer), and a matchless blues harp blower. Like a fair number of top blues performers, he's better at one thing he does onstage than at another. (This is why guys like Mitch Kashmar kill me: he's as good a blues singer as he is a harmonica player; he's amazing at both. Same thing with B. B. King on vocals and guitar, obviously: as good as it gets on both.) So his performances are partly about getting you to hang around for the main event. Notice how Cotton takes full advantage of the spaces BETWEEN harmonica phrases, making his vocal yells a part of the harp solo--and always with a brilliant sense of timing, knowing exactly how much space he's got and when to slide back into harp phrasings.
It's easy today to see Cotton as a "legend" and miss the continual act of self-creation that marked his career.
Last Edited by on Sep 04, 2012 2:11 AM
" he's a master of misdirection--using emotional commitment to compensate for technical inadequacy--you never miss what's not there."
I could not agree more. I think he may have known his singing was a bit off, but did not care and just came with it anyway. His singing sounds much better in the live album he did later with Muddy and Johnny Winter. His harp playing is a soulful as it gets. The man feels it. I compare him to Jason in two ways. First, these guys are my top two harp players for closing their eys and just feeling it. Kind of like SRV did. Second, I don't think either started as great singers but they poured so much soul into it that it just got better and better.(SRV was like Jason and Cotton as a singer as well) I think Cotton is top dog when it comes to passing his emotions on to his audience. It feels like he is unleashing something powerful on you.
Last Edited by on Sep 04, 2012 8:15 AM
During the first two verses, I think he was having a hard time hearing himself. Throughout the song, he kept using the harp for vocal assistance. I suspect it was so he could hear his vocals. I doubt it was for a pleasing affect of hearing his vocals through the amp.
I always liked Cotton's vocals. He may not have been as great a singer as BB, Bobby or Tyrone Davis, he had a very emotional style of vocal delivery that got the point of the tune across. Cotton was always one of my favorite singers.
He didn't play a ton of harp in the Michael Coleman led big band era, but Cotton always put on a helluva show. I saw him last night. He was fighting sound problems most of the night, but he had the crowd in the palm of his hand during the whole show. He had people dancing or sitting and listening.
In my 30+ years of being a blues fan, you maybe the first Blues nerd to ever mention pitchiness in one's vocal performance. For that you win the Randy Jackson of the Blues Award, dog!
This is a very interesting post, and gets to the heart of something I was thinking of last week with regard to Jimmy Reed - what makes a great performer? For me, as a listener, it is someone who can touch me which James Cotton always does - even here where he may miss a note or two as he sings. Like Adam points out, he pours his soul into the song - both vocally and on the harp - and (for me) that matters more than anything else. That said, even with his vocal deficiencies he is very good, and if a musician was bad enough it would certainly ruin the experience. Without trying to hijack this thread, I have wondered what makes Jimmy Reed so great. From what I've listened to, his harp playing seems fairly simple (though well executed), his singing fits the song but isn't remarkable, and his guitar likewise - but, the result (generally) is great. Is it because blues is an emotional medium - more so than a lot of music - and if the performer can bring that to his audience the total package can outweigh the individual parts? Again, sorry if this too far off topic.
Last Edited by on Sep 04, 2012 9:30 AM
Joe, I accept the award! I think pitchiness is something that all blues singers need to think about. That's because one thing that differentiates good blues singing from not-so-good blues singing--and there are many things--is that good blues singers know how to swerve and dip through vocal phrasings in ways that hit all the right pitches or pitch areas, and NSG blues singers (to invent an acronym) don't even know that the pitch areas are there. Certain kinds of blues vocal lines are exactly like Michael Jordan lofting, twirling, faking, outfoxing, and slamming the ball home. Good blues singers--taking B. B. King for example--know exactly how much to squeeze the string (i.e., how much to raise the pitch) and for how long in order to create bittersweetness. Thanks to Auto-Tune technology, it's now possible to see what good blues singing looks like: you can see the actual pitch curve of a guy like Bobby Rush. I've done this in a local studio. You can see some of the magic.
And you can see pitchiness in your own voice. I've seen this, too.
I asked Mitch Kashmar how he kept his voice so perfectly in tune as he did all the stuff he does. He said something to the effect of, "You're always tuning your voice. Singing well is like playing an upright or fretless bass. You're always tweaking it in real time in response to what you're hearing. You're always slightly adjusting pitch."
You may well be right that Cotton was having trouble hearing himself here. I sing much better when I've got a great monitor beaming up at me. Singing blues well is never just about singing with total commitment. If that were true, Janis Joplin singing "Ball and Chain" would be the greatest blues performance in the world: complete and total unburdening. But it's also about knowing where the magic is buried in the blues pitches, and about drawing on all one's accumulated knowledge of idiomatic performance to craft lines that not only hit the pitches but mess with the timbre (growling at the right moment, as Little Milton does), hold the notes for durations that just WORK in the emotional contours of the moment. You have to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.
Cotton certainly knows what great blues singing is about, because he watched Muddy at work. Muddy Waters was the master for a reason: he's a brilliantly precise singer, MANIPULATOR, of the blues pitches. This isn't apparent until you struggle, as I do, to master the vocabulary and really begin to listen for what's there and not there. I've been singing several of Muddy's songs for years, especially "Goin' to Main Street," long enough to have made the song my own, but whenever I go back to the original, various versions by Muddy, each of which is different, I'm amazed by the subtleties--the tricky little picth-curve that he throws onto the last split second of his lines. Those pitch-curves come, I think, from the fact that he was a slide guitarist. Great blues slide playing isn't about holding or hitting specific notes; it's all about sliding into and out of notes at specific speeds and about holding certain notes with various sorts of vibrato. Sometimes, as in Muddy's case, it's about slowly sliding off a note while vibratoing it heavily.
I think the subtlety of his singing comes from there, as the subtlety of B. B.'s singing comes in part from the subtlety of his guitar playing. BB can squeeze one note slowly and wring a whole lot of feeling out of it.
Last Edited by on Sep 04, 2012 10:32 AM
All kidding aside, we agree on many points. I had never heard of that software before. That's pretty cool. It would be interesting to run Cotton's Sun recordings through that and see what you get. I think being a good singer is much more difficult than being a good harp player.
I've really enjoyed your observations. And agree. Especially relate to the comments about not fully appreciating until one starts to really grapple with the challenge of doing it oneself. And remembering listening to nina simone yesterday. One of the great benefits for me of trying to perform music well is the enhanced appreciation i have for great performances. ----------
Kudzurunner, your post seems to be written from the viewpoint that Cotton's vocals were still yet to be developed & honed? Yet some of his late '60's recordings have some of his best vocal performances (The Blues Today, Cut You Loose & the tracks produced by Bloomfield & Dayron). He was a serviceable vocalist before he started working with Muddy, comparisons with Muddy - a titan of a blues singer - seem a little unfair?
The guitar in the clip posted appears to be out of tune, in fact it's not a great performance in many aspects (probably why it hasn't surfaced until now), Cotton is hunting for pitch...but he's got a tough job there.
Perhaps he was at his peak as a vocalist, in the technical sense (though a commanding frontman for decades) for a few years, but great vocal performances are out there, if not plentiful on Youtube...but then, Youtube isn't the universe ;-)
He's singing out of tune, and I think it is because he can't hear himself very well.
His timbre/tone/whatever when singing is more than serviceable...he's just out of tune, and I'd wager due to monitoring moreso than ability at the time.
I guess it is hard to tell from just the one clip, but I've heard a lot worse from harp guys trying to sing - on actual records. ---------- Mike VHT Special 6 Mods Quicksilver Custom Harmonicas - When it needs to come from the soul...
Lets see here... it is 1973. the sound system is possibly a bunch of Shure Vocal Masters strung together or something similar, like Kustoms version of this PA. whatever it is it is verrry primitive. floor monitors are a relatively new invention in '73 and a separate main and monitor mix is either newish or unheard of at that time.
i 'discovered' this great band the year prior to the above clip. They were loud and great and i loved 'em! no one could touch 'em. NOBODY. can i hear an AMEN!!??
that being said, i'd like to say one more thing. i'd rather hear a 'pitchy' James Cotton over an on the money singer like Tab Benoit or Sonny Landreth.
am i comparing apples and oranges? i think not. The Blues is a BIG neighborhood. no sense standing on the same street corner every day.
---------- MP affordable reed replacement and repairs.
"making the world a better place, one harmonica at a time"
It's easy to be a not-so-good singer with confidence. There is enough reality tv contests to show that, lol.
IMO, and this is a foundation of some Sufi beliefs about music, the breath might be the most god-like, soulful, direct path to "god". I in now way mean this as a religious topic, but I am trying to put into words the mojo or whatever that we like to label people by.
A great singer, IMO, will always have more of that X-factor to me than an instrumentalist. Harmonica would be a close second as well as other instruments using the breath.
In terms of real success, being a great singer will take most further than being a great harp player, but it is also more complicated than that. ---------- Mike VHT Special 6 Mods Quicksilver Custom Harmonicas - When it needs to come from the soul...
Just got done listening to "Evening",Sugar Ray Norcia's new CD-THAT is the epitome of a great blues singer/harp player-he's all you could strive to be-
Now-as far as the OP Cotton video-it was never meant for public consumption-Wolfgangs Vault videos are known for being the poorest of quality and sound-if you want the same show,the same year with the same band,I can provide it- the sound is pitch perfect from the tape I have-but it will cost you. Therein lies the difference-the audio I have is of the highest quality,but it comes with a price.
Last Edited by on Sep 05, 2012 4:50 PM
So you come in and say hey I have this same video better quality but his pitch is perfect but not going to show it unless you pay me? hahaha. beautiful.
in this video his pitch is slightly off but the majority of people listening to the show would not hear most of it as he is just barely off the pitch. And it does seem like he is struggling to hear.
"So you come in and say hey I have this same video better quality but his pitch is perfect but not going to show it unless you pay me? hahaha. beautiful"
Never said anything about money-I got it on trade,and thats what I would do-trade it for other rare recordings or whatever,but not for money. I promised the person I got it from it would never be sold for money.
I never said anything about video either-if you read the end of my post it clearly states AUDIO-
Also-it's not the same date-same band,same tour, same song list,just a different date.
Last Edited by on Sep 05, 2012 7:05 PM
I agree with kudzurunner on Cotton not being able to quite reach the pitch on some notes in his vocals, it's not that hard to miss. But he DOES have down the timing, tone, and style patterns of classic blues singing - the subtle twists and turns in the phrasing and singing, the little changes coming from the throat, the moans and cries - that only come from deep experience and listening and learning from the original Southern blues masters.
Last Edited by on Sep 05, 2012 7:20 PM
There's a very easy way for anybody who disagrees with, doesn't like, or doesn't want to acknowledge what I'm saying about Cotton's pitchiness here to rebut me: post a video in which Muddy Waters sounds similarly off-pitch. An off night. There's got to be one, right? Surely it can be found on YouTube.
Joe L, tmf, 5F6H: You guys MAY be able to find such a video, but I think you'll have a hard time. That's because Muddy was a better technical singer than Cotton was.
Cotton was a terrific STYLIST, as a singer, but that's not the same thing.
And Hubert Sumlin--a propos of nothing except my own strong feelings about the technical side of the art--sucks as a blues singer. Or at least he sucked every one of the four or five times I wasted money paying to see his show. He was a superb, important sideman who just shouldn't have been a frontman. This is not unusual. The way of the blues world--and Muddy spoke about this--was that great bands spin off their sidemen, who then take the leap into becoming frontmen. Not all of them have what it takes, but the better ones who also play an instrument and whose instrumental prowess exceeds their vocal prowess figure out a way of making it all work.
It was Sterling Magee who explained the stylist/singer distinction to me many years ago. He insisted that he was a stylist, not a singer. I think he was wrong about that, but that was his claim.
Tab Benoit is a much better blues singer, for my money, than James Cotton is or was. He has all the blues pitches; he has the feeling, and he certainly has a distinctive voice. He has a raw, dirty edge in both his singing and his guitar playing.
Bonnie Raitt is an amazing vocal stylist--she set the bar almost impossibly high for any white girl who came along after her--but she's also a technically brilliant singer. She hits the pitches, she makes the swerves, she keeps power in reserve, she knows exactly what her instrument is about.
My point about the video I posted above--and I don't want this point to get lost--is that Cotton's command of the total performance context completely mitigates any technical shortcoming that a blues nerd like me might be tempted to point out. His performance is brilliant IN SPITE of the notes he doesn't hit. I'm not inventing the technical shortcoming; it's there, in the video: pitchiness. It may well have been a localized thing--localized to occasional evenings like that one, where he can't hear himself in the monitor or the guitar is out of tune or or or or.......
Which is why I've leveled my challenge: find me a Muddy Waters video where he's pitchy, too. Or just agree with me that he's matchless--and better, technically, than one of his best-known and most beloved harmonica-playing sidemen.
Last Edited by on Sep 05, 2012 7:29 PM
Adam, I understand your point to a degree, but you may as well argue who's the better harmonica player, Cotton or Muddy?? No one will argue that Muddy was a better singer than Cotton; it's a point of contention that seems to affect you more than anyone else. Not trying to be argumentative, I am just not understanding why you would search YouTube archive to prove a point about Cottons "pitchiness" and now ask your forum members to scour YouTube to try and find a video of Muddy singing out of pitch?!?
As far as I'm concerned,that video was an anomaly. I've never heard Cotton sing that badly on any recording I've heard from him. I have "Seems Like Yesterday", recorded live in 1967.He covers a lot of soul or R&B. The opener is "I feel Good",for cripes sake! No pitchiness there. Not a blues vocalization but good singing. Is he as good as Muddy at blues singing? I don't think so. But I hold Muddy's singing in extremely high regard. When he sings "I Can't Be Satisified", I believed him.
Now if you want to talk about blues singers and pitchiness,let's talk about Charlie Musslewhite!
Kudzurunner - No one is suggesting that Cotton is a better singer than Muddy, just that your link to a bootleg, never formally released, clip doesn't show Cotton in a representative light.
Of all the dates that Muddy did I don't doubt there were some with issues & embarrassing moments, but here's the thing...I don't particularly share your passion for schadenfruede - Cotton has a substantial body of work, many seminal recordings...perhaps not all of them great, but let's look at him (or anyone else), whilst bearing in mind their whole portfolio, rather than focus attention on a clip where he and Murphy are struggling. It doesn't do any of them justice. If someone has a long buried clip of Muddy Waters singing out of tune in the shower...frankly they can keep it. Everyone has bad days. ---------- www.myspace.com/markburness
http://www.facebook.com/markburness
Last Edited by on Sep 06, 2012 2:45 AM
I think Joe is right about the monitor problem and Cotton not hearing himself, hence singing not so good (but not a catastrophy either).
If you compare his singing in the beginning and in the end of the song, it's much better at the end, with no pitch problem (at least I think so), because he sings also in the harp mic and hears himself in the monitor.
5F6H: Schadenfreude is when you take a positive pleasure in somebody's failing, especially of the "told you so" or "they finally got what they deserved" variety. For example, when Jason went down hard last year and several people on this forum expressed something like satisfaction. That's schadenfreude.
My feelings about Cotton aren't like that. Cotton is one of my heroes on the harp. I'm just trying to hear clearly--which, when you're listening to live videos, also involves seeing clearly, intuiting the situation--and people here have helped convince me that the small technical problem I hear in Cotton's voice may trace to him not being able to hear himself.
But I'm also making an important point: Not everybody who played with Muddy Waters and who has gone one to make a name for themselves as a solo performer was his equal as a vocalist. Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, for example. Great personality, great drummer, so-so harp player. Not a great singer. But he made it work. Cotton was a better singer than Smith, certainly. And on "Love Me or Leave Me" he's definitely got it. I'm speaking from memory here; I haven't watched the video above.
Those of us who sing blues, or are trying to sing blues, need to get beyond hero worship--or, to be more precise, we need to develop ears capable of hearing the difference between not very good, good, excellent, and truly gifted. Muddy was a truly gifted blues singer, and virtually any clip or recording makes that clear.
Here's one that has two million hits but that I somehow missed. It's a live performance in front of a black crowd. In his comments late in the video, Muddy names a handful of great blues singers, and he's right: my ears tell me that they're not just big names, but his equal as blues singers. He says something very interesting about B. B. King and about the importance of the church. And all of that is audible in his singing and visible in his performance. I don't hear any pitchiness here:
But I'll acknowledge that being on pitch isn't everything, god knows. I suspect that T. Model Ford could sing the telephone book off key and he'd still sound like deep blues.
Then again, in the following live clip, he's flawless. Every time he sings "Sallie Mae, Sallie Mae," rising to the flat seventh on the first Mae, falling to the tonic on the second, he's perfectly in tune. When he sings the word "dow-ow-own" in bar 10, he nails that phrase every time--fourth, blue third, tonic. That's the blues. It ain't primitive music, trust me! His guitar is slightly out of tune, but his voice is a laser. It takes a lifetime to get to the point where you can toss off a line as casually as he seems to be tossing it off and make it all settle in like that.
@ Kudzurunner "Schadenfreude is when you take a positive pleasure in somebody's failing, especially of the "told you so" or "they finally got what they deserved" variety... That's schadenfreude. My feelings about Cotton aren't like that."
Fair enough, then I'll retract that remark.
The Muddy clip was filmed by a professional film crew (Harley Cokliss' Chicago Blues film, the audio of certain tracks has been available for years from Red Lightning), Muddy's vocals are, well, as good as ever...but echoing Cotton's experience in the OP, Oscher had a little trouble with relative tuning on 19 Years Old from the same session (but still a good performance). ---------- www.myspace.com/markburness
I started a thread a couple days ago about Muddy bringing the BLUES Preacher Man to his Performance....
Muddy is a PREACHER of the blues - he is "Preaching" to the audience...
Iv'e been to some Black Pentecostal Church Services and it is a TRIP, an experience, a type of entertainment that is FELT.
I sang in church when I was younger and sat in with some Black choirs and the feeling was Jubilation and out right JOY- you held nothing back "singing at the top of your lungs" belting it out, LOUD and PROUD :) And the Sad songs would tear your heart out! Their Singing and Preaching is out of this world! They mean what they Say and Sing with every ounce of energy and conviction in their body!
Here is Koko doin it up right...Lyle gets the line up wrong,
One comment was that the guitar was out of key.. I think if you listen carefully to the way Murphy is playing it, he is on key when he plays with the rest of the band on the chords.. but his line has a real flat approach that he is doing on purpose. I think this also throws Cotton off so he sings off key. That would explain why Cotton gets on key after playing his solo, he has the proper pitch in his head then and does not let go of it.
Hey, all bands have slight trainwrecks... not all bands have a Cotton harp solo to make the audience totally forget about it!
My brother in law, singer and drummer in his band, has similar problems getting worse toward the end of the night. Goes from singing to yelling and voice all worn down. He says he knows it but the sound man, who admits to increasing deafness during the show, keeps turning the instruments' volume higher and higher until the vocals are buried and the singer can't hear himself and has to shout to get presence in the mix.
Last Edited by on Sep 06, 2012 7:23 AM
Before this thing gets too heated, one thing I must say is the fact that EVERY vocalist on the planet has off nights for various reasons, including health, smokiness of a room, monitors not working properly/poorly set up in a loud room, and a whole lot more, plus also room acoustics can mess with your ears a lot.
I've seen many great vocalists have bad nights in just about every genre imaginable. Plus another thing to take into account is that one's voice ALWAYS undergoes changes in their lifetime in their range and you really can't stop that, but take time to adjust to it, be it changing the keys of what your singing, etc., and EVERY vocalist is going to go thru that, like it or not.
I've personally gone thru a lot of those things and have my share of bad nights as well as any other vocalist.
One thing to remember, just because one is technically great doesn't automatically mean you're gonna automatically connect with the audience because I've seen tons of technically great musicians, be it vocalist, harp players, guitar players, you name it, who just can't connect with an audience to save their lives yet someone who is far less skilled easily connects with the audience to make what they'e doing memorable and this goes in every genre in the world regardless of what it is.
Hell, even if you watch the dance shows on TV, there are dancers who are technically brilliant who just don't connect with an audience but some who don't come close to that, yet they are able to connect with the audience, and it's not as easy as you think to be able to do both. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
