I was at a Hummel show once, where during a kick butt swing number and he set the mic down jumped on the floor and started doing some serious swing dancing with the ladies, Mark can play harp and dance!
I really enjoy these types of threads. They demonstrate that blues has gone from a fun hobby to a true love for some people. The kind of love that makes one sit around and ponder all of these connections and perspectives.
I should admit that I am an amateur philosopher so naturally, I like questions.
My exposure to black gospel music (not far from blues IMHO) was life changing for me. ---------- Great experiences with: 1623 Harmonicas
I enjoyed it too. Then I went back and watched the "Busking 1" video. Now I'll wait patiently for the "Busking 2" video...(It's only been a year since Busking 1) :-) ---------- Matt in Michigan.
I already commented when I saw it go up on YouTube- Of course it was a silly comment about sexual innuendo in the harmonica lexicon and really didn't have anything to do with intelligent blues discourse, which is why I made it there instead of here, but yeah, great video.
what is so cool to me is that, even with "just" one harmonica, and with a guitar in the mix for certain, if you play the right stuff, people can't help but respond with a step or a tap or at least a nod. sometimes thy don't even know they are reacting as they walk by acting so indifferent, yet they are showing a response to the beat or the groove. Shake Rattle and Roll, My Babe/This Train/Mama Don't Allow, some of the simplest Jimmy Reed medium speed stuff, get s reaction.
you will see a reaction from small children very often and quickly since they are in the age before self-consciousness. if a kid likes something he or she will respond to it. also older people will recognize on some deep level what they may have heard on pop radio in the 40's or 50's.
for me busking in a duo- and occasionally a solo- has taught me a lot about humility. no matter how hard you suck and blow, you will NOT reach those people across a busy street! possibly a few notes. but care must be taken to not blow a reed in open air settings. this is why location is important. people must be passing close enough to hear or at least see you play, and their curiosity must be piqued to come closer. tips happen from a few to several feet away.
our favorite spot was taken over for a new police kiosk in the downtown nightspot area here. so we'll find another one. ---------- http://www.reverbnation.com/jawboneandjolene
The social function of harmonica, indeed. This is so true and let me go further as to say the function includes the continual re-population of the earth. Why do I say that? One of the primary function of the harmonica is to provide a special kind of music, music I like to describe as "the boogie real slow when the blue lights are way down low..." And yes the music encourages couples to hold each other real tight and sway so slow in unison, well you what happens next! Can't say that rap or punk music puts me in that kind of place.....
My apologies, but I don't remember the thread or specifics comments I made relative to this. I did ask a question, with the intent of being a bit of a Devil's Advocate, about what it takes to be a "real" blues harmonica player...
Adam, if you've read any of my posts, and I am working off the assumption your are referencing me at about 7:27 in the vid, I am in complete agreement with your assessment. I have a LONG established history of posting in regards to the importance of playing live for a non-harmonica playing audience, understanding music from a technical standpoint, and considering the business of music (including going so far as to posting specific formulas for writing setlists). While not a famous player, what cred I do have comes from generally playing non-harmonica music and playing for a wider audience. Hell, my last band was a dance band playing contemporary tunes!
I've gone so far as to even share sites like onstagesuccess.com and criticize YouTube backing track performances as a way of showing off ability (I will be the first to admit that I have posted playing to tracks to demo harps and gear, and I appreciate many YT performances, but I wouldn't consider them to be "cool" or equivalent to sharing a real live performance).
In the vid you spend a lot of time discussing the history of blues and the blues forum. I 1000000000000x agree with your comments about "knowing your a guest in the house", etc. Personally, I feel many of the blues contemporaries that preach the virtues of traditional blues don't mean what you are saying. Remember, I am the one who posted the distain for the term "traditional" blues as I felt it was misleading. "Traditional" tends to be assumed to be post war blues from the 50's-70's. I find this insulting to the roots of blues harmonica. ---------- Custom Harmonicas
Last Edited by on Dec 11, 2012 8:16 AM
Here is the comment I made on that thread, and I am only sharing it as Adam listed me in his post on this thread, and I am assuming he means me in part on the YT above:
'"...learning how to play the blues--REALLY learning how to play the blues--is about becoming part of a free-floating community of fellow musicians in a linked series of live scenes: performing live, traveling from place to place, hanging out, learning the stylistics and survival skills on the bandstand."
I would politely challenge that what you are describing is being a professional blues player, or a working musician...not prerequisites to being able to proficiently play blues music technically or emotionally."
I do think there is a wealth of evidence suggesting someone can be a proficient blues harmonica player and not do what was suggested above. There are endless YT backing track tunes that prove that. However, there is a huge gap with lots of grey areas between being able to execute a blues song and to be a blues harmonica star. IMO, which is the same as Adam's, there has to be the components listed above (to some extent).
I don't think, from the original comments that ultimately led to this video, that this is unique to blues, though.
I am realizing I can think of a ton of famous blues harp players that are "famous" and appreciated as players with very limited experience in the areas Adam has listed (or who have reached that status through other means). This is a very loaded topic in that everyone is going to have different expectations and assumptions.
I am also realizing that a lot of what Adam is suggesting in the video - things like the need for call and response, for example - wouldn't require what is suggested above.
For example:
If I play to a rhumba backing track, record it on YouTube for a YT audience, and then post comments back and forth with people, some of who are musicians...
Also, the most recent generation of players only have recordings of the greats to pull from...there are hardly any videos at all. I only know LW, for example, because of his studio recordings, which aren't necessarily any more organic than a YT vid.
Again, I have my opinion on this, which are similar to Adam's but that doesn't make them right. I think it is important for any number of reasons, though, to openly challenge those opinions and to think about them beyond my bias.
What I like about the quoted comment from Adam is that it establishes that being a blues harp player is more than just "playing with soul". There is the business side too. I think this is perfectly acceptable, but not acceptable to ignore.
I don't see someone like, say, Rick Estrin, to be any more or less credible than Nickelback. Obviously, I enjoy Rick's music more, but both are trained musicians who have paid dues and made some business and performance decisions to further their careers. In my book, both are more successful and respectable as musicians because of the fact they take the music to the streets. ---------- Custom Harmonicas
Last Edited by on Dec 11, 2012 8:42 AM
Well said. Reminds me of my trade, teaching. The students should be dancing (thinking, reasoning, doing). MOST teachers, the best they can reach for is to try to present it really well so should make it sense to the listener. Admirable enough but the higher and more rewarding measure is if and how students say it. They dance. Doesn't mean squat how well you dance. Do they dance? Do they have a song.
Last Edited by on Dec 11, 2012 8:43 AM
...and, I'm gonna get whacked for this but I'm listening so convince me otherwise. "You're welcome to come into the house but don't forget whose house it is." If that's the standard then we won't have much time for anything else. Let's keep Steve Jobs in mind while we type, and the Chinese for inventing the harmonica.
At the risk of introducing a straw man, I would wager that many of the people offended by the Sugar Blue comment also have a closed mindest to progressive blues...which would seem odd.
Maybe I am way off base, but I totally get what S.B. is implying. ---------- Custom Harmonicas
Having spent an extremely enjoyable evening making music in a twin bill with HarpNinja this past summer, I should say that any disagreement we have is a gentleman's disagreement, not an irritable or angry disagreement--and in that, we might actually be a good model for what this forum can be. As his followup comments suggest, we agree on far more than we disagree. Many people would argue that we're merely splitting hairs. I consider the conversation--not the argument, the conversation--well worth having. Mike and I find ourselves on the same side of things far more often than we find ourselves disagreeing about ANYTHING, and that, too, is important to say.
Plus, the customized Bb MB harp he gave me is a great harp. I use it often.
I'm working on a whole set of new videos about the history, social history, and cultural meanings of the blues. I'll be uploading the first video shortly. And no--HarpNinja is not named in those videos. I'm happy, however, for the productive train of thought that he and Sugar Blue have ended up prompting.
Last Edited by on Dec 11, 2012 8:16 PM
I'll "plus one" the awesomeness of Adam's video. That was a true education and puts Sugar Blue's comments in a new light for me. This week a series of interviews with Alan Lomax showed up on my YouTube radar and I watched the first of four. It somehow resonates with the tone of what Adam has said. It's these thoughtful gems from Adam that keep me coming back here. ----------
In my limited exposure to Joe Satriani (I've never been much of a fan...While his playing was always technically brilliant, it's lacked emotion IMHO), this is the most emotion I've seen him play with. ---------- Matt in Michigan.
This is an interesting thread, but I must say I received Adam's message as more emphatically about the making of music that moves people, literally. Maybe not so much about the ownership of the blues. I think he said the roots were grown in a social context of people moved to dance, folks whose found love, joy, relief, delight, and comradeship in the act of dancing with friends and family while musicians provide that subtle but powerful energy that gets taken up and transduced from sound to motion in the muscle, bone and nerve of receptive sentient beings, creating an internal feedback of intense pleasure. Ethnicity and common history may inform the precise expression of that gratification, but the essence is the communication, the response of the musician to the response of the dancer, the mutual call and response, and the resulting 'dance' between them. As a trained dancer myself (now long past performance age) I was quite touched by Adam's expression of that understanding.
You can always put the CALL and the RESPONSE in your own playing right? The old tension and release. That's what lessons have focused on.
the BEATS are incredibly useful and sometimes confusing...mentioned here:
1. Shuffle 2. 2-step 3. Rumba 4. Slow drag
QUESTION: is boogie woogie a beat or style? Is swing time same as shuffle? Is Rumba used often, can you a cite a famous blues tune with it? What's the diff between 2-beat and 4/4 (not just countin 1-2 in 4 beat)?
Thanks for the 1-TUNE TEST reminder. I have adapatation of a Big Bill B and Keb Mo tunes nearly polished for public consumption.
I'm still a jammer not a player, but have played 150 times in public, sometimes with people dancing. Already committed to becoming a pro though..thanks for the guidance.
I am a bit mystified as why this is really anything special with the blues. You could make almost the exact same argument for bluegrass fiddle, electric guitar in pop rock, dixiland jazz etc.
There seem to be three points here. 1 There are two kinds of music, one you just sit and listen to, the other demands physical reaction from the audience. Once you stray from regular beat, then it has to be the first. If you want to be popular it better be damn clever or funny or have the groove. and 2. Blues is mostly from the audience response side. It is not something to listen to like a classical music critic, but to be in a bar dancing to, or on a street corner. and 3) Don't forget the roots. There is a reason all the old players were successful, they found something that resonated deep in people. They borrowed from gospel, latin, country blues, hillbilly, ancestral drums, all of that and made something unique that speaks to deep and primal emotion in many people around the world. If modern blues strays from its roots too far, it becomes derivative.
But these points could be translated to almost any major popular music style and parallel arguments could be made.
I agree with everything you've posted about this really being a civilized dialogue and essentially being the splitting of hairs. I really appreciated the history lesson portion of your video.
I also had a blast at our show, was bummed we couldn't hang out more, and thrilled you continue to enjoy the harp! ---------- Custom Harmonicas
Music is more important than gear. A live audience is better than a one person audience (yourself) in the basement. A dancing audience is even better. I mean DANCING, not sitting in chairs, clapping politely after every song.
The dance aspect-- In another life (no kids, no mortgage) I played in a 1000 seat dance hall once in a while. These were sold out shows. Nothing but blues. At least half the seats would be empty during the show because its occupants were on the sprung dance floor shaking, shuffling and wiggling their butts in time to the music. They were some of the greatest gigs of my life.
Maybe this is self-evident, but to get people on the dance floor, every member of the band has to have a sense of rhythm; more importantly, a sense of dance rhythm. If you and your band manage it, though, what a feeling! A full dance floor, the band locked into a danceable groove-- nothing beats it.
A kind of symbiosis happens. A grooving band drives the audience to dance, but the dancers drive the band, too. A sea of throbbing flesh bouncing up and down tightens it. You ARE going to concentrate on the groove, not flash. You don't want to lose the dancers.
Like Adam says, you tend to play simpler. We harp players are sometimes tempted to show off. "Look at me, look how fast I can play!" Many flashy harp players play faster than they are capable of. By that I mean they can't keep the groove and play fast at the same time; it's one or the other. If you're gonna play fast, make sure you are so good, and so capable, that you're always playing in time. To give a jazz example, Charlie Parker played fast, but he played in time. If you can't do that, simplify.
Adam talked about four blues dance rhythms-- shuffle, cut-time, rhumba and slow drag. I love playing them all. There's one more rhythm, or rhythmic family, I love playing-- funk. I won't even try to define it, or state whether or not it's a blues rhythm. It's a rhythmic feel that doesn't fit in the first four categories, but should be part of every dance band's rhythmic repertoire. When I'm a listener, not a performer, funk is what pulls me onto the dance floor every time.
Back to Adam's video-- "The Social Function of the Blues Harmonica". Drop the word harmonica for a minute, and have a look at this video of Lightnin' Hopkins, which demonstrates in a real way everything Adam is talking about:
Wolf: "Many flashy harp players play faster than they are capable of"
Funny thing is, I've got one Irish jig sort of piece I wrote that throws me off if I try to play it slow. It's a lilting sort of thing in 3. I end up putting the emphasis on the wrong beat when I play it slow.
@Walterharp: You're probably right about the dance groove being important in a range of other musics. Radical things are sometimes very simple and obvious things that everybody has forgotten to say (such as the idea that blues harmonica players should be thinking about the dancers). I happened to say them here, but anybody could have said them. Yet in comparison with other musics, I do think that African-derived musics are a) somewhat more heavily syncopated--as the Lightnin' Hopkins video shows--and b) notably more invested in call-and-response dialogue, organized antiphonally so that it proceeds almost like a tennis match: now I go, now you go.
Of course, bluegrass, country, jazz, and rock, all have a notable admixture of African rhythmic and melodic elements in them: blue notes, syncopation, and--in the latter three musics--drumming styles that trace more directly to Africa than to the English isles. That helps explain some of their participatory dimensions.
Last Edited by on Dec 13, 2012 4:29 PM
have been drinking here, but let me lay my take on this down a bit.
the first take.. on your own music.. this sounds good to me
second part,, this connects to others
third, lets find a common thread that we can agree on, beat is the common denominator, because melody and chords are too random for people to participate in without knowing all the intricacies.
so does the argument about whose house you are in become more important depending upon the type of music?
yes, because that is what the house is all about. The syncopation has roots in one place... that place has become the home of modern dance music. It is what rap, R and B, and much of rock has taken up.
The straight count on the one and three, is the country two step, the contra dance, the polka has to get people dancing.
Either way, that is the call and response part, independent of the house.
So is there a division, between the 1 and 2.. melodically in simplest terms the blue third and the major scale, that perpetrates the basic human experience? To a degree, that is the house.
but the beat, that is what separates the dancers from the listeners. and that is what separates call and response from the "performers"
ok back to the beer and my other worldly passions.
Is the 2-beat breakdown also the same as a train beat? (blues, country, gospel?) I heard trains all the time growing up, with the accent on the upeat. ----------
Many moons ago, Guitar Player magazine ran a story about the "Cultural Significance of Blues Music."
The backlash over this was intense. Many people wrote in saying what a bunch of crap all that stuff was about cultural significance.
One of the funniest quotes came from Frank Zappa, posthumously of course. I'll paraphrase it here:
"I think all that stuff about the cultural significance of Blues music is just a bunch of shit made up by white people. Do you think when Elmore James plugs in his guitar and goes, reedily-deedily-deedily-deedily-dee-doo, he really gives a shit about whether or not some kid in a college dormitory sees that as a viable instrument for social change? Hell no! He likes that sound."
Having been a student and teacher at Augusta Heritage Blues Week for about 10 years a while ago, EVERY ONE of those old masters who came to teach, whether it be the VERY OLD Black Minstrels or the old blues guys all said the same thing. Their music was to make people dance...period.
I think this is one factor that is missed by a lot of the current blues scene. Too much emphasis is put on virtuoso individual playing - "looka me mom" stuff - w/lotsa fast notes flying by. The connection to the feet of the audience is traded for the "Whoo Hoo" yelling of the audience at the "dig me" performer.
Never saw Mark Hummel himself dance, but during every show I've seen him perform, Mark always encourages people to get out there and dance. He "gets it". ---------- The Iceman
I grew up in the 70s...i meant the sound of the train on the tracks, not the loco. thump thump. and the squealing and groaning of freight cars. ----------
adam says when someone asks you to play something you do it.....tried to play sitting on top of the world for todd parrott while sitting on picnic table @HCH 2012....did my best...phil wiggins was sitting nearby...at least I did not back down...todd was not judgemental....appreciate that....
Last Edited by on Jan 16, 2013 9:33 AM
