Adam, I agree with you 100% about Ronnie. It is interesting you say his grounding is Rice Miller. Now that you say it I can hear it. I always heard Kim Wilson in his playing when I first met him, and then he kind of blazed his own trail. His phrasing became beautifully expressive. I do not know how he does it.
But he chooses to not overblow.
That was the source of some of my confusion about what it means to be a modern player. I thought overblows were an absolute part of that, and I considered Ronnie to certainly be modern.
"... he's trying to pull us backwards through time into a 50s jump blues style that he loves"
Adam, I think that's an agenda-laden way to characterize Dennis' musical goals. I'd guess he's trying to carry a magnificent musical vibe FORWARD because it is in fact magnificent, and to demonstrate that it can still go 10 rounds with the best of the new guys on the block. He does it very effectively. To me his live performance screams NOW and says "Bring it on! If you want to do something new, here's what you're up against. You better be good."
I agree Ereeder - If Dennis was on a the same bill to play a show with any so-called legit "modern" players... and the audience was polled to WHO they thought was MODERN, I suspect there would be some very surprising results...Also his approach in executing technique is as modern as it gets - that's were he pulls away from most all current modern players is the way he has modernized >> SOUND/TONE/TECHNIQUE/DYNAMICS/PHRASING/RHYTHMIC PERFECTION, who wants to add to the list?
Last Edited by Frank on Apr 28, 2013 6:17 PM
Unique tone=NO ONE has it like Dennis. I agree wholeheartedly with easyreeder and Frank. I know for a fact there are top pro players who are intimidated by Dennis. He recently got huge accolades from Rod Piazza on his playing-I won't get into the specifics here,but he's placing Dennis very high on the list of current top players.
The videos I posted were meant to show how Dennis takes a well known Little Walter tune,and adds his own little phrasing and styling-making it his own. That's what a modern player does-the two latest releases from Doug Deming and Dennis feature ORIGINAL tunes written by both of them-there are some covers as well-but even those are laden with Dennis and Dougs own musical stylings.
Last Edited by tmf714 on Apr 28, 2013 6:40 PM
Odd counterpoint twitch rhythms and screaming harp from across the river. Captain Beefheart, the missing link between the blues and modernist atonality.
I am not claiming this to be a marvel of music by any means, but is this blues? Modern blues? Rock?
I strictly ask out of my curiosity - and am not even looking for harp playing feedback.
This is from a CD I did several years ago with a band that was essentially falling apart (this was a sort of swan song and we broke up right after finishing the recording). I will probably never play this song again at any point in my life, but I guess I never really thought about what "genre" others would think it was.
I'd say about 2/3 of the CD makes me happy still - the other 1/3 I loathe.
I had these online too:
Remembered this one too...this is tricky as it is a cover of a song from a classic rock band...and not the original arrangement. I'd call it bar rock with effects-drive harmonica...
This band called themselves a blues band, but I'd say they were less blues than NiteRail, which is the band the studio cuts are from. I've always considered myself a rock singer and harmonica player and am not trying to classify myself as a "modern blues" anything.
@easyreeder: Aha! Now you're talking--and we're actually have a conversation, which is all I've ever hoped for. I basically agree with you, and I wholly agree with your last sentence.
I've argued for many years that the history of the blues can usefully be understood as a dialogue between tradition and innovation. To be modern is always in some sense to be an innovator, but to be modern isn't quite the same thing as being avant garde or cutting edge. No does something that WAS modern at one historical moment remain modern forever--although the 1967 Corvette Stingray may be an exception.
The standard Bell Telephone rotary phone that predominated from the 1960s through the 1980s was modern in its time--modern with respect to the hand-cranked phones of the 1920s. Now it's antique. So one way of getting a handle on what it means to be modern is technological modernity: making full use of current technologies and not growing attached to old, outdated technologies, such as the Apple McIntosh from 1983. I like the fact that Billy Branch uses an octave pedal and Sugar Blue uses a Mesa Boogie. Those are modern touches. I use solid state and tube technology together. Brandon uses looping pedals. Those are modern touches.
Sartorial style is another way of assessing modernity. Does a blues performer dress up in a way that suggests a conscious homage or attachment to an earlier era--and specifically, a pre-1960 era? Many contemporary blues performers, both acoustic and electric, do. The styles they favor may have been modern in THAT era, but they're not modern now. They're one form that a traditionalist orientation takes.
Stevie Ray Vaughan had his own style. He was a modernist in that respect. He created his own style in the early 1980s--as, for that matter, did Kim Wilson. Kim was a sartorial wildman. Stevie Ray's style was so distinctive that it has remained with us--although actually, now that I think about it, it was somewhat indebted to Jimi Hendrix. But it wasn't a style associated with the 1950s.
The blues style forged by black Mississippians in the prewar period and by black Chicagoans in the 1950s exerts a continuing fascination on the blues culture of our own time, and specifically on non-African-American musicians. Many members of this forum--and not just this forum--use the music of that period as a touchstone for what real blues is. This may be because the elder generation of top white blues harmonica players (Piazza, Estrin, Paul Oscher, Kim, Musselwhite, Portnoy) deliberately placed themselves in the mentoring orbit of George Smith, the Muddy Waters Band, and Muddy's harp players.
What's notable to me is how, with the clear exception of Musselwhite, those players just don't seem very interested in the range of developments in black music over the past 50 years, above all in funk, rock, and hip hop. Kim and Bill Clarke, along with Dennis, have spent some time letting jazz inflect their styles, but that's about it.
African American blues musicians, many of them, have an entirely different orientation to the music of the past 50 years. Even those who debut as Robert-Johnson-replicating thoroughgoing traditionalists, such as Alvin Youngblood Hart, Keb' Mo', and Corey Harris, quickly expanded in a range of directions. All three of those musicians are actively seeking to expand the vocabulary of the blues. I would call all three of them modernists--as I'd call Sugar Blue (who began his recording career with Brownie McGhee on the BLUES IS TRUTH album) and Billy Branch (who is steeped in the tradition but has worked hard to update it, as one listen to "Son of Juke" will attest). I was delighted to produce Brandon's first album in part because I like the way that he was already, at a very early moment in his career, trying to draw on a wide range of musical influences, from Magic Dick to Bill Withers, to create something new. I flipped when I heard his version of "Bye Bye Bird"--it's important for young musicians to show that they can "do" the tradition--but...
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Apr 29, 2013 1:43 PM
...it's also important, I think, to try for something that hasn't been done.
I'm delighted that the contemporary scene contains a range of terrific players, from those who prefer to work within older, established parts of the tradition to those who are trying to create sounds that sound like right NOW, whatever that "now" sound is. All art forms, if they are to remain vital and especially if they are to continue to draw younger listeners into the fold, need to dramatize a passionate, ongoing conversation (or tension) between tradition and innovation.
There are many on this forum who don't like that tension, or even that conversation. They're convinced that the touchstone for real blues IS, in fact, Mississippi in the 1930s and Chicago in the 1950s. My own touchstone for real blues is Mr. Satan in the 1980s: raw, real, community-based, willing to throw funk, rap, and a little rock into the mix, and determined to be right NOW, whatever that is. Because I've had that experience, that touchstone, I have an easier time valuing the new stuff AS blues than many of my brethren here.
I've never said that I ONLY like the new stuff--even if timeistight would like to burlesque me as somehow driven mad by my desire for the cutting-edge. That's silly. I teach and admire the tradition, as did my own teacher, Nat Riddles. But I also want the conversation.
When people here take pride in their dislike for Michael Hill or their refusal to hear Sugar Blue AS blues, I think they're cheating the music and diminishing the conversation. The music deserves better.
"When people here take pride in their dislike for Michael Hill or their refusal to hear Sugar Blue AS blues, I think they're cheating the music and diminishing the conversation. The music deserves better."
I'm not sure I read anyone taking pride in their dislike of anyone. As for a refusal to hear Sugar Blue as blues, personally I've heard him do blues. First album was called Chicago to Paris as I recall. And one can not deny he has chops for days, but again my personal taste does not run to the 90 mile an hour guys.
I'm not into Steve Vai, Jaco Pastorius, or blasphemously on this forum, Jason Ricci, though one can not deny their impact on the playing of their instruments. Others would rate them as the greatest thing since Leo Fender had a bright idea and Matthias Hohner figured out a way to train his tongue much to the delight of his Mrs. But always and foremost the nature of art is subjective or it wouldn't be art. To diminish an opposing opinion regarding art is also diminishing the conversation. ---------- LSC ---------- LSC
"timeistight would like to burlesque me as somehow driven mad by my desire for the cutting-edge...
When people here take pride in their dislike for Michael Hill or their refusal to hear Sugar Blue AS blues, I think they're cheating the music and diminishing the conversation."
“There are only two kinds of music—good and bad.” (attributed to Duke Ellington and others)
I'm of that school. Others may disagree. But to me this is mostly much ado about nada mucho. When I hear Gussow or Fugazzi or Gazell or Adler or Wonder or Jelly Roll etc. etc., I just think " I like it" and spend virtually no time thinking about "what it is" or where it fits.
Last Edited by scojo on Apr 30, 2013 8:44 AM
Without over analysing it i've always instinctively thought of Hakan as someone with a new approach to the 'blues' harp. Interesting to see him on Adams list amongst all those name players.
