kudzurunner
4713 posts
May 25, 2014
7:44 PM
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Thanks, Goldbrick. That brings back a very special memory. Back in 1990 or so, somebody in the NYC blues scene called me to do a session. We had a rehearsal at some random apartment building up in the Bronx, near Fordham. I ended up on a bed, sitting on a bed, with Wild Jimmy Spruill, a gold-toothed blues singer named Grace Brimage, an Italian bass player (skinny girl from Queens) named Rose, Andy Mazzilli (very talented kid from Dan Lynch; he OD'd in 2007, long after he'd left NYC) and somebody else on drumsticks. We worked through two tunes, "Baby, You Don't Have to Go" and "C. C. Rider." All five or six of us, black and white, young and old, were sitting on a bed, making music. I kid you not. Very unselfconsciously, too. We were just working out the song.
A few days later we reunited in a recording studio half a block from Penn Station (34th and 8th) and recorded those two tunes. I remember that on "C. C. Rider" I was playing an F harp and I hit the root with a vibratoed note, one time each for each of the twelve bars, for the whole song. The simplest, most repetitive possible harp comp track on a blues. Actually, I didn't play the changes I just hit the C the downbeat of the first beat of each bar: it's the root of the I, the 5th on the IV, and the 11th of the V. (Hope I've got that right.) I played one note--the 2 draw--for the whole song. That's the part that I heard. I just hit it hard and vibratoed it hard, like a hummingbird.
Jimmy loved that. When the track was played back, he kept chuckling and singing the part that I'd played. "Whoooo!" on the C. "Whoo! Whoo!" His own guitar part was the rhythm part on the track you've pasted above: straight fours: chuck chuck chuck chuck. That's what he'd played on Wilbert Harrison's "Kansas City" and that's what he played on "C. C. Rider."
As wild as he could be on leads, in other words, his aesthetic as a rhythm player, comping, was absolute minimalism.
Go figure. It was a great lesson (and compliment) and I've never forgotten it.
Andy Mazzilli: http://rememberingandy.blogspot.com/
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 25, 2014 8:15 PM
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