Joe_L: He sounds about as good a rack player that is out there. I wonder why we don't hear more about him? Yes, he does sound alot like snoky's harp playing. Walter
PS: The original posted video was pretty boring to me. I have heard this same stuff done all over the world, and most everytime they are getting paid more than the guys that originally did the darn songs. I wouldn't pay a dime to hear such stuff. I only heard this kind of immitation because I was on bills with such stuff. I will never understand why people do such things - take the buccu hours it took to memorize all those riffs. That is sterile. I guess the masses go for this stuff over current original players because the bucks must be there to waste ones limitied time on this planet on such stuff. ---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year. " No one can control anyone, but anyone can let someone control them"
"The ways that that blues harp pros choose to have fun and impress their students also teach their students what's important. I'm intrigued by this particular ritual, since it so explicitly endorses the "back then" emphasis, the retro focus, that, as I see it, weighs pretty heavily on the contemporary blues harmonica world."
In my opinion what it teaches is not a "back then" emphasis. What this piece teaches those students to my mind is the following: Phrasing Timing Tone Structure How to have fun whilst playing How to improvise over a groove.
All the things it teaches are important to any style of music.
Louisiana Blues, the Muddy Waters version with Little Walter, is a song I love. I just discovered a Jim Liban version which is soaked in the original and yet is so much Jim Liban's voice.
He isn't copying so much as being inspired by the original. ---------- Tin Lizzie
@JoeL: You've come up with lots of great examples, but I don't believe that a single one of them is relevant to the specific point I've made about a certain kind of public ritual that animates the contemporary blues scene. Here are a few reasons why your examples aren't relevant:
1) 95% of your examples concern one African American artist who is doing his own turn on an earlier African American artist, not a pair of artists who are publicly competing to show that they have completely mastered the style of an earlier African American artist. The ritual, the competition, are what fascinate me, and the erasure of individual style (more in Filisko's case than in Liban's) to further the ritual.
2) Don't underestimate the power of white producers to shape black artists in the direction of what will sell to a white audience. I suspect that a number of the albums you mentioned--and Muddy's albums of the 1960s, after Newport, in particular--were shaped by that dynamic.
@Tin Lizzie: Bravo! I've always said it's important to listen to the music that moves you. I've learned a great deal from "Down at Antone's," "Jumpin' Bad," and especially "Learn to Treat Me Right." I've stolen a few of Kim's licks, I'll admit. I've also done my best to turn them inside out--adding overblows, in some cases, so he can't steal them back. I applaud your choice of listening material.
@Kingley: You're right about some of the things it teaches. While we're at it: Is Joe improvising?
Last Edited by on May 13, 2010 1:35 PM
Well yes I would say so. Even though Joe and Jim are both playing Big Walters style, they aren't doing a note for note rendition of "Walters Boogie".
What they are doing is consciously drawing riffs and ideas from many of his recorded tracks and then mixing them together in a kind of tribute to Big Walter.
So that by it's very nature is improvisation, albeit one that is restricted to the stylings of one artist. Unlike most improvisational pieces that tend draw from many sources (conscious and unconscious) to create a piece.
"2) Don't underestimate the power of white producers to shape black artists in the direction of what will sell to a white audience. I suspect that a number of the albums you mentioned--and Muddy's albums of the 1960s, after Newport, in particular--were shaped by that dynamic."
Adam: I knew Luther Tucker quite well. He let us live with him in Austin, I played the bay area with him, and also when he lived in Belgium. He was not one to brag about his days at chess. You had to really ask him about it. He told me the chess brothers mapped out all those songs. SBWII cursed them and waved guns, but in the end did the songs. White culture has to control artists. It is a age old thing. Just look at how art has been shaped over the centuries by those paying the artists how to paint it. This is my point with videos like this one. There are obviously lots of paint by the numbers players out there willing to drop lots of cash to see people play bigger paint by the number songs. Walter ---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year. " No one can control anyone, but anyone can let someone control them"
"I guess the masses go for this stuff over current original players"
You have it in one.
The vast majority of the public, and harp players would rather hear some old school style blues.
Why? Because its brilliant,timeless music.
Walter, you've posted in the past about turning work away because it didn't fit your Spontobeat ethos. IMHO You've cut off your nose to spite your face.
Maybe if you had taken the work, got better known to the masses. You could then have introduced your own music.
Almost all bands, start off as covers bands. Then might progress to doing their own material.
Not everyone wants too, I don't.
90 % of the musicians I've played with/know ,don't either.
One of my happiest harp memories, was the very first time, I nailed James Harmans tone. It was like he was playing through my amp.The smile on face took weeks to fade.
I still get those moments occasionally, they still make me smile, and the effort getting there makes me a better player.
As I know, for a fact that, the licks and phrases,timing and tone I've copped, will eventually become my own.
Paul Lamb told me years ago, to pick my favourite harp player and go and study and study till I knew their every lick and phrase. This would lead to developing my own style. He did it with Sonny Terry and Big Walter.
Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a butterfly and fly from one player to the next. ----------
7LimitJL: I understand what you are saying. I love the great bluesmen and their songs, but I have yet to hear a cover of one that didn't make me want to listen to the original. It is easy to buff up a great song because the song itself is often a diamond in the rough- a cutting edge moment in time for that artist. To have 20, 30, 40, or more years to tinker with it, which is what almost everyone does to these songs, just doesn't hold me attention. It is like recreating a magical moment. The moment was magical because it can never be recreated.
Many people told me to just go along with those deals to get my name out there. Robbie Robertson, Michael Been, are just a couple musicians that said that to me. It was done out of kindness and wanting to see my music get a wider exposure. But when I said OK I will do it if I can just come in and play a few solos and leave, they said no. It had to be rehearsed and there would be set ideas of how I would play. I just can't do that. No, what I should say is, I won't waste my precious musical journey on that. My spontaneous gift comes with lots of stuff like if I try to think out stuff, it leaves me like it was never there. Plus, if I did do those projects I may have gotten some big time exposure, but it would all be based on doing a regular, rehearsed, performance. Both Robbie, Michael, and others that initially said just do it, understood my take and supported my decision once I explained why I didn't want to do it. Those short time gigs would have paid me more than I would have made in a year of doing my normal gigs to nobody most of the time. I am just fine with it. I am actually very happy I said no. I have no desire to get known for not who I am. That creates another personality that I am not interested in putting on for a buck. I respect anyone that doesn't compromise their art whether I like it or not. We all choose what paths to follow for a life on this earth. I do appreciate you comments and I hope you understand where I am coming from. Walter ---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year. " No one can control anyone, but anyone can let someone control them"
@7LimitJI You said: "The vast majority of the public, and harp players would rather hear some old school style blues. Why? Because its brilliant,timeless music."
I disagree although I am, as it happens, a great fan of that old-school stuff. Love it as I might, I don't think for a second there's something 'timeless' about it. As an anthropologist - or a wannabe anthropologist anyway - all I read about these days is how norms are socially constructed. In other words, how the stuff that seems normal to us, even 'good', is actually a historical process where society shapes ideas of what sounds good and what doesn't. Something that appears to be 'timeless', whether music taste, or any kind of ritual or custom, tends to have historical origins, and a specific point at which it became an institution. Those institutions have a way of making themselves appear 'timeless' - in the west, just look at democracy, christianity, or capitalism, and the way those are or were seemingly universal values, with very specific origins in history.
But there's me being a wannabe anthropologist. Let me instead ask a few simple questions, and if there are simple answers to them, let me have it with both barrels: If that music is timeless, why hasn't it existed throughout time? If it's timeless, why is it not universal? (i.e. How does one explain non-blues fans?) And in the case of blues, why has it gone out of fashion??
Like I said, I'm a huge fan of many of blues music (not all, of course) so I don't say this lightly: my musical taste, just like my way of acting, talking and thinking, is a product of history.
Do you like Shakespeare? Perhaps not - hey, I would understand - but if you do, maybe you'll be interested in this (pretty funny) study, Shakespeare in the Bush. It's often said in Western culture that Shakespeare is universal (timeless, if you will) - that even acknowledging his fruity, out-of-date language, something about the themes of his plays explores eternal questions of man's existence. Well, an anthropologist named Laura Bohannan decided to read Hamlet to some tribespeople in West Africa. Their response is pretty hilarious, even if you're not a Shakespeare guy. It's 12 pages long and worth it.
@Adam You know I support what you do on this board, but the responses here are interesting. Are you perhaps pushing the modernising line too hard? Something that is pursuasive in measures becomes alienating in excess. Just a thought.
Cheers, folks Murray www.harpsurgery.com
p.s. Tin Lizzie -- funnily enough, I listen to Satan & Adam way more than I listen to the Thunderbirds. For my money, their version of "Take You Downtown" [WORD ON THE STREET] is one of the best and most unexpected blues covers I know.
I think part of it is most people are most comfortable listening to and playing styles and music they know. Probably most bands on saturday nights in the bars in the US and Europe, are doing covers as close as they can, note for note, of the songs played on "classic rock" stations. Most local reggae bands have to do Bob Marley (regardless if they are made up of black or white musicians). If you want to make a living playing in a band, getting a good tribute band together may be the best way to accomplish that at the mid-level of touring... those bands probably make more than Jason Ricci, or at least as much. Adam how does Wynton Marsalis playing the classical music of a bunch of old dead white guys note for note work into this question? Or his codifying jazz standards style the same way as Filsko does for decades old harmonica blues?
i do my own tunes but also copy styles note for note.
i guess iv'e broken the new unwritten rule so many times i should have my harmonica license suspended. what?!!! there is no such thing as a harmonica license or that rule where you are not allowed to play BW and bum out adam and tore?!! say it ain't so Joe L!!
Elwood... I do not listen to the Thunderbirds at all. I listen to other recordings with Kim Wilson....such as Barrelhouse Chuck, Billy Flynn, Big Jack Johnson, PineTop Perkins, Jimmy Rogers, Hollywood Blue Flames, Ronnie Earl and Kim's own CD, Smoking Joint (love his Early in the Morning).
Here is Kim doing Learn to Treat Me Right (a tune Adam mentioned) with some of those guys I just listed.
I think this is from the same night.
---------- Tin Lizzie
Last Edited by on May 13, 2010 7:16 PM
@Adam - Carey Bell and Billy Branch stretch out on a tune called "Tribute to Big Walter." It's essentially Big Walter's Boogie. It's on an album called "Goin' To Main Street" on the JSP label.
@MP - I'm not casting stones. I'm guilty of the same sin. I've played Big Walter and Sonny Boy tunes with other harp players. We were having fun at the time. I won't be doing that again.
Shame on Billy Flynn. He plays the guitar similar to Earl Hooker and he blows traditional sounding harp. Gerry Hundt plays mandolin like Johnny Young and traditional harp.
dude, both of em passed their tongue blocking wet harps and mics to the band memebers... and then replayed em... WTH? ---------- Kyzer's Travels Kyzer's Artwork
@ Walter I understand, and applaud you abiding by your principals. I would have caved almost immediately ;o)
@ Elwood. I'm glad you mentioned Shakespeare. :o)
Like the language of the blues has shaped, and can be heard in a lot of modern music.
The 1 - 4 -5 progression can be heard in pop, country, bluegrass and jazz.
Shakespeare also shaped much of the way we speak today.
Here are some of the most popular Shakespeare phrases in common use today:
* A laughing stock (The Merry Wives of Windsor) * A sorry sight (Macbeth) * As dead as a doornail (Henry VI) * Eaten out of house and home (Henry V, Part 2) * Fair play (The Tempest) * I will wear my heart upon my sleeve (Othello) * In a pickle (The Tempest) * In stitches (Twelfth Night) * In the twinkling of an eye (The Merchant Of Venice) * Mum's the word (Henry VI, Part 2) * Neither here nor there (Othello) * Send him packing (Henry IV) * Set your teeth on edge (Henry IV) * There's method in my madness (Hamlet) * Too much of a good thing (As You Like It) * Vanish into thin air (Othello)
As you can see they are both very much alive, well and timeless.
Probably if the above phrases had been translated into the tribes peoples' language, they would have "got it"
Adam, have you ever asked Billy Branch the second question?
I'd bet that in the history of blues players, there has been at least one African American harp player who even changed his name in order to be more like a predecessor.
I'd even bet that there has been at least one great innovative harp player and teacher who has sat around with other players trying to play "Whammer Jammer" more like Magic Dick than everyone else!
Maybe there is a time and place for innovation and personal style and also a time and place for practicing the sincerest form of flattery.
Perhaps this is dragging us off topic, but I think if we can figure out what gives Shakespeare the status of ‘timelessness’, it might help us understand another way in which old-school blues has its own ‘timelessness’.
It seems both of us think the other has proved his point. I’m not denying that Shakespeare’s legacy is very much alive today: there are dozens more examples of everyday English speech derived from his plays. (Even the word “eyeball”, bizarrely.)
But that’s not the same as being ‘timeless’. The question is whether Shakespeare’s work is inherently timeless, or has been *made* to be timeless over the course of history. Is his status possibly related to several centuries of history in which English was the language of an empire that was actively taking over cultures all over the globe, and trying to reconstruct those cultures in its own image? In all those conquered places across the globe, this empire set up schools in the model of its own, which played a big role in spreading its cultural values. Of course, Shakespeare was a central part of any curriculum, because Shakespeare is often thought to be a pinnacle of literary acheivement.
So maybe we should consider his timelessness, in part, as a product of his status as literary top dog of an empire that was also top dog, which had the biggest navy and the best cannons.
But also, how did Shakespeare get to be top dog in English culture? Well, clearly the guy had talent (and no qualms about ripping off a few story-lines, perhaps). But there was also a resurgence of interest in his work among literary critics, themselves famous playwrights and poets, in the 18th and 19th century that helped cement his place as England’s ‘national poet’. There were literary and drama festivals that feed into a genuine need to create heroes of Englishness, at a time when Englishness wished to assert its dominance over all other nesses.
This may explain why the tribal people we referred to above, the Tiv of West Africa, do not have any bards we remember as ‘timeless’. Even though they surely had talented storytellers and musicians, the Tiv lost out to history, while Englishness did very well for itself. This is not just because of its inherent quality, but also because those who sit at the top of the pile naturally get to decide the terms on which quality is measured.
But getting back to the topic… can we see any forces at work that have done the same for old-time blues music, that would have ensured its ‘timelessness’? If we do understand its sense of timelessness as a product of history, this doesn't mean it’s worthless. But it does mean maybe we think about it differently. Maybe more like ole Gussow. Then again, maybe not.
In our Shakespeare/blues canon comparison, we should consider how vast and varied the reproduction of Shakespeare has been. How much contemporary Shakespeare actually tries to recreate Will’s work as it was in the 1600s, and how much updates it, riffs off it, transforms it completely for another day and age. For example:
Adam, do you think that what we're seeing with this kind of reverent emulation of such figures as Big Walter has something to do with this phenomenon? That BW and his cohort have assumed archetypal Wizard/Mentor roles in the White Blues psyche? Or am I completely off base with this?
The7thDave - I'd say the reason that Big Walter Horton is widely emulated (or more that people attempt to emulate him because nobody really even comes that close to it!) is that he was simply one of the best harp players (if not the best) to have walked this earth.
His tone was simply phenomenal, his phrasing was exemplary, his use of percussive techniques (associated with tongue blocking) has never be equalled.
Sure there are (were) other players who come fairly close. In the end the end though they all fall short. Big Walters playing has a very deceptive simplicity to it which draws in the listener and evokes a resonance deep within that touches the soul in a way that no other harp player can quite manage. At least to me it does.
If I had to be stuck with just one CD for the rest of my life it would be a CD of Big Walter playing harp. Because his music swings like hell.
In short to me Big Walter is blues harp personified.
Last Edited by on May 15, 2010 9:15 AM
Kingley: which BW CD in particular, if you had to choose?
"In short to me Big Walter is blues harp personified."
Exactly--BW and LW seem to have assumed a kind of transcendental, archetypal, mythic status with a lot of us. They've basically become "demigods" of a sort, and their recordings seem have taken on some of the qualities of holy writ. Perhaps deservedly.
@7thDave: I think you're potentially onto something here, and I'm delighted that you're willing to ask these sorts of questions. I'll think about it
JoeL: NOW you're onto something. I was not aware of that particular cut--Billy Branch and Carey Bell's "Tribute to Big Walter"--but the moment I saw your post, I downloaded it from iTunes and listened to it. It's extremely important to note that the track was released in 1982 and Big Walter died in December 1981. So it's fair to say that it was recorded directly on the heels of his death, as a way of mourning him--a kind of wake-ritual, if you will--and that materially distinguishes it from what Liban and Filisko are doing almost thirty years later. Carey Bell recorded with Big Walter; Branch played with and learned from him. They'd just lost a friend; their recording is a way of honoring him. That makes a difference.
Still, I was extremely curious to hear the recording itself, and fascinated by what I heard. Billy Branch had his own distinctive sound at that point--the homepage of Hill Country Harmonica has his version of "Juke" from 1982 and he swings like himself and nobody else--but on this particular track, he DOES definitely sublimate his personality, doing his best to summon up Big Walter's sound. And he gets a great deal of it. It might be argued that as the junior member of the duo here, and one who is still coming into his full voice, he is tasked with the subservient role. The recording, in a sense, is his final exam. He's saying, "I can do Big Walter. He taught me well. Here is what he taught me. Now I'm ready to head out with Sons of Blues and blow my own stuff"--as he did on that "Juke" recording from around the same time.
Carey Bell, on the other hand, sounds nothing like Big Walter. He's playing in third position and he sounds 100% like Carey Bell. He's not competing with Branch to say, "No, listen to ME do Big Walter."
Thanks very much for directing me towards the recording.
Last Edited by on May 15, 2010 10:14 AM
@Kingley: I have "Mumbles" Walter Horton, early recordings from Memphis, and I don't know any recording that swings like "Blues in the Morning." It's explosively vital, and it greatly influenced my hit-it-ahead-of-the-beat approach.
I think Big Walter is an excellent player for developing players to listen to and copy. Certainly I did, when I was in my learning-phase. But I was aware even then (the mid-to-late 1980s) that a certain cult had developed around him in New York blues circles, perhaps because he'd been part of the scene there in the late 70, and that some players seemed to think that he was the be-all and end-all. But no individual player is, of course. He had his limits. He rarely swings behind the beat, for example, the way that some jazz guys do, and when I began to get interested in that, I needed to look elsewhere. I love his square, aggressive attack, which is sometimes a little ahead and sometimes squarely (smack!) on the beat--bang! bang! bang! bang! on the downbeat with a hard 2 draw--but the sort of lengthy legato lines that I do aren't something, again, that I got from him, or could have gotten from him. This is why I encourage players to listen widely, and why I agree with Buddha that "widely," for a harp player, absolutely must include other horn players in the blues, R&B, and perhaps jazz category. Magic Dick played sax; Butterfield played flute. Horn energy is good.
What you're describing with BW and LW - demigod status - is what I was trying to say happened to Shakespeare in the English language. The difference between us is you managed to say it without sounding like a windbag. Kudos to you! ---------- Murray. The smartist formerly known as Elwood.
