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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
my take on all this modern talk
my take on all this modern talk
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waltertore
614 posts
Jun 05, 2010
6:20 AM
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It is all opinion. there is no science to this thing. have the faith in yourself to play what is really inside you. Forsake your concerns for worldly acceptance, shame, guilt, fear, and let the joy of your unique soul come out. Stop thinking and allow yourself to explore your own unique soul. IMO that is modern because there is only one you. Walter
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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.
" life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
2,000 of my songs
continuous streaming - 200 most current songs
my videos
Last Edited by on Jun 05, 2010 6:21 AM
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kudzurunner
1549 posts
Jun 05, 2010
6:08 PM
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Yes! You're preaching like Emerson, Walter. "Self Reliance" has much to teach us. And you, as a musician, are exemplary; you're walking the talk.
Here's a relevant tidbit: I remember how it felt to play 125th Street in Harlem right after HARLEM BLUES came out. We had this CD in hand and were peddling it between sets. I was playing it nonstop at home, and reveling in the understandable narcissism of a youngish musician who finally has a record (well, disc) to his name, and the beginnings of a national profile.
But out on the street, playing our songs, I kept hearing the CD version of my solos in my head as I tried to play new stuff. And it messed me up! It took me away from the glorious present moment in which all the best music is made. I'd become self-conscious, and that took away from of the total recklessness with which I'd thrown myself into the music both on the street and in the studio.
I'd urge every developing musician to struggle with the koan that floats up out of such experience, which happens to be the urging in Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose": blow from yourself NOW. Don't hold back. But put in the practice time that gives your no-holdback stuff some shape, some discipline, some harnessed ferocity.
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Nastyolddog
841 posts
Jun 05, 2010
6:45 PM
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WOW!!! Adam i love simple words for there complexity,
it makes me think of how we use them how do they relate to the person useing them,
Adam not be rude or disrespectful Bro,
this is just an observation of the word and how and who uses it you are in one hell of a situation your life it seems is bound by Koans:)
i just love the word after all Life it seems is one big Koan ? = no answer ? never ends :) :( :/ :)
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waltertore
616 posts
Jun 05, 2010
7:39 PM
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thanks Adam! thanks for sharing that story too. Walter
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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.
" life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
2,000 of my songs
continuous streaming - 200 most current songs
my videos
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thorvaldsen76
75 posts
Jun 06, 2010
3:01 AM
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Hello guys!
Often when I read posts here I feel like I'm a boring harp-player.. Because so many players are so scared of playing traditional harp. I'm not saying it's wrong to be creative and work out new stuff,but I think that maybe some guys focus so much on this that they miss out a lot of cool old stuff as well.
There was one post here that asked if it would be better not to listen to great harp-players.. I LOVE to listen to great harp-players. Of course I copy some stuff that I like,sometimes I play so traditional that some guys here would roll over in pain I guess:)
But I think that sometimes people are too scientific in the approach to the harp. For me it's all about the feeling. That's why I love Sonny Boy II. Every sound he makes is filled with feeling. And I like his playing a lot more than guys that are technically brilliant but have less feeling in the playing.. So when I play I focus on feeling. I want every sound I make to come from feeling.. That's my approach:) I guess I'm not going to change harmonica-playing,I'm not going to be world famous. I'm probably just going to be an ok harp-player in a ok Norwegian bluesband. But I get to play the way I like and that's what count for me:)
Kent Erik aka 9fingers
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Ev630
551 posts
Jun 06, 2010
3:08 AM
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Good for you. Ditto.
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yogi
12 posts
Jun 06, 2010
4:05 AM
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All this talk of who is and isnt a modern player, who should be and not be listened to, who is old hat and, by inference , who is relevent and who is not.
Why the need to create little clubs and then decide who can and cant be in them?
Adam , i am surprised by your persistence to include and exclude.
If we assume that we are the sum of everything we experience then everything we do is modern if we do it in the now because we want to.
I love Jasons playing and i even enjoy some of Budhas stuff to but i dont want to start hearing every player in every band playing in that style. Just as modern is the music of filisko, the fiddle tunes of Mrk Graham, Phil Wiggins keeps the peidemont blues alive and modern. The list goes on and on.
So stuck on labels, blues / not blues, modern / not modern.
It smells heavy of wanting to be on the inside and the abilty to label others out.
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kudzurunner
1550 posts
Jun 06, 2010
5:08 AM
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@Yogi: I'm a dialectician, an enthusiast, and an advocate. Please take a look at the page marked "all-time harp greats," earlier on this website. It contains three lists. Jumble them together and you've got an amazing range of blues harmonica excellence. That's a pretty fair representation of the breadth of MY tastes in blues harmonica. Please let me know who I have excluded from that menagerie in a way that strikes you as plainly unfair.
If you can find any thread on this forum--ANY--where I say, or even suggest, that I want "every player in every band" playing in the Jason/Buddha style, I'll send you $100 via PayPal. Your claim is preposterous.
In fact, my tastes in blues harmonica playing are incredibly broad, as the lessons I've got for sale and my several hundred YouTube videos help evidence. The so-called "classic" players are central to that project. I spent literally hours teasing apart the mysteries of songs by Little Walter, Junior Wells, both Sonny Boy Williamsons, Big Walter, Kim Wilson, James Cotton.....
They're all relevant. I suggest that ANY developing player who is serious about mastering his (or her) instrument spend a lot of serious and disciplined woodshed time accruing the sounds and techniques developed and perfected by those players.
But then I do something else, and it's this something else, I think, that you're irritably gesturing at: I dare to suggest a) that listening ONLY to great harp players is a bad way to develop an original voice on the instrument; b) that those classic players were each, in their time, working hard to develop original voices by responding to a broad range of music from their own historical moment as well as the tradition they'd inherited; and c) in our own time, given the weight of tradition, it's particularly important for harp players who yearn to develop original voices not to be content with merely recapitulating the great blues harmonica vocabulary that has already been accumulated.
The key word here is "merely." An occasional homage to Big Walter Horton is fine and dandy. A whole repertoire built around sonic photocopies of Little Walter is silly. It trivializes Little Walter rather than honoring his surpassing creativity.
And you're quite right, in some sense, when you say "everything we do is modern if we do it in the now because we want to." Revivalism and ghost-dancing are arguably modern phenomena. In the 1970s, music from the 1950s was suddenly all over the radio. There are all-white choral societies in Charleston, South Carolina that still get together regularly to sing the spirituals of the black slaves whom their ancestors used to own. I guess you could call that modern. I'd probably call it a way of avoiding the challenge of truly confronting and living with modernity--which is to say, actual black people in the year 2010.
I've always said that a culture, in order to remain vital, needs strong voices advocating for the tradition, which is to say for full spectrum of great art that has come to us from the past. Joe Filisko brilliantly fulfills that function for our blues harmonica culture. I've made that claim before and I'll make it again. But it's also clear that some people confuse the tradition-bearing function with another and equally vital function: a teacher who says, here's how to work with that tradition, our tradition, in order to make new, fresh, relevant, and contemporary blues harmonica music RIGHT NOW. That's what I do, or try to do. I open up space. Just as Joe is particularly interested in music from (for example) the 1920s and 1930s, I'm particularly interested in music that, fifty years from now, will clearly say to blues harmonica players of that period "Music of the 2000s and 2010's."
If you listen to Little Walter's early work, you know that an incredible shift happens between the late 1940s and the mid-1950s. He goes from "The Stuff You Gotta Watch" to "Juke" and "Backtrack." He becomes modern. Amplification is a part of that, but not all of it. The shift was also a matter of increased technique and attitude, along with keen listening to the horn players of his contemporary moment.
I think young harp players of our time, seeking to excel, deserve the best teaching we can possibly give them. A certain amount of critical thinking, reflective thinking, is a part of my teaching method. This website seeks to explode clubs, not create them.
To the extent that I have any sacred principle, any core belief about which I'm inclined to get doctrinaire, it's this: be an original. In order to be an original who has anything worthwhile to say, you'll need to engage deeply with the tradition. But in order to actually BECOME original, you'll need at some point to break away from the tradition, in some measurable way, large or small.
Not everybody is interested in being an original. (Within the past year, Joe Filisko told Murray Hunter in an interview that he thought originality was greatly overrated and unneeded.) Some harp players just want to master, recycle, and embroider established traditions. I'm OK with that. The world needs competent professionals, and it certainly needs masterful archivists and reanimators like Joe, the late Bob Shatkin, and Wade Schuman. But I'd encourage anybody who places themselves in the happy-just-to-master-and-recycle category to take another hard look at the Top 20 players on my all-time lists. Each of those players dared to create something new, something distinctive. If those players are your heroes, why don't you let their example inspire you ALL the way, rather than part way, and dare to do the same thing?
What Wade has done with Hazmat Modine is an excellent example of what I'm advocating for. It's not my cup of tea, but it is memorably original and yet deeply rooted in the tradition that it extends.
Last Edited by on Jun 06, 2010 5:24 AM
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yogi
13 posts
Jun 06, 2010
5:47 AM
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A teasing reply Adam.
''If you can find any thread on this forum--ANY--where I say, or even suggest, that I want "every player in every band" playing in the Jason/Buddha style, I'll send you $100 via PayPal. Your claim is preposterous''
Money safe on that one. I dont state that you say this. I say only that i dont want to hear it.
I agree with many things taht you say. There is no doubt that the music being made by Jason, Chris and others is different and new. But that is, in my mind, different to being modern. The need for originality is essential.
However, it is the weight i see being put on 'modern' that is divisive and not needed.
''There are all-white choral societies in Charleston, South Carolina that still get together regularly to sing the spirituals of the black slaves whom their ancestors used to own. I guess you could call that modern''
Indeed I would. Agrreeable...no. Innapropriate ..yes. But it is them, there and in the now. That is modern. It isn't particularly evolutionary or something I would want hear but how many of us sing blues songs about life on plantations, poverty, the depression, dust bowls, cat fish and box cars. Is that any more appropriate? I dont know.
It is possibly story telling at best but these are the songs available
for us to play the instrument we like the way we like to. This probably supports your argument for things to move on but i dont see that much wrong with telling the stories in the songs of the past.
And it just isnt the blues where this happens. All folk music is just that. And it needs people like chris and JAson to add new stories. But some of us are just not story writers.
I'll have to check on some of the names you mention, they are new to me.
How far away from the traditions did the greats of the 50s /60s actually deviate? I am just curious on this one. Did for example, sonny terry listen to players around him in his formative years and think I want to be able to do that or did he hear them and say I want to play differently to that?.
Keep your money in your pocket.
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waltertore
620 posts
Jun 06, 2010
5:59 AM
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If you are working at being original and modern, you are a million miles from your goal. Being original and modern comes from uncontrollable inspirations of the heart and soul. These things can't be constructed like a math equation. They have to emerge on thier own and for them to emerge, one has to be willing to blindly walk through life.
Most people are followers and need to be directed as to what is new and modern and most declaring themselves new and modern are conciously putting together an equation, often of cover tunes and highly scripted approaches, that sounds different to the casual listener via technically constructed/thought out approaches. To my ears, it is almost all rehash with a forced, thought out feel. Much of what I hear as toted as modern and original hits me as such.
Simple playing still has endless roads to be explored. IMO most players dismiss the basic stuff as old hat, done, used up, over with, when in reality, that is where all the new and modern sounds lie. A timeless, very simple puzzle, but very hard to achieve.... Walter
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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.
" life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
2,000 of my songs
continuous streaming - 200 most current songs
my videos
Last Edited by on Jun 06, 2010 9:06 AM
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Nastyolddog
845 posts
Jun 06, 2010
6:34 AM
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If you are working at being original and modern, you are a million miles from your goal
walter tore's spontobeat
what is sponto beat if not original?
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waltertore
622 posts
Jun 06, 2010
6:46 AM
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nastyoldog: spontaneous music is what flows out of me. I don't work at it at all. It is as easy as sleeping. Doing music any other way is a thinking thing. That is why I don't do covers or even my own songs over again. The word spontobeat just popped into my head at some point. I did work very hard at booking over 200 gigs a year, around the world, for 20 years. I have recently realized that end of the music does not flow out of me effortlessly, so I have dropped it and put out a call to the universe for an inspired person to appear. I am not putting any effort into that either other than expressing it when it is effortless to do so. I don't have any festivals booked this summer because of me dropping the booking end. It all has worked out because I have picked up 14 gigs for my 10 weeks of summer vacation. They are all within a few miles of home and came without any effort. This is how I want to live my life. I dream of these things and they all come true, but in ways I never expected, and I have to walk blindly. Walter
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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.
" life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
2,000 of my songs
continuous streaming - 200 most current songs
my videos
Last Edited by on Jun 06, 2010 6:47 AM
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oda
344 posts
Jun 06, 2010
6:53 AM
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Walter, can you elaborate on
"They have to be emerge and for them to emerge, one has to be willing to blindly walk through life."
I merely do not understand. I respect your wisdom but I want to understand it.
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I could be bound by a nutshell and still count myself a king of infinite space
OdaHUMANITY!
Last Edited by on Jun 06, 2010 6:58 AM
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Nastyolddog
846 posts
Jun 06, 2010
6:55 AM
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Fair comment Bro:)
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waltertore
623 posts
Jun 06, 2010
7:04 AM
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oda: I was diagnosed as learning disabled when I went to college after pulling the plug on playing full time. One of my struggles is the editing process. I reread my stuff a few times before posting and would bet my life it says what I wanted it to, and then when someone, like you have, points out that it doesn't make sense, I am kind of shocked that I couldn't see it. We all have our glitches, and mine are minor thank god. Plus our glitches can be great gifts if we see them that way. I think my glitches have definetely helped my music and have led me to becoming a special education teacher. I struggle big time with math beyond basics. I have lots of musician friends that are considered genius by the world and almost all of them see music as a math problem. I never see it as such. I see it as a blank neck of the guitar, a blank keyboard, a blank harmonica, etc, and I just make sounds randomly and find ones that sound right. I still can't identify what sounds come out of what hole on a harp(guitar, keyboard). It has forever remained a blank to me all this stuff. that is how spontobeat works. That is how I do music.
"It should have said "They have to emerge on thier own and for them to emerge, one has to be willing to blindly walk through life." Basically, we can't control the creative process. Does that help? Walter
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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.
" life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
2,000 of my songs
continuous streaming - 200 most current songs
my videos
Last Edited by on Jun 06, 2010 7:13 AM
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