It's hard to argue with playing like this. Bharath is surely one of the finest, if not THE finest, contemporary exponent of the Little Walter approach. This is note-perfect, error-free, beautifully modulated stuff--and not a note-for-note copy of some particular recording. It's rare, frankly, to find somebody who is this far inside of a style and can work every single dimension so that it lives freshly. Nice stage presence, too: relaxed, funny, and fully in command of the band.
I've occasionally been accused of hearing ONLY Little Walter in certain performances that strongly echo him, so I'd like to hear from htownfess and others. If you hear strong influences from some other well-known player here (e.g., Big Walter), please give time cues. I hear LW in half a dozen ways, especially the modulations in tone, the timing (hitting hard on beat 2 of bar 1), and above all the range of warbles. But the "other" Walter is certainly in evidence here.
I said you missed the fact that the Gruenling vid from a few weeks ago was WAY more BW than LW.
Congratulations on finding a clip that is heavily influenced by LW, but it doesn't change the fact that most hobbyist cats just assume everything is a LW clone performance.
The vamping is to my ears more Little Walter than Big walter. His approach to phrases remind a bit of juke.
Hi is one D** good harmonica player thats for shure. He really swings and has an impecable timing,
Also I love his showmanship, he seems as he is having a great time on stage, and that transfers to the audience. I will never forget when I saw Billy Branch live in Buenos Aires last year, he had that thing beyond music, such joy, such emotion, that engaged all of us.
Chicago blues as its finest.
---------- With some latin flavour for you, chico!! :P
What perplexes me is why a musician with such a high level of skill and talent would choose to perform in what is essentially a cover band or tribute band.
Maybe because it is easier to get gigs or other business factors. I only chime in because of my own personal situation. Getting gigs as an original artist is way tough and those in the know would tell you that, as a business, the most money is with a tribute band, than a coverband, and then an original band.
My current band isn't as "good" as my previous band. The amount of talent is totally different as is the presentation and mission. However, because we're a coverband and not an art band it has been easier to get gigs, etc.
I would love to play with a band interested in writing and recording and being an original act, but the coverband route is way easier. I could invest the same time into just doing harp related things via YouTube and the like, but I want to be on stage as much as possible.
Where I live, the blues scene is pretty much dead as is anything original that isn't already way established. In my home town, NiteRail could play 1-2 a month for $75-100 a guy in rooms with full sound and lights and draw a crowd five years ago when we sucked and only played what we wanted to. By the start of this year, it was $65-75 a guy in rooms not set up for music and half as many people playing more recognizable material.
The number of venues to book in town went from a dozen to 3-4. In fact, even with my current group, one of our favorite clubs just went from two bands a weekend to 2-3 bands the entire month!
Long winded story summed up...if he wasn't doing a tribute thing, would we even know who he is? Let's face it, musical success is only one part talent and there are many other factors involved. There is appealing to the harp world and then to the rest of the world.
IMO, it might be a wise move to be a tribute of sorts like he is because it might open more doors. Having a niche and attacking it is a great idea. Most people don't even realize how good he is unless they play harp. Maybe the LW angle is an easier sell to the blues market in his area?
I've spent a wealth of time communicating with a few top tier coverband leaders picking their brains. One thing that comes up again and again is appealing to peers vs appealing to the audience. His approach seems to make fair business sense in my mind. Being good at your instrument is often a very limited factor in success. Gimmick, etc can mean more. Having a unique selling point is a great idea. How many blues bands with harmonica are out there? Too many! But how many calls do blues clubs get from LW tributes? That is unique.
Around here, classic rock dance bands are a dime a dozen and most suck but play the right songs. Why hire my band, which is pretty much a classic rock band? We are young and appeal more to the younger crowd, we have added a lot of audience participation, my back up band is all graduates from the region's top music school, and we use the harmonica in place of guitar in a way that is totally unique to the area.
There are no other harp players around here playing rock like I do. None. That doesn't mean I am awesome, but unique. Notice that it is the last selling point as it is the least impressive....clubs don't care.
What perplexes me is why a musician with such a high level of skill and talent would choose to perform in what is essentially a cover band or tribute band.
There are a lot of reasons:
1. Playing in this style is a shitload of fun. Try it some time and you'll see. Additionally, it isn't as easy as one might think.
2. Playing in this style gets people moving and on the dance floor and also drinking. Pimping drinks is the name of the game in the bar business.
3. Girls dig this kind of carrying on. Do I really need to tell you about girls that have been drinking?
4. Playing with guys of that caliber is an absolute blast! Playing anything but traditional Blues with them would be a complete waste of time.
Finally, as good as Bharath is at playing this sort of music, I think Kim Wilson is better at the Little Walter Jacobs thing. ---------- The Blues Photo Gallery
What Bharath is doing in this video definitely ain't easy!
With most blues players, a combination of factors determines the choices they make about what style to focus on. I think it all starts with what moves you, what touches your soul. If you hope to play live, in an amplified band context, you're inevitably going to be pulled towards "mainstream" blues, however you define that, and mainstream these days is going to be a mix of Chicago, West Coast, Austin, swing, funk, what have you; with regional inflections, of course. There isn't much money in blues, until you reach the highest level (the Kim/Rod/Estrin level), but what money there is for blues harp players tends to go to folks who can pull in BOTH the dancers and the harp player/students. Jason Ricci was a rarity in this respect; Sugar Blue is perhaps another. They're not going after the swing dancers. But for the working stiffs (and I mean no disrespect; stiff is good, unless you're dead), the steady bread is made by those who play familiar repertoire: good time music that makes people feel good and makes dancers move.
I think Joe L. is right, in other words, except about Kim being better at the LW thing. Nonpareil as Kim is, I think Bharath is actually better at the straight up LW thing. I think Kim is better at being Kim, though, than Bharath is at being Bharath--at least if what we mean is that in a blind taste test, with each guy doing his best LWish playing, it would be much easier to pick out Kim's distinctive voice. That being said, there are a couple of moments in this video when Bharath seemed suddenly to reach for something that definitely DOESN'T come from LW. A big 2/5 blow octave at one point. That's when my ears really start to perk up. I have sliding scales, though, and although I can play a fair simulacrum of LW, I'd be the first to acknowledge that Mr. B. has taken things much further than I have. I made a deliberate decision at a certain point in my own development to turn in another direction, rather than pursuing the thread deep, deep, into that particular hole. But my ears don't lie. Bharath's execution is at the highest level.
But look, here's the big difference between our day and Little Walter's day: back then, blues records were pop hits. "Juke" was a #1 R&B hit. This meant that there was a constant pressure urging players to try for the new sound, a fresh update, a new beat. "Teenage Beat."
In our own day, blues recordings are subcultural stuff. They're a minority taste. THEY AREN'T HITS, except in extremely rare cases, like Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason to Stay Here," which was a 12-bar blues. So there's nothing like the same pressure to innovate--unless an artist's music specifically drives him to do so, as Jason's plainly does, and as mine to some extent also does. (Michael Hill and his Blues Mob and Sugar Blue fall into this category.) There isn't much profit in it, at least not within the subcultural mainstream. The subculture erects boundaries and says "Blues is on this side, rock is on that side." Aesthetic conservatism is a way of maintaining solidarity within the subculture.
The key thing to note is that not all subcultures work this way. The skateboarding and X-games subcultures certainly don't. They're always about pushing the limits. And that's because the profit, the fame, goes to the dude with the wildest tricks.
Last Edited by on Dec 08, 2010 9:06 AM
Well, I'm not suggesting he shouldn't play blues--it's the highly imitative style that I'm referring to. Nor do I suggest that what he does is easy to do. But if he has the talent and skill to do that, he surely should be capable of greater originality if he has any creativity at all.
Now, i don't compare myself to Bharath and I don't claim to be a great player or anything like that. But I am in a blues band that works regularly and we get people dancing pretty consistently. And we get gigs specifically because we play blues tunes in an original non-imitative style. A lot of our audience and many of the venue owners that hire us tell us they like us because we're "different" or because "no one else is playing blues like that" or "you guys have your own style [or a different style]." Of course I'm fortunate enough to be playing with some very strong musicians. But, anyway, based on my experience, a band does not have to do covers in order to work--familiar material, perhaps. But performing original arrangements/interpretations of familiar material is not what i consider being a cover band.
There's not much that's very original about what Bharath does. Those of you who describe his style each do so by comparing him to others who he appears to be imitating. People don't describe Sugar Blue's playing that way, or Jason Ricci's or Chris Michalek's.
But maybe I'm prejudiced since i tend to think that too many harp players put too much effort into imitating traditional blues recordings, anyway. But Bharath certainly does that at a very high level of skill. It's interesting to listen to his technique. But I find it boring to listen to his music.
I wrote my previous post before I saw Adam's which must have gone up as I was writing mine,
I like to think my band is about pushing limits of how familiar material is played/interpreted. I agree with Adam's observation about the blues subculture tending to enforce aesthetic distinctions and limitations. Personally, I think that's unfortunate simply because it is so limiting. I mean, what's the point of doing what someone else has already done? As I've said before, that seems to me to be at roughly the same creative level as being an Elvis impersonator, although it may require considerably more skill and technique which, IMHO, could be put to better and less limiting use--like, for example, putting an original spin on familiar material that makes it uniquely your own.
I also happen to think that Blues would be more widely appreciated if it were more commonly heard in different contexts than imitations of traditional renditions.
You know, neither my band nor the other band i work with as a sideman ever plays the same tune exactly the same way twice. There are general arrangements, and, of course, heads, melodies and other defined passages have to be played correctly, but everything else varies depending on the vibe. Again, i am very fortunate to be able to play with very strong musicians, most of whom are full time professionals and some of whom have college degrees in music. I'm not a full time professional musician myself and i count my blessings that i am able to play regularly with musicians of this caliber. Although I've had gigs where I've been required to play material note-for-note (and still do occasionally), at this point in my life i don't think I'd be willing to play regularly with a band in which I was required to do that all the time. To me, music is an expression of things that can't be communicated in words but which other people can understand. I would get very limited fulfillment from just repeating what someone else has already said musically. If I get hired to blow harp in a pit orchestra for a play, as occasionally happens, that's different--I play the part as written, which, btw, can be very challenging. But if I'm going to spend time performing in a band, there has to be some originality and spontaneity to it in order to hold my creative interest. So, if i could play as well as Bharath plays, I certainly wouldn't be playing what he plays.
Last Edited by on Dec 08, 2010 10:21 AM
It doesn't sound particularly LW like in terms of phrasing...apart from the one verse approaching the 2 minute mark.
AS 7Limit says, I would have figured it more like Kim, if anyone, at a blind listen, some similarities with BW in terms of timing. It sounds like someone playing traditional amplified blues harp well...yes the techniques are recogniseable, but this is not an example of Bharath playing "inside LW's style".
Hyvj - if you think that is a clip of a LW covers tribute band, you need to buy a LW CD and listen to it. If this kind of "immitative/going nowhere/archivist blues" isn't for you why not just pass it by & post some examples of something you like? I'm not saying that you don't have a right to your opinion, but it just doesn't appear to be your sphere of interest, hence some of your comparisons/comments seem ill informed.
@Adam "With most blues players, a combination of factors determines the choices they make about what style to focus on." I usually find that musicians in any genre play the music that they like, be it a tribute, wholly original concept, whatever. What I find more often is musicians judging other musicians by their own aspirations & approaches, rather than just taking another's performance for the entertainment that it is. Perhaps consider if he is achieving his aims, rather than whether he is playing to your perspective...a quick scan of the guys who share the stage with him suggests that he is.
Agree with what Joe L says entirely, plus I think there are about a dozen guys who are no worse at the LW thing than Bharath.
@5F6H: Well, you may be correct. But I think if the best harp players were not so archival in their approach to playing music on the harmonica, the instrument might have broader popular appreciation and greater musical respect. But, yeah--there's no counting for taste.
Were any of you at Amanada's Rollercoaster? I was-you truly needed to be there to fully apprieciate Bharath's music-he does not sound like Kim when he plays live-he sounds like Bharath. He was backed by some of the finest blues musicians around-Junior Watson,Larry Taylor,and Richard Innes. I picked up on some unique phrasing and notes that seperate him from anyone else playing this type of music. He owns a bar/restaurant in the Great White North,but he mostly relies on his music for income. We spoke for a while,mostly about music-Bharath is also a decent guitar player,which also seperates him from most other players. Think and say what you want,but the guy gets it done live-period.
"cover band" Classical musicians more often than not play 200 year old music thats been "covered" hundreds of times. The quality of a performance is measured not only in the accuracy of duplication, but in that specific artists redition of the particular piece. Even though Bharath is duplicating another artists work, if you have a decerning ear you can hear Bharath. That to me is how this can be special. Having said that, new blues is cool too.
@5F6H: Nobody who listens to this clip with open, honest ears can fail to miss Bharath's immense stylistic debt to Little Walter. Period. It's huge, audible, and weighty. (And everything I say is about this clip, not about Bharath live.) The phrase "covering" isn't quite right; others may have used it, but I haven't used it. I don't even know the name of the song; I have no idea whether it's a LW song or not. I'm not a LW scholar to that extent. I just know his basic repertoire by ear--and I certainly recognize his style and those who are following in it.
Bharath is following in it. In this particular video he's doing precisely what some classical musicians, the bad boys of their own time did at the end of their concerts, which is improvise in the style of an earlier composer. (Read Robert Walser's RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL, a book about the classical/heavy-metal connection, for substantiating evidence to this effect.) Most blues guitar players can do a passable Albert King imitation, for example. Stevie Ray Vaughan, early in his career, had a hard time NOT imitating Albert King, as a recent PBS show that I caught made clear. It featured the two guitarists, up close and personal. Albert--a Little Walter of his time, with a magnificent signature style--did Albert King stuff, naturally. Stevie Ray began by doing Albert King, and then he pushed harder and began to do his own thing, live, as Albert watched on.
I see some of that same dynamic at work in Bharath's solo. I don't hear him playing a specific Little Walter instrumental note for note. But I hear him effortlessly replicating a whole series of LW's stylistic signatures, deliberately trying to conjure up a ghost. If he's not doing it deliberately--well, he's doing it anyway. His phrasing is 1955 all the way, and he does THAT beautifully. It's important to note that the whole event is named for a well-known song of LW's, and it's hardly surprising that that desire to honor LW would help determine who was invited and how the invitees played. In this respect, Bharath was an extremely good choice. Jason Ricci and Sugar Blue would have been bad choices for that same reason.
But as I say, there are a few points where he's pushing beyond that, and they are what I admire. I'm a traditionalist enough to hear how phenomenally well he's mastered the tradition and a modernist enough to be impatient with that--and intrigued by the moments where he's pushing harder at the edges of the familiar.
He's a great entertainer, indeed. I said that. It's important for a harmonica player to have some of that going on, although not all of the great ones do. Paul Butterfield wasn't a particularly good entertainer, the handful of times I saw him. He just blew amazing harp and sounded like Paul Butterfield.
Last Edited by on Dec 08, 2010 6:47 PM
Adam - I think his playing is pretty heavily influenced by many of the postwar Chicago players. I think that Bharath is one of the few players that listened to a lot of harp players beside Sonny Boy, Little Walter and Big Walter. (Many of the better traditional players have done that listening.)
If you removed the video off this clip and said it was from the mid 1950's, it wouldn't have surprised me if it had been one of many players on the Chicago scene. I wouldn't have thought this was a Little Walter recording for a number of reasons. I would have thought it was a good Little Walter stylist like Harmonica George, George Mayweather, Easy Baby or Willie Anderson.
There is no denying that Bharath is heavily influenced by Little Walter, but most of the players on the scene since the mid 50's that are worth listening to were heavily influenced by Little Walter. (Sonny Boy Williamson is probably the only exception.)
@kudzu: Please, please forgive me for chiming in late when you've honored me by asking for my input on the topic, but . . . you're wrong. I've been multitasking and wondering if anyone would spot the crux of your response to this clip, and now I get to be smug at great length, because no one did yet. Pardon the digressions, it eventually arrives somewhere--
7LimitJI nailed it in more ways than one. I listened to the first minute or so and paused it because I was waiting for him to start playing some LW instead of Kim Wilson. This is Bharath demonstrating he can study KW as hard as he can study LW--even the body language is Kim Wilson. Since the occasion is a festival organized by KW's wife, the tribute is altogether fitting and proper--though if I were in Bharath's shoes and knew that Steve Marriner was going to be on the program as well, I'd have left it to Marriner because SM sounds like he could quote an hour or two of this stuff. Instead Bharath shoulda spent the prep time, oh, I don't know, maybe *writing something* instead of memorizing KW? It has KW's characteristic echoes of/debts to LW/BW, but as 7LimitJI says, it's Kim's distinctive timing and emphasis shaping the phrasing.
One reason I recognize this stuff readily is that when KW came through on the Tigerman tour ca. 1992, a friend bootlegged most of the show, including a fifteen-minute version of "Down at Antones" or whatever the lead-in to Kim's solo breakdown segment was, so I've had that around for twenty years, plus the landmark 1998 SPAH performance--where it sounds to me like it's the first long instrumental stretch like this that really wins over the older school/chromatic players in the crowd--plus the Different Tacos CD where there's a ca. 1981 live breakdown. More than half an hour of this stuff even before Youtube came along and though I've never tried to transcribe it, it's all different but you can spot the habits. (One difference between a good player and a bad one is that the bad player's style is a collection of bad habits and the good player has evolved a set of good habits.) Kim's been doing it for more than thirty years but it did not get onto a widely distributed recording.
I can remember reading local music critic's review of a T-Birds show I missed ca. 1996, where he said it was pretty much all standard T-Birds, good but familiar, until the last tune, where Kim Wilson threw down the first fresh, inventive blues harmonica instrumental the critic had heard in years. You know and I know without being there that what the critic heard was that unique tongueblock vamp opening to the breakdown that Kim does. I think it's time we all gave Kim credit for adding that specific song and form to the canon of great blues harmonica instrumentals--it reaches clear back to DeFord Bailey, to "Juke," to "The Creeper," to "Whammer Jammer": everything in the grand tradition of blow-the-audience-away blues harmonica instrumentals.
7LimitJI mentions Piazza's early LW emulations as supreme and IMO you cannot overestimate the impact of the bootlegged LW Chess tapes on West Coast players of that period--you can even hear Johnny Dyer quoting them. If you had those tapes or the Le Roi des Blues LPs made from them, you could memorize a whole bunch of LW that otherwise was not available in the U.S. until the 2-disc CD issues in the 1990s. Something like that learning process has been happening with Kim Wilson's style, where enough of it has been out in circulation for long enough that some few people have mastered some of it. It strikes me that Rod Piazza's walk-the-bar solo breakdown mode may not have made it onto record till the Live at BB's CD, but I'm sure bootlegs have been out there and players have stolen it--yet I don't think of it as a distinct addition to the canon of blues harmonica styles the way I think of Kim Wilson's swinging shuffle/breakdown flow style. Too much LW DNA? I think Piazza's got a flow mode that hasn't really made it onto records, but it might not be separable from the Mighty Flyers core playing feel, let me try to explain and get back to why this Bharath clip works better--
Sometimes when KW puts an instrumental on a record it sounds like maybe they just took the first four minutes and faded it or gave him a heads-up like they probably gave LW around 2:30 so he would end the tune, but it seems to me that there's a distinct KW mode live when he knows he can just stretch out if he wants, especially on the breakdown song, a different flow of ideas and maybe a heightened rhythmic stamp, refined in conjunction with his solo blues band lineups as opposed to the Thunderbirds--I was just thinking that if one A/B'd "Pocket Rocket" or "Jumpin' Bad" off the first two T-Birds albums with the mode Bharath is channelling here, the creativity would be evident in the early stuff but it's nonetheless a different feel; very possibly there's a Keith Richards dynamic in the early Birds, Jimmie Vaughan's guitar rhythm at least in tension with Kim's personal rhythmic feel, whereas in solo mode Kim can wholly suggest the rhythm. That make sense? Surely a sentence as long as that contains something of value :) Really good leaders don't need but a few solo bars at the opening to impart the rhythm they desire to a good band, and Kim's solo bands have learned to do it his way--he's on what, sort of the fourth or fifth generation of his solo band, in a way?
The reason why this video performance might work better in some ways ought to be obvious: Bharath is not doing LW the exact same way every time with guys who never played with LW, he's doing Kim Wilson with guys who have played with Kim a lot over the past decades. This band is attentively listening for, anticipating and reacting to Kim's improvisational tendencies, his phrasing and dynamics, as though it were Kim's flow happening in the moment instead of another Bharath recital.
It's just that simple.
Bandstand memory IMO can be a different phenomenon than rote memory--playing with someone familiar, stuff that I like to do with them on a given song comes back to me that I could never quote off the top of my head. If you play with a strong improvisational stylist enough, you develop a sense of where they're likely to go, although they may have a vast bag of things they like to do and readily create new ways to get from one to the next--that's the sound of the Aces behind LW, 1952-1954: no two takes are the same, nor are they equally good, but when it really jells it really kills. I think it was seeing Charlie Musselwhite twenty years ago where I first perceived that CM wasn't reciting memorized solos, but had big chunks of stuff he liked to get into the solo on a given song, or power moves he loved, and wouldn't do those in the same order every time, but the band could feel them coming. That dynamic is sorta happening here but I daresay Bharath is quoting a bootlegged live KW performance verbatim, or has strung together chunks thereof--the band isn't likely to recognize it because they've played with Kim too many times and weren't necessarily the precise lineup on the performance in question. Yet's it's still a lot more organically alive than Bharath's LW recitals, because this is *something the band has helped Kim Wilson to create* through how many hours together on the bandstand?
And that, dear Adam, is why you liked this clip a lot better. Kim Wilson's band is playing with an animatronic Kim Wilson. I daresay it would have been a treat to hear the actual Aces backing up Bharath on a LW tune because it would have had more of a living pulse for the same reason.
I'm not finished with this rant, but I am gonna clean up quick & go play some--
edits were "on a LW tune" and [a] "living pulse" and taking off a stray "a" on "local music critic" [and I bet that review is archived if you really want it].
Last Edited by on Dec 09, 2010 6:23 AM
As a fairly new player, I'm becoming frightened to practice too much, and live in constant dread of sounding too much like Little Walter (not much chance at present ability!). Recently I've been waking up during the night due to worry over this matter.
However, I have a grand plan - I will buy a tremolo harp and play those blues in my own unique style.
Before I go to the expense of buying the tremolo harps, can someone please confirm LW is NOT a known exponent on tremolo harmonica.
@Adam - "I'm not a LW scholar to that extent. I just know his basic repertoire by ear--and I certainly recognize his style and those who are following in it." In the clip in question phrasing & timing is nothing like LW, apart from one verse. Your perception of LW's style and what LW's style actually was seem disparate.
I don't need to read a book on the subject, I can hear the Bharath clip, I can hear LW. You have a position on Bharath and you are determined to bend reality to fit your perception, you intimate that you know what his aims & motives are, as if you can read his mind. It's absurd.
There were a lot of players at Rollercoaster, I wasn't aware that it was a long festival where everyone was expected to jump up and do their "LW parlour trick", strikes me that it was a celebration of blues harp...as such I'm sure the memory of LW was well represented (as it should be, him being the greatest & most influential player, in the genre, that ever lived)...but I still don't see why Bharath keeps getting singled out, compared to plenty of other traditional players.
If holding a harp to mic & blowing through an amp is LW style then Bharath is guilty, so am I, so are you. That's the only major commonality that I can see. Maybe one day he'll do an overblow in a youtube clip and be accepted as "new/cutting edge/inventive"...because he is employing a 40yr old technique instead of 60yr old techniques. My idea of "new" isn't usually something that is older than the average life expectancy of the population in some countries.
Last Edited by on Dec 09, 2010 7:00 AM
You're right in your deep analysis of the material identifying the objective as an homage to Wilson. Of course, Adam is broadly also right in hearing LW influences in there.
But your analysis proves my repeated point about folks who don't listen more broadly always assuming that a man with a mic is a LW clone. It shows that these types are listening on a more superficial level - they can identify the obvious influences but miss the other 90% - the nuance and the tapestry of influences that exist in the best amplified blues harp.
Thanks, Drew. I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate to have been hearing LW outtakes/alt-takes and live Kim Wilson bootlegs for longer than some other folks through no virtue of my own apart from being in the right place at the right time--but I damn well know some things when I'm hearing them, or hearing the OP clip for the first time.
I've been holding off on saying hardly anything about what I think The Future of the Blues or The Future of the Blues Harmonica are. But I will assert one damn thing: part of the future of blues is compelling live performances, and the performance in the OP clip is more compelling because the backing band is into it in a way that matters whether you're playing overbends or not. I explained why they would be into it above. As to the rest of my opinion about The Future of Blues, that's really pretty simple but nonetheless is another post or two.
@Jagrowler: Little Walter played tremelo harmonica on the January, 1959 "Blues Before Sunrise" session with Muddy Waters.
Last Edited by on Dec 09, 2010 7:12 AM
part of the future of blues is compelling live performances, and the performance in the OP clip is more compelling because the backing band is into it in a way that matters whether you're playing overbends or not.
That's not only the future, but it's also true of the past and it isn't to be overlooked. Part of what made Little Walter's recordings so great was the choice of artists providing support. His records wouldn't have been nearly as interesting if he hadn't been backed by Robert Jr, the Myers brothers, Fred Below or Muddy's band. Those guys were part of the magical nature of Walter's work on Chess.
One thing that is rarely mentioned is how great the band was that backed Little Walter on those recordings. Little credit is given to Robert Jr, Louis Myers, Dave Myers and Fred Below. Little Walter wasn't the only guy on the bandstand doing major evolutionary things on the band stand. Robert Jr and the Aces were huge trendsetters and highly influential. Listen to what Junior Watson is playing on the video. It came directly from Robert and Louis. If it hadn't been for their abilities to support him, Little Walter may not have evolved. You can see how he was constrained on the AFBF videos when being accompanied by Hound Dog Taylor, who was no where near the guitar player Robert or Louis were. (I am a huge fan of Hound Dog and his music.)
(There are very few guys who can play like that. Appreciate them, when you find them. They are like a rare diamond.)
The same is true of Big Walter's recordings. When he was recording with a solid band, he sounded great. When he was backed by a band that wasn't as good, the results were less than impressive. For example, the recordings with Hot Cottage were nothing special, but the live recordings with Ronnie Earl were really nice.
If the whole team isn't into it, the results always suffer. When they are digging it, the results can be better than the sum of the parts.
