Re: Subject: [Harp-L] Never Call Out Stevie Wonder at a Blues Jam

[nonidesign@xxxxxxx]

Everybody's been there. I feel your pain brother. 
When in doubt, build up from what the bass and drummer know. If the back line is good, everyone else can fall in.....or fall down  ;-)
One thing nice about playing a harp is that if you don't know the tune you can just not play until you find a passage you feel good about dropping into.
Pity the poor drummer stuck in a tune he/she doesn't know with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide....and they can't just "stop" playing.

-------------- Original message from EGS1217@xxxxxxx: -------------- 


> Jonathan: 
> 
> That's a shame...I really feel for you, also being a big fan of Stevie's 
> music. I had thought he played that song on a chromatic. Am I wrong? So 
> perhaps that was another possible reason it didn't lay well...unless you were 
> playing it on a chrom? 
> 
> Elizabeth 
> 
> To Revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the 
> foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an 
> animal 
> can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt. Mikhail Bakunin 
> 
> 
> 
> "Message: 1 
> Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 22:42:27 -0600 
> From: "Jonathan Metts" 
> Subject: [Harp-L] Never Call Out Stevie Wonder at a Blues Jam 
> To: 
> Message-ID: <001801c7a274$ede607d0$0101a8c0@JONNY> 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" 
> 
> "This was the valuable lesson I learned tonight. I called out "Boogie On, 
> Reggae Woman", a funk in Ab with I-IV chords and a II-V turnaround. I sang 
> the bass line for the rhythm section, and the keyboardist knew it 
> beforehand. I knew the lyrics fairly well and had a cheat sheet just in 
> case. I had practiced the harp solo and had it down fairly well -- 4th pos. 
> on a G harp because I don't own an Ab harp to play in 1st like Stevie did. 
> (My version sounds reasonably close to the original because all those blow 
> bends are still there. You just kind of move the solo down one hole on the 
> harp.) 
> 
> For all that preparation, there were so many things wrong with the song that 
> I should have just called it off halfway through. I forgot to write down 
> the chords for the chorus, so the band just played the head over and over. 
> That made my harp solo sound off-key, because it's based on the chorus, and 
> it probably was slightly off-key anyway because I'm a novice at 4th 
> position. The song has that I-IV progression twice, but I didn't tell the 
> band that, so the vocals didn't match up to the music half the time. The 
> drummer didn't know the song, and I didn't describe the percussion well 
> enough beforehand, so there was way too much kick. I put down my bullet mic 
> and played the harp solo into the vocal mic, which wasn't set up for that, 
> plus I'm not used to that style, so I couldn't really hear myself playing. 
> Also, we had no idea how to end the song after everyone begrudgingly took a 
> solo. 
> 
> So there you have it. Don't try to play Stevie unless you have a band with 
> rehearsals. There are too many things that could go wrong, and in a blues 
> jam setting, the non-blues chord progressions don't go over so well. 
> 
> Jonathan Metts " 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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