Re: What constitutes "blues"?

["Bob Maglinte" <bbqbob917@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
One of the worst things about this thread that really bugs the living crap
out of me as a professional blues musician is that there is far too many
people over intelluctualizing the music and in my not so humble opinion, it
serious detracts from the music in general. It isn't just the notes in the
chords, it FEEL, and wheras notes and theory is relatively easy to teach but
groove and feel is much harder, sometimes almost impossible to really teach
and teach it well. The real sound of blues, to give it the more realistic
African American feel to it, whether you put it with a 50's jump feel or
hip-hop, African American music is played AND sung BEHIND the beat, and
often off the 2 (and I do NOT mean the 2 chord). This is still very much
true today in African American popular musics such as hip-hop, reggae,
R&B/soul, and still very much true from Louis Armstrong's day with a few
exceptions. Most popular white and hispanic musics are often played dead on
top of the beat or ahead of the beat and off the 1 (again I don NOT mean the
1 chord). Many think of behind the beat as dragging the beat, and that is a
total misconception. What it is is nothing more than playing musical mind
games, and so playing behind the beat gives the listener the ILLUSION of
being slower than the tempo really is, while playing ahead of the beat gives
you the toal opposite of that, and there are my different delineations of
both. One thing to realize is that by playing either off the 1 or ahead of
the beat, or both, you will fall into the playing often times an excessive
number of notes, whereas behind you can do the job with a lot less, allowing
for tension to build. The players who play real busy usually fall into the
former, and have a difficult time with playing behind the beat, which also
makes enormous use of SPACE, while a  busy player can't help but try to fill
each and every hole trying to dazzle with every note they know how to play
in seconds.

As a general rule, far too many musicians never learn FEEL in regards to ANY
genre of music they're attempting to play, regardless of what the genre is.
The better pros, especially the studio musicians will usally be more intuned
to this while the average musican, especially the ones the usually only play
in the local Sunday jams are too often clueless about it. And that there is
part musical finesse, and learning the necessary mindset for the genre so
that you sound like it's truly part of what belongs there.

Sincerely,
Barbeque Bob Maglinte
Boston, MA