[Harp-L] Re: yet another Juke question (long, but no Le Riff)

[Spschndr@xxxxxxx]

Scott tells us that when the well-known version of "Juke" is nailed on the 
first take, <After it ends, the next thing heard on the tape is Jimmy Rogers 
saying, "I'll give you that boogie..."> This is interesting in light of the 
question of whether either complete version of "Juke" is arranged or improvised.  
Does <"that boogie">  mean "that boogie I played on the take we just did," or 
"that boogie I do on that other way we play the song"?  Listening to the rest 
of the band, not just the harmonica, is going to tell us something about how 
arranged/improvised a given song might be.

Compare the role of the guitars on takes 1 and 4.  (It would help if someone 
onlist who is genuinely qualified, like Hash Brown, would analyze the guitar 
parts for us.)   If there are two guitarists on each take, what are they doing? 
 On take 1, what stands out are the occasional flourishes and accents early 
on, apparently by one player, while the other plays a very low-volume backing 
pattern to help hold the groove together.  On take 2, the guitar boogie is 
prominent in the mix through the entire song and sounds to me like a largely 
different pattern than take 1 uses.   The second guitar can only be discerned very 
occasionally--at least that's when I think I hear it--adding subtle touches to 
complement the foregrounded boogie pattern; a casual listener might think 
there's only one guitar on take 4.

The guitar boogie on take 4 relates to the question of tempo--it sounds to me 
like Rogers is pushing the beat on his guitar part for the entire song, while 
the drummer is fighting to keep from going with him and speeding the song up 
out of control.  You will *not* hear that happening on take 1--in particular, 
compare the final chorus of take 1 with the final two choruses of 4; they're 
going ragged near the end of take 4.  Take 4 feels positively frenetic to me 
compared to take 1, and a lot of it is that prominent guitar boogie pushing the 
beat.  I have trouble counting beats per minute on the two versions, but you 
can time the length of choruses on them, or compare how many choruses take 4 
gets through by the time take 1 has ended. Seems to me that the tempo is 
significantly and deliberately faster on take 4.

Now, my impression from the terrific LW book that Scott co-authored (buy it 
*now* if you haven't read it yet) is that thanks to the union, steady work for 
the Muddy Waters band in Chicago in the early 1950s could mean up to seven 
nights a week plus a Sunday matinee, five sets or more a show.  If they used 
"Juke" as their theme song to open and close each set, at that rate, how many 
times would they play it in a single month?  Something like three hundred times?  
I'm sure I'm overstating the situation due to overgeneralizing about how they 
gigged at that time, but my point is that they could have played that song a 
lot, an awful lot, before they recorded it, so often that they were quite 
comfortable improvising on it, and conversely, so often that not every section of 
each take is wholly improvised.

I mean, that bit at about 1:50 on take 4 (the alternate), the band never 
played that with LW before? Especially with that little chirp he plays at the end 
of the previous chorus to maybe signal the band that something's coming up.  
Even someone as staggeringly inventive as LW is still going to repeat 
themselves sometimes and keep using things that work--that's what you learn on a 
bandstand if you play together enough, what someone's tendencies are.  You don't 
have to rehearse it, you recognize where they're going and get on board with 
them.  

Rod Piazza's band is an excellent example of this today; they seem to 
remember everything that ever worked on a given song or type of song, and when 
they've worked up a tune, it's chock full of that stuff.  They know each other well 
enough to jump right onto anything new that one of them is coming up with, but 
every time I see them, I believe that many of the punches and builds that I'm 
seeing are things they've done before--yet they're still exciting because 
they're done sincerely and well, in a good place at a good time, and not 
necessarily in a planned/rehearsed order; more along the lines of "Hey, now would be a 
good time to do that thing that goes . . . ."  There's no shame or 
calculation in that; it's what every band that plays this kind of tightly structured 
music together frequently and at a high level of competence deals with: repeating 
yourself vs. coming up with something wholly new.  What do you do to get 
yourself to the point where you can take off on a flight of inspiration?  And bear 
in mind that stringing together existing bits in a new order can qualify as 
an inspired flight.

I don't have my copy handy to check, but I believe that in his book Power 
Harp, Charlie Musselwhite talks about what LW called "smoking" or something like 
that--playing rhythmically and mainly on the low end of the diatonic while he 
gathered himself to take off on another flight. This seems to me to be a 
standard element of uptempo LW instrumentals or his soloing on tunes with lyrics, 
providing a dynamic contrast to the sections that people usually remember.  
There's an early take of "Off the Wall" on the Le Roi du Blues bootleg series 
where LW at times does that for long stretches, almost like a poet or songwriter 
saying "tumpty-tumpty-tum" in a section where they haven't thought of words 
yet and are just maintaining the rhythm.  It's not aimless playing, there's 
wonderful phrasing and creativity in there, but it's deliberately less intense.  
Rick Estrin and Kim Wilson are a couple players who do it really, really well 
these days.

And within each 12 bars, LW often phrases so as to leave room for the drums 
and/or guitar to reply to what he just played--listen to this on "Fast Boogie" 
and "Fast Large One."  They know he's going to leave that space, he does it 
habitually, so they often  jump in there and do something in reply.  Then each 
12 bars plays off the preceding one--what new idea is LW going to develop, and 
is he cranking things up or backing them off compared to the previous 12 bars? 
 He works through that idea, and comes up with another for the next chorus.  
There nearly always seems to be enough space for the band and Walter to react 
to one another's initiatives. That's what I hear going on in the great 
Myers/Below version of the band, but it's there in "Juke" too.

That practice, combined with bandstand familiarity with things that have 
worked in the past, would make it possible to improvise the whole of "Juke" or 
other LW instrumentals.  Play the head, and then flow from there till it's time 
to wrap it up; the most successful takes/live performances will achieve a 
logical development from beginning to end that makes them sound like 
arranged/rehearsed tunes.  

It's there on slow instrumentals too; compare the "alternate" take of "Blue 
Midnight" on the Essential LW set with the genuinely alternate earlier take on 
the Blues with a Feeling set.  The earlier take uses a different head and 
doesn't give the same sense of coherent development; the later version ratchets up 
the intensity from chorus to chorus so successfully that Chess was able to 
create an intense sense of longing/yearning by fading out during the final 
chorus and chopping off the climax and resolution of the song when they issued it 
as a single (the "alternate" take on Essential is just the complete version of 
the single, not the only time Chess did this to LW).

I hadn't ever realized the degree to which LW's phrasing makes it possible 
for his bandmates to anticipate where he's going and join in; he leaves the 
space for them to react, instead of playing continuously throughout.  I think a 
lot of us need to fight the tendency to play continuously, should develop more 
of a genuine call-and-response pattern to our improvising.  It's true that 
stuff can start to sound very mannered (a guitarist friend calls West Coast jump 
the harmonica equivalent of SRV-inspired guitar banality), but it's a useful 
hint about how to improvise on these grooves.

Which gets me circling back at long last to the two takes of "Juke."  Is it 
possible that the band conferred in advance and agreed, "Let's do it this way, 
and that way, and see which way that @#$%&* Chess likes"? Because the issued 
take's got more of a relaxed swinging feel, and the alternate's got a frenetic 
boogie feel; and can't you see the bandstand usefulness of doing it each way?  
Do you want to pump the crowd up by pushing the song, or draw them in with a 
relatively relaxed swing?  Seems to me you might have occasion to do either, 
starting or finishing a set, based on your sense of what to do to the audience 
right then (as part of your artistic mission of selling adult beverages and 
helping folks get lucky ;-).  Scott's description of the session tape sounds to 
me like they had no problem at all going in there and laying down two versions 
of the tune with distinctly different feels--and then there's the legendary 
story of the woman out on the sidewalk picking which version got issued.  

Even the head of each version reflects the feel of the whole song--the 
alternate's got a different urgency.  We shouldn't forget that the first two 
choruses of the issued take of "Juke" are too strong an echo of Snooky and Moody's 
"Boogie" to be anything but deliberate homage/requisitioning, as has been noted 
onlist and in print in the past.  As for the opening of the alternate take, 
sure, it's tricky, but by no means is it beyond the ability of competent 
musicians--the drums need to be sure about where to punch, the guitars need to be 
sure about where to come in, and then you just do it.  It's a musically logical 
opening, and they get it on the third try. Interviews with LW band members 
indicate they would try that kind of stuff on the bandstand to keep themselves 
mentally engaged and because of their pride in their abilities.  How well would 
this work on a tune they may have done literally hundreds of times?  Well 
enough to get the two versions done in six minutes or so, as Scott says.

OK, enough blather.  I wanted to make the point that if you want to 
understand what's going on in a song from the great early half of LW's career, you had 
better listen closely to the rest of the band and figure out what's going on 
there.  LW's music suffers greatly when that kind of explosive interplay within 
his band declines, when it's only there in fits and starts, if at all.  I 
think a lot of people miss just how much this element of attentive listening and 
reaction informs the great recorded performances of LW, Muddy Waters, the 
early Wolf, Rice Miller; there's stuff going on there that you won't even notice 
unless you stop and pay really careful attention to what each band member is 
doing.  And instead of simply memorizing what they play, you need to deduce the 
principles behind it, and work on/from those instead.

It's useful to precisely memorize and analyze a recorded LW instrumental, but 
the evidence suggests that when you do that, you're not doing what LW did 
when he played them.  Instead of  trying to precisely execute the memorized 
version, why not use an approach that could be expressed something like, "Well, 
there's this bit and that bit and those other bits that I like to get in on that 
song, but let's kick it off and see how it comes out."  That's what I think I 
hear players like Musselwhite and Piazza and Wilson and Primich and Hummel and 
others doing in live performance, and you can see the joy on their faces when 
they jump off into new territory and it works, as well as their pleasure in 
successfully stringing together bits that they already know will work.  They 
put themselves in a position where stuff will come to mind, whether it's new or 
old, and their relationship to their band is crucial for that--it's not just a 
groove, it's the listening and responding. The early Chicago electric bands 
are masters of that.

Kinda tough to get players to do that today, they'd rather zone out and watch 
the game on the widescreen or speculate on which mammaries in the room are 
real and so forth.  I don't doubt the Chicago bands lapsed into that too, but 
they could bear down when it counted, and the results are both amazing and yet 
not impossible to aspire to.

So my take would be, "Yeah, it's improvised, but think about the definition 
of improvised--it can include both old and new elements; and if the whole 
band's involved in the musical conversation, the improvisation can move so 
purposefully that it gives the impression of being arranged/rehearsed, when it 
actually isn't."

A question one might ask is "If LW's instrumentals were arranged/rehearsed, 
how come he never resorts to playing the head again to close out the song?"  
That's not an uncommon practice in jazz, one that indicates a more structured 
approach without stifling improvisation (think "Work Song").  Did LW not like to 
do that?  I mean, I think you can sense the engineer signaling "2:15 boys, 
time to start wrapping this tune up" on instrumentals, but LW always works out a 
closing chorus or two instead of simply returning to the head--Mojo Red makes 
a good point about playing the final chorus of take 1 of "Juke" faithfully, 
because the band will realize the song's wrapping up.  For me it's a lot easier 
to repeat the head for an ending than to improvise a final chorus that gives 
the feeling of closure; it's a clearer signal about ending a song if you don't 
play with the other people regularly, and I guess I like the feeling of 
closure from a repeated head better.  But it seems that LW would always rather 
travel from point A to point B rather than loop back.  The song comes out that 
way, that time, and no other.  A less honest band might have claimed that the two 
versions of "Juke" were two different songs, and gotten away with it too.

Stephen Schneider