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

[scott <checker758@xxxxxxxxx>]

Stephen's comments are very insightful and on-target - a great post.
 
I think it's especially important to note, as Stephen does, that a large part of what made Little Walter great was what was going on around him.  You simply cannot separate LW's harp playing from it's context and still have it make musical sense.  To put it another way, we could spend time learning to perfectly duplicate a passage from a LW song, but unless every other element of the music surrounding it is ALSO exactly duplicated, that passage won't "work" - it *can't* work.  The passage was played the way it was in response to what was around it, and when you change that context, it no longer fits.  This is why I think the answer to the "Was Juke improvised?" question is yes.  LW was constantly changing in response to what was going on around him, and why there are precious few examples of him ever playing the same thing the same way twice.
 
Something sort of related: I've always felt that Little Walter got a bit of a bad rap for some of his later work not measuring up to his early classic recordings.  No denying that his skills suffered due to his self-destructive lifestyle, BUT...I think a lot of the time he was just playing what worked and what fit in with what was going on around him, the same as he always had.  When he was playing with clumsy or insensitive or drunken or inexperienced backing, *of course* he couldn't recreate his earlier triumphs - those licks didn't fit anymore, and he knew that.  So when he couldn't get gigs that would pay enough for good musicians, he used the second or third tier guys in Chicago, and it was reflected in his playing.  When he went to Europe in '64 and '67, and got uneven (or worse) backing, he adjusted to the occasion - and got his share of bad reviews for it.  But for evidence of him rising to an occasion, listen to the live recordings he did just a month or two before his
 death, with a band that included Eddie Taylor and Louis Myers on guitars, and Sam Lay on drums (released on a bootleg LP some years ago.)  Though he was playing very differently from his 1950s recordings, he was playing his a$$ off, and meshing with the band around him as well as he ever had.  I honestly can't think of any examples of blues harp playing in the 1960s that were any better.  
 
It's been said before, but I'll say it again: I don't think LW's genius was so much in the area of technical innovation (amplification, fancy licks, etc.) as it was in the way he thought about and approached MUSIC.  
 
Anyway, once again, great post, Stephen.
 
Scott
 
 
 
 
--- In harp-l-archives@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Spschndr@xxxx wrote:
> 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
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