[Harp-L] Defending the Blues

["Mick Zaklan" <mzaklan@xxxxxxxxx>]

   Kind of reminds me of a SPAH convention dinner banquet several years
ago.  I was seated at a table with one of the esteemed harp old-timers.  Had
a lot of fun pumping him for gig stories, what it was like to work full time
as a harmonica player back then.  At one point; he had to get up and accept
an award.  He came back to the table with a very sharp-looking gold lifetime
membership card.  Out of blue, I recall him getting irritated.  "What's the
big deal with the blues?", he asked me.  "It's just one kind of music, you
play it and move on".  He couldn't understand why a harp player would want
to play the stuff all night, or even two or three blues numbers in a row.
   My brother, who ironically has had a long career working in fairly
well-known blues bands, was even more blunt.  "It's the kindergarten of
music", he once told me.  In the face of those kind of opinions, I always
think back to a conversation I had with Jim Liban in the 80's.  Jim confided
to me that the guys in his rock band Short Stuff thought they knew
everything there was to know about playing the blues.  He was sure they
didn't.  Jim felt that there were so many different approaches to this
music, so many different styles, nuances, and such a history of recordings
that it was impossible to get it all.  "You could spend a whole lifetime",
he told me, just studying a handful of these artists and mining their
material for riffs, ideas, and inspiration.  Awhile later, Jim disbanded
his roots rock band and formed a blues band.  To this day;  if you ever
catch a Jim Liban show, you'll notice that he takes great pains to make
every blues tune sound different.  Keys, tempos, grooves and arrangements
are all carefully fussed over.
   Back when I first started playing; it was widely held that if you
couldn't play the blues, you weren't ever going to be much of a jazz
player.  It was your base.  You needed that cry, that wail, those blue notes
in your playing.  That vocal sound that grabs an audience.  When spraying a
million notes on your instrument doesn't always work.  Gene Ammons used to
destroy guys like that when it came time to play a ballad.  Because he had
that "cry", even taking his bends out of tune to convey emotion.  It was
pretty well-known that one of the greatest alto saxophonists ever,
Cannonball Adderley, loved to hit the blues clubs and catch guys like Muddy
Waters when he came through Chicago.  He wanted to reconnect with that stuff
and never let it slip out of his playing.
   Maybe in this day and age, with the advent of "world music" and all the
musical cross-pollination that's going on, blues isn't considered as
important as it once was.  But again, when I started playing, you truly
needed that background to play decent rock and roll and even country.  Guys
like Charley McCoy and Don Baker were known as big blues fans.  As is Jelly
Roll Johnson.  Blues was your musical starting point; and if you wanted to
devote your entire life to it, there was and is plenty to be gotten from
it.
   I love it, I never get tired of hearing it played well and with respect.

Mick Zaklan