Re: [Harp-L] Bluegrass Harp and the Dixie Flyers

[Richard Hunter <turtlehill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Naiditch wrote: 
>Unfortunately, the few harmonica players who show up at bluegrass  
>jams often haven't taken the time to learn the genre and don't  
>understand bluegrass jamming etiquette.  They often don't know the  
>melodies, play too loud when others are taking their breaks, or take  
>breaks that are too bluesy.  IÂve tried to avoid these problems by  
>learning the leads to many bluegrass tunes and by playing softly, if  
>at all, when it isnÂt my turn to play.

If you show up at a bluegrass session determined to play blues licks, the other players infer, probably rightly, that you just don't care about the music they love, at least not enough to learn about what makes it tick.  That kind of behavior isn't limited to harp players. Years ago, at a Monday night jam session at Kenny's Castaways in Greenwich village, I stood onstage next to a saxophonist who insisted on playing free jazz over (and under) a rhythm and blues tune.  It did not go down well with anybody in the room, musicians included.  The guy said something to me about how he was on a mission to free everybody up from the meaningless boundaries of style.  In other words, everybody else in the room was just a platform for him to lay down his version of The Truth.  That's not very respectful of anyone besides onself.

And yet, I saw James Brown on the Dick Cavett show on TV in 1969 with saxophonist Maceo Parker doing "Sex Machine".  When it came time for the solo, Brown shoved his mic into Parker's horn, and what came out was pure late-period Coltrane, howls, squeals, and growls--and man was it amazing.  The energy was mind-blowing.  But Parker saved that stuff for the solo, where he could take the tune to a whole new level, instead of competing with Brown.

Different genres have their own conventions, and the practitioners know what's right and wrong. If you show respect for the limits of the style, you can ultimately get away with almost anything.  But you have to show respect first, which means speaking the language of the genre before anything else.  I guess that's why Maceo Parker can get away with playing free jazz over "Sex Machine".   

Lots of harp players have grown up speaking the language of Chicago blues, and it's so natural to them that they may not think about how carefully constructed that language is.  When I listen to 1950s Muddy Waters, it's like chamber music--every instrument has a role and a space to fill, and it all works brilliantly.  Drop something out and you can really feel the hole.  Throw something in that's not of the style and it sticks out like mustard on ice cream.  Other styles are like that too. 

The hard thing about bluegrass--like baroque, or any other very detailed virtuosic style--is that it's played very quickly with complex melodies and rhythms that are very, very precise, and so it's very obvious when you get it wrong. The guys who play it well work really hard at it for a long time. I don't play a lot at bluegrass jams for that very reason--I haven't worked at it long enough or hard enough, though I pull out my 1000 Fiddle Tunes book every once in a while. I'd rather wait until I get it closer to right before I try it in public.

By the way, one of the two or three most amazing and inspiring performances I ever saw was the Ricky Skaggs band at a festival in 2001.  Talk about casual power--they executed like a big machine turning corners on rails at 150 miles per hour.  I told the fiddle player later that day about how my jaw dropped when he played one blazing solo, and he said very sweetly and kindly, "Y'know, if you can think it, you can play it."  Words to live by.

Regards, Richard Hunter
latest mp3s and harmonica blog at http://myspace.com/richardhunterharp