[Harp-L] Totally bored with the blues genre

[Mick Zaklan <mzaklan@xxxxxxxxx>]

   I'm constantly amazed by the vitriol harmonica players seem to want to
rain upon blues harpists for the crime of playing mainly blues music and
not tunes with other changes.  Or apparently not using enough 16th or 32nd
notes.  And usually it's the people with the button on their harp doing the
beefing.  And, again, most of those guys couldn't play the blues to save
themselves from being buggered by a live moose.  The guys that get up at
the SPAH Saturday night banquets and play Clyde McCoy's "Sugar
Blues" or Tommy Dorsey's "TD's Boogie Woogie" note for note and think they
have the blues idiom covered because they "wah wah"-ed a note or made a
growling noise.
   Now I like Randy, and have corresponded with him in the past.  I'm
puzzled  that he seems to suggest the idiom is stagnate but then goes on to
name 15 blues players who apparently aren't.  That's quite a few exemptions
for a supposedly dead or boring form of music.  And I wonder if any of
those people would agree with his stance.   He complains that the
same riffs are used over and over again, but then claims he respects
traditionalists.  Classical players have been playing the same tunes and
riffs for 250 years.  Note for note.  Nobody ever gives them shit about
that.  But let a blues player play a Little Walter tune note for note and
he's living in the past.  He's not ADVANCING the music, you see.  He's a
"blues Nazi".  I am so sick of this "if it's not new or different, it's not
valid or interesting" b.s. that I could scream!  Some people want to
preserve the past and other people want to strike out on their own.    Pick
your side and let the other folks be.  You want a lot of notes?  Go buy an
Art Tatum cd and leave the Jimmy Reed people alone.  You're upset that 80%
of the blues players are boring you and 20% aren't?  I don't know any form
of music, including jazz, where 80% of the players are truly innovators or
saying something worth hearing that hasn't been said before.
   When I was a young guy I recall reading an interview in DownBeat
magazine  with Cannonball and Nat Adderley.  It had a profound influence on
me.  We're speaking of two jazz Hall of Famers here.  The brothers stated
that on their off-nights in Chicago they always made a point to check out
Muddy Waters or another comparable blues band live in a club.  Why?  They
explained that they never wanted to lose contact with where jazz came from
or lose the idea of a few notes connecting with an audience better in some
cases than a barrage of 16ths.  The idea of economy and of telling a story
with their horns.  I guess that's a dying concept these days.  Too bad.

Mick Zaklan