Re: [Harp-L] Re: Totally bored with the blues genre

[Mike Wilbur <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ahhhhh Men Rev. Leone !

But that doesn't mean stop looking at Horn parts on a Diatonic.
 
" Do nothing tell you hear from me, " Lady Be Good",  Since I don't have you "

 

   

Mike Wilbur


> On May 4, 2015, at 1:39 PM, Joseph Leone <3N037@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hmmm, the way I see it, blues are generally a fairly simple music written by and for (at the time) fairly simple hard working people.  Not everyone can be a Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart, but they still need to express themselves. Blues fills the bill. When I think of genuine blues, I picture a beat up Montgomery Wards mail order guitar with missing pick guard and a hole in the birch face, probably mismatched strings, and a dented10 cent harmonica from a box at the general store (at $1.oo per dozen), held in a bent coat hanger rack. If there were any amp at all, it would probably be a beat up Silvertone that looked like it had been dropped off the truck a dozen or more times.
> 
> The mic is held together with twine and looks like it had been used as a hockey puck. The singer/artist has a voice that no one could exactly call pleasant and everything was out of tune. The drums were patched with pieces of canvas glues on and the bass was a wash tub with a stick and some wire. BUT Oooooh, what magic would come out of this junk.
> 
> Then, over the years, people started to try and improve blues. I have to give a lot of credit to some of these people for they really really studied the genre very hard and dissected it to the ength degree, but they also turned it into a mathematical thesis. I (personally) don't think that the early masters gave much thought to theory. Nor did they care. They just wanted to play in their own gut bucket style. Playing from the gut. Sitting on a bucket.  
> 
> Now, over the years there are some whom have used all sorts of musics as a means to their own ends. I consider that how, during the depression and the dust bowl eras, there were people who would sweep up a stable or do yard work for a few nickels so they could buy a can of beans .Then there were others who would sit and watch them work, write songs about it, perform them at hobo jungles, in the hopes that someone would 'share' their beans with them. Sometimes even becoming famous song writers. Like people who photographed the despair and later wound up as famous photographers, whose photos now go for thousands of dollars. I consider these people as users. 
> 
> No, I think blues are honest down to earth musics and if done in a caring manner and not 'phoned in' (as I hear so much of these days), it is a wonderful outlet for those who are willing to emote. To completely open their hearts and exude their innermost feelings. So I'm not so sure that blues have to evolve. I saw that with jazz. Hot music to swing to progressive to bee-bop to re-bop to hard-bop to fusion. Just my opinion but that killed jazz. 
> 
> In conclusion I have known Randolph for 20-25 years and never found him to be negative. Not at heart. He has always been a positive influence and ambassador of harmonica and while he rarely posts, the posts are usually links to wonderful things. He wants us all to start thinking. Because when you stop thinking, you're probably stinking. You're probably dead. There have been some seriously great posts on this subject. Well done 'W.C. Handy Randy'. lol 
> 
> 
> smokey joe
> 
> 
>> On Apr 30, 2015, at 1:11 PM, Randy Singer wrote:
>> 
>> I'm going to come out of the closet and state emphatically that I cannot stand 80% of all the blues music that I hear. 
>> 
>> With the exception of Little Walter, Paul Butterfield, keb mo, derek trucks, William Clark, mitch Kashmir, howard levy, Robert Cray, The Allman Brothers, thiago, dennis gruenling, muddy Waters, rob Paparozzi, sebastian charlier, eric Clapton and other progressives, I find the state of the blues is a useless circle jerk of mind numbingly repetitive musical clichÃs and nursery rhyme chord changes. (please pardon the misspellings I'm doing this on my iPhone)
>> 
>> JOKE
>> How many blues musicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb in? 145145145145
>> 
>> In other words how many times can I keep hearing a I-4-5
>> or progression with basically only diatonic notes? Imagine telling that to a professional musician of any other instrument that they can only play pentatonic and scales, they would look at you like you were absolutely crazy out of your mind and they would be correct. Imagine telling a piano player he could only use the white keys!!!! LOL. You would be laughed out of the room. Yet seems like almost all the harmonica players only use those scales with a couple colorful over blows as if that would be sufficient
>> 
>> Most harmonica players have stopped growing and we deserve the gimp reputation that we have. 
>> 
>> Where is the Maceo Parker of our harmonica age? very few harmonica players could go head-to-head note to note with a player like him or Gerald Albright another great blues jazz player. Playing precise blues/chromatic lines is a extremely rare breed in our community yet in the horn community it's the easiest thing to do. 
>> 
>> If you keep recycling the same thing over and over again a copy of a copy of a copy becomes faded and ludicrous
>> 
>> Also having performed and lived extensively in Brazil, Paris New York Nashville and now Miami I have come to revere the art of songwriting using predictable yet unpredictable changes and I see none of that in the harmonica community. 
>> 
>> The Beatles set the standard for creative and inventive songwriting and that seems to have TOTALLY escaped the blues and harmonica community.
>> 
>> The elephant in the room is the so-called blues Nazis and I am sure that when the blues musicians and songwriters attempt to create a song which sets the songwriting bar higher, they would be shut down by the blues natzis!! I believe when Robert Cray put out his strong persuader album which features some of the best blue songwriting I have ever heard, he was shut down as not being a blues artist any longer ---that's a bunch of BS!
>>