I Love The Blues.
I learned the blues through jazz. I was soaking up jazz as a teenager. It was the early '70's and there was all this modern acoustic and electric jazz music being created, and I was catching up on some of the great jazz history moving back in time - virtually chronologically backwards. The blues form was evolving wildly in the jazz idiom and I thought I was being exposed to the essence of it somewhere in all it's permutations.
I wasn't aware of the roots of blues until I moved from the jazz world to the blues world in the late '80's. As a purely classically trained pianist as a kid, moving into jazz was a great way to utilize a crisp and fast technique - lots of fun! Besides really digging fusion, I did have some experience with funk and R & B music that required a new concept for me - subtracting from my complex harmonic sense, and nimble technique to a simpler, somewhat stripped down way of playing.
I really had to strip down for the blues. I mean the last sentence in a literal sense too, as once you take away all the slickness and speed and fancy chords you're left kind of naked, with such a basic set of tools that in order to make something with the music, you have to put heart and feeling into it to make it meaningful. Simplicity (very accessible) and heartfelt (soulful) music. This is the key to it's wide appeal. And really, only the people that put their feeling into it and out there for everyone stick out as the stars of that genre. There's no heady, intellectual place to hide - straight below-the-neck music that can reach everyone.
I want to do an album of blues at some time. It's been on my mind lately. The hard part won't be getting myself in technical shape or anything like that. It'll be in getting my entire being ready to say something with every damn note. Otherwise it's a rather meaningless little pile of notes.
I learned the blues through jazz. I was soaking up jazz as a teenager. It was the early '70's and there was all this modern acoustic and electric jazz music being created, and I was catching up on some of the great jazz history moving back in time - virtually chronologically backwards. The blues form was evolving wildly in the jazz idiom and I thought I was being exposed to the essence of it somewhere in all it's permutations.
I wasn't aware of the roots of blues until I moved from the jazz world to the blues world in the late '80's. As a purely classically trained pianist as a kid, moving into jazz was a great way to utilize a crisp and fast technique - lots of fun! Besides really digging fusion, I did have some experience with funk and R & B music that required a new concept for me - subtracting from my complex harmonic sense, and nimble technique to a simpler, somewhat stripped down way of playing.
I really had to strip down for the blues. I mean the last sentence in a literal sense too, as once you take away all the slickness and speed and fancy chords you're left kind of naked, with such a basic set of tools that in order to make something with the music, you have to put heart and feeling into it to make it meaningful. Simplicity (very accessible) and heartfelt (soulful) music. This is the key to it's wide appeal. And really, only the people that put their feeling into it and out there for everyone stick out as the stars of that genre. There's no heady, intellectual place to hide - straight below-the-neck music that can reach everyone.
I want to do an album of blues at some time. It's been on my mind lately. The hard part won't be getting myself in technical shape or anything like that. It'll be in getting my entire being ready to say something with every damn note. Otherwise it's a rather meaningless little pile of notes.