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^ take it easy. don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.

I will say that blues influence isn't bad, and that it's not that the blues itself is bad as I like some John Lee Hooker from time to time. I don't know if Wes Montgomery would have existed without the blues, and for that I guess that I have to be at least a little bit appreciative.

At one time most music was complex and interesting. Much of it still is. It's just that I don't get why things fell into a "3 or 4 chords for everything" pattern AFTER Paganini and Mozart. Ironic that someone who lives in a distant land loves blues, while I live close to the Mississippi delta region and think that it's horribly overdone. Still, it's just a personal taste and my opinion on the matter is totally irrelevant to any kind of facts because it's just how I (me, myself) feel.

It could also be that I don't have a soul to sell to the devil at the crossroads (*cue Cream playing blues with a British accent.)

^ well, you have a point :)
it all just boils down to this for me: i like it. not all of it, of course. but the good shit, y'know ;)

Like, some paintings are done with just a brush and some black ink on a white page but manage to conjure up a whole world...

Anyway imho blues is complex and interesting. The subtle melodic nuances of the blues scale, accent, syncopation... "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." There's a little R&B bar round the corner which has a monthly blues session, where sometimes jazz musicians come to learn how to swing from the blues guys and girls.

Finally, it's what comes from the heart, whatever medium you use to try and convey it.

John just made a valid point.

I can see where DJ's coming from, even though I live nowhere close to Blues Country.
For me, the Blues was never about swing. That was Jazz. Blues, to me, is all about space. Not deep space and planets and sh*t, but the space around you, between the licks. It's the air. You need to fill it with enough smoke, yet still allow it room to breathe. That balance between tension and release - easier said than done.

Enough rambling.... unless you wanna here how closely related jazz and country are. O_O!!

Term paper:
"Stockhausen had the blues." Discuss.

For the record: not every blues is I IV V :)

(Led Zep's Tea for One, Yardbirds/Zeps (?) Dazed and Confused, Rays' I believe to my soul, etc pp)

^ Yeah. Listen to Muddy Waters and then to Led Zep. :)

If I use Slobber's definition of blues (use of space) rather than how I normally think of it (pentatonic minor phrases over a predictable progression) then I would have to consider Chopin's Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2 blues. It is longing, depressing, and filled with languishing choices of notes.

In that case, I love blues.

I don't know that I would have ever called "Dazed and Confused" blues. It just seems like older rock to me, but getting into how to label genres and sub-genres is way too 'music elitist' for me. I guess that I just dislike overly simplified, predictable music.

Thing about the Blues Scale .... a lot of the great Blues players don't stick to it as closely as the rock guys do. Go listen to Waters or Hooker, and compare them to the Cream-era Clapton (back when he was angry and used humbuckers). You'll realize that young Clapton was still a very disciplined chap.

The only problem I have with Cream (or Hendrix Experience, or Led Zep) *live* is that they played awfully sloppy, and that they never knew when to fucking stop that boring solo nobody wants to hear. Vocal-wise it is a load of crap, too.

Example:
[yt]4jgAdeWK9mU[/yt]

Especially the second part with Cream Live. A pain to listen to.

That's the biggest problem with guitarists - they still believe people wanna hear their solos.

Hendrix was a bit of an anomaly. Sometimes he'd be the most disciplined player on the planet (All Along the Watchtower), but other times he transcended frets, like he somehow turned the guitar neck into this single organic thing that he just slid around on.

Slobby, right - guess why: http://www.cynthiapcaster.org/casts/_di ... x_page.htm

You have a personal collection of these casts, don't you MB? ;)

^ Yep, of those that are listed in Rotten Meat, and the About page :D

just heard this song on the radio that reminded me of DJ's hate for stupid blues:
[yt]OlwRNCnsbUg[/yt]

boring as fuck.

gutterslob wrote:Thing about the Blues Scale .... a lot of the great Blues players don't stick to it as closely as the rock guys do. Go listen to Waters or Hooker, and compare them to the Cream-era Clapton (back when he was angry and used humbuckers).

This is it. The real "blues scale" isn't pentatonic minor or dorian mode. The "blue notes" (third and seventh usually) are somewhere between the Western major and minor scales, and seem to be descended from certain scales in West African music. You can hear the same "bluesy" sound in singers from that region today. I don't know where the fondness for flatted fifths came from though.

I don't know if slobby meant that reference to notes suspended in space (a smoke-filled space of course) as a definition of blues or one of the qualities of blues. Sure, some classical music shares some of those qualities, but of course Chopin isn't blues. There's a Miles Davis album "Kind of Blue" which is just as the title suggests - hard to say it's blues, but it shares some aspects of it. One of the first Jazz albums I bought and still one of my favourite albums ever. A real gem. Here's one of the best tracks "Flamenco Sketches" - the cream of jazz and much better than anything on the album "Sketches of Spain imho Just exquisitely beautiful:

[yt]7GgXqIf9h4s[/yt]

^ though not my favorite Davis's, Kind Of Blue is one of the first jazz album I bought. Along with Coltrane's A Love Supreme brought me to jazz years ago.

rhowaldt wrote:just heard this song on the radio that reminded me of DJ's hate for stupid blues:
(George Thoroughgood)

boring as fuck.

Well... personally, I quite like tunes that only have one chord. I saw G T and the Destroyers at a smallish club in Nagoya many years ago and they were pretty good I thought.

But it's OK to hate stuff you hate of course. I hate Simon and Garfunkle for example, also all that hard rock/heavy metal stuff: Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin... but there's a fuzzy crossover to the stuff that I love, like Hendrix is God for example. I don't think I've heard anything by Jimi Hendrix that I didn't like, except maybe one or two tracks on "Blues" which were just fillers recorded at some gig.

btw Clapton's best recorded work (again imho of course) was on that John Mayall album "Bluesbreakers" where he's reading the Beano on the cover. Really intense, and better than Cream I think.