Now, I don’t want to beat up on ol’ Guitar Player magazine, which I’ve read since I was a kid, and still read today at the library. They publish great things, and naturally, some less than great things. (I was upset about their recent “50 Bad-ass Blues Solos You Must Hear” cover story, but loved the article about Henry Kaiser.) All I’ll say about this is that whoever came up with it, they didn’t take lessons from John Schott!
I’ve added a page of videos of various projects, from various low budget sources.
The concert I wrote about a couple of posts ago has come and gone. Among the pieces on the program was the World Premiere of Sebastian Currier’s Artificial Memory. How exciting! Guitar-wise, I was stepping onto a new planet, created by but not tread upon by the composer.
The passage below was among the hardest moments on the program for me. It’s very fast, very “almost repetitive”, and it’s six and half measures in the middle of seventy-five measures of similar fingerbusters.
What makes it so hard, other than just being very fast, is that almost all the intervals are a Major third or larger, necessitating a lot of string skipping, and almost no pull-offs or hammer-ons.
Deciding on the fingering is the first step. The guitarist becomes a chess player, considering many possible lines of attack.
The high F, the highest note of the passage, can determine much. There are two places one can realistically play that note, if you’re playing a 22 fret guitar: on the first or second string. In each of these places, there are multiple fingering choices. The F on the first string could be played with the pinky, the hand positioned at the 10th fret. Or you could play that F with your second finger from the 12th position, or your first finger, 13th position. From these three positions, the rest of the notes could be variously found, with perhaps a few more choices to be made.
I want to find out the best fingering, and then I want to stick to it, stop thinking about it, because I’m going to practice it over and over and over. Practicing this piece illuminated that zone that lies beyond, well beyond, the zone of “knowing something” on the guitar. After an hour or two of playing these six and half measures, you “know” the notes, the fingering. After twelve hours, you experience something altogether different. (I don’t mean, of course, twelve consecutive hours!) These eight notes might stand for the passage’s DNA: 
In the end I decided to keep it around the 12th fret, and try and use open strings.
I would recommend these six measures to any guitarist who enjoys a healthy workout. If any more incentive is helpful, I would say it’s not hard for me to imagine Herbie Hancock playing something like this in the celebrated Plugged Nickel recordings, or Coltrane on Interstellar Space.
By the way: the Ensemble did not end up playing this at the quarter note = 164 tempo, but closer to 150-154. Not because this was my upper limit, although it was; but it was felt that this was plenty fast, and that we could more effectively lay into it at that tempo.
Last year the venerable Chicago independent label Delmark released Magic Sam: Live at the Avant-Garde, a recording of a gig in the summer of ’68, Milwaukee. This is the 7th CD I have of Magic Sam, and I keep buying them because they are ALL GREAT, although also ALL VERY MUCH THE SAME. But check out this guitar chorus on Come On In This House:
Isn’t that lovely? Two distinct guitar “voices”, call and response, played with his fingers, straight into his Fender amp. It really sounds like two guitars, and that illusion is done with his hands: how hard he picks, where he picks and what he plays. This is moment that slays me:
Thinking and re-listening to this solo, I was reminded of Charley Patton’s Spoonful. It’s been a while since I’ve gone through a Patton obsession, perhaps I’m due. I play some of his songs from time to time, and I like not listening to the originals for some time, and letting my interpretation drift from its model. Spoonful is virtuoso “multiple voices” play: he alternates between two voices talking back and forth, and then the bottleneck guitar takes over the final word “Spoonful”:
At one point I went through a phase where I was convinced that one of those voices was Walter “Buddy Boy” Hawkins, who had traveled with Patton from the Delta to Richmond, Indiana for the recording session. Somewhere in this track I thought I heard the two voices slightly overlapping. I was convinced that this was an elaborate joke by Patton and Hawkins: set it up to make you think that both voices were being done by one person, and then overlapping, just a bit, to make the whole effect surreal. I no longer think this, but I’m nostalgic for a time when I ascribed such devious operations to my Delta Blues heroes.
There’s a lot going on here:
vaudeville, and its fascination with “freakishness”,
(see also King Oliver’s “freak cornet”)
ventriloquism,
African conceptions of voice-instrument interchange,
use of the recording medium to shape a performance,
multiplicity of Black voices,
and probably, in the case of Magic Sam,
the desire to make your guitar-bass-drums trio sound like B.B. King’s seven-piece band.
I know someone has written on this, but I can’t recall where at the moment. Probably Paul Oliver.
At the same session that Patton recorded Spoonful, June 14, 1929, Richmond, IN, Buddy Boy Hawkins recorded Voice-Throwin’ Blues. This is putting the technique front and center, although in Hawkins’ practice it’s a little different. For the most part he doesn’t run the two voices right into each other. Somehow it seems both more and less weird than Patton’s song.
All right, for tonight, that’s all I got.
As much as I enjoy the exceedingly complex music of Schoenberg,
Stravinsky, Carter, et al, as an electric guitarist, my enjoyment is
strictly limited to listening and studying scores. I’ve rarely had the
pleasure/terror of performing it, of experiencing it from inside. Of
cursing it, struggling with, arguing over it, aching from the practicing
of it, and all of the soul-shaking work, physically and mentally, that
comes from performing such as piece. That would equally apply to the
Brahms Piano Concertos, any of the major Wagner roles, or the Goldberg
Variations. Jazz is as demanding as one can conceive it to be, but not in
this way.
What I have had is the privilege of playing the music of some of the most
prominent contemporary composers with the Paul Dresher Electro-Acoustic
Ensemble. The electric guitar parts for Steven Mackey’s opera Ravenshead,
over an hour of music for voice and six instruments, was my introduction
to playing with the ensemble. We toured it around the east coast,
California, and Dallas. The band I stepped into, in effect subbing for
the leader, guitarist Dresher, were all at such an astounding level of
musicianship, I felt humbled and inspired. This incarnation of the
ensemble was Amy Knowles, electronic marimba; Marja Mutru, keyboard; Gene
Reffkin, electronic drums; Craig Fry, violin, and Paul Hanson, the
one-of-a-kind bassoon virtuoso, whom I had played with before. I got
schooled right quick. Particularly Marja, whom I was positioned
next to, helped me out a lot, demonstrating certain passages, or
suggesting a way of counting a passage, or announcing measure numbers
when I got lost. Eventually I found my footing. I had to really
understand the fundamental truth of always knowing exactly where you are,
of counting, especially when you’re not playing. From jazz practice I had
been used to seeing a six measure rest and being able to “feel it”
without actually internally saying “1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3…” Playing
Ravenshead, with its frequently changing meters, you can never assume
“you’ll hear where you come in”, even after you’ve played the piece many
times. You walk a balance beam, and you can space out or look down, or
you’ll crash.
The most difficult pieces I have played with the Ensemble are the two that
are on our concerts this weekend in San Francisco, Artificial
Memory by Sebastian Currier and Fusebox by Jim Mobberly. The former is a
world premiere, the latter a piece we’ve performed twice before. Both
require a level of velocity on the instrument beyond what I’ve been
heretofore been capable of, thirty-five years into playing the guitar. As
I write this, less than a week before the performance, I’m almost, but
not quite, there. I’ve been working my butt off the past couple months,
on these pieces, and as recently as three weeks ago, I was not at all
sure I’d be able to get anywhere close to the tempos asked for. Now at
least, I can see them from here.
My hands feel different. The left hand mostly just feels tired, but there
is a nimbleness in the tips of the fingers that feels new. The right
hand, the picking hand, is reveling its newly emerging speedyness, like a
man in midlife getting a sports car for the first time.
The best part of the process is that I enjoy these pieces very much. They are fresh, engaging, and interestingly complex, not needlessly complex. Playing Fusebox is like surfing – when you are really riding the wave of those meter changes, it’s absolutely exhilarating, invigorating. When you crash, well, you just want to get back up there and try again, as soon as possible.
If you are in the Bay Area, the concerts are at the ODC Theatre. there’s a free dress rehearsal this Thursday, and the concerts are Friday and Saturday. There’s much more on the program than the two pieces I’m playing in: the aformentioned Paul Hanson’s bass/bassoon duo, and world premiere songs by Conrad Cummings and Lisa Bielawa, performed by the ensemble with guest Amy X.Neuburg.
More information at www.dresherensemble.org
Hey, remember the Berkeley Arts Center? That cute little gallery in Live Oak Park? So nice and cozy, and it seems like no one knows about it! I hadn’t been there in many years, but it’s just as inspiring as it’s always been. Music sounds great in there! I was happy to join with my buddy Rachel Durling and saxophonist Stefan Cohen last week to provide the soundscape for the Yoga Garden Dancers, a long-standing (hah!) project of Yoga teacher Gay White. Here, in a photo by Agnes Rettie, is dancer Tasha Hansen.
It’s not that I don’t think about my website; I think about it frequently. It’s just that thinking isn’t doing. It’s as if there’s an invisible force field preventing me from getting anywhere near “johnschott.com”. I’ll spare you the myriad theories I’ve constructed to account for this personality myopia, this allergy to being-in-public.
But I’m going to try again. In the oft-quoted words of Sam Beckett: “Fail again. Fail better.” What compels me this time is the pride I’m taking in my Actual Trio, and the desire to help it prosper. Dan and John have given this band a lot of non-compensated time and energy. Sal at the Actual Cafe has given us a steady gig for over two years. As a result of these efforts the trio has really taken root. Keeping this site updated and worthwhile is a cheap and theoretically easy way to draw attention to our music, as well as other worthy endeavors with which I’m involved.
All it requires is for me to let go of the excuses and rationalizations I clutch at like a security blanket:
“I’d rather be doing music than websiting about music.”
“I hate the internet’s cheapening and flattening of artistic and intellectual production, as well as the premise that everything should now just be given away.”
“I’ll just be disappointed when my witty and erudite postings are not celebrated like Ethan Iverson’s or Jeremy Denk’s.”
“If I were a fan of me, it would be a selling point that I was an obscure, reclusive, adverse to self-promotion, man-out-of-time sort of character.” See Franz Kafka, Emily Dickinson, Herbie Nichols, and Mary Margret O’Hara.
I know my appetite for “being-out-in-the-world” comes and goes, occasionally spiking as if in a manic episode, then plummeting down to its usual below-sea-level status. If and when that happens, so be it. What I do manage to accomplish while I’m “up” will still be out here in technospace, a little beeping beacon, while I revert to my more usual ostrich tendencies.
Yeah. So… I updated the calendar.
Hubert Sumlin died last month. He was Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist from the time Wolf came to Chicago around 1954 to his last performances in the mid ’70s. Those twenty years on the road, in the clubs and on record are unrivaled – this was the deepest, hardest blues.
They were one of the greatest pairings in music – the great seer and his loyal protoge. I can’t think of too many parallels – John Gilmore and Sun Ra, or Ellington and Johnny Hodges, except they had many great soloists in their groups. Monk and Charlie Rouse, but Rouse was with Monk for less than ten years, and it wasn’t Monk’s greatest period. Sonny Rollins and Bob Cranshaw, but Cranshaw isn’t a soloist.
He was, to my mind, the happiest of blues guitarists. The feeling that emanates from his playing is different from the tortured, dark night of the soul blues of Otis Rush, or the searing passion of Buddy Guy and Magic Sam. Sumlin is giddy, bubbling over with enthusiasm. Great as they are, Guy and Rush were very much coming out of B.B. King’s. Sumlin’s sound is instantly recognizable, and totally original. His strings sound like skinny electrical wires that might overload with current at any moment. He like the “out-of phase” sounds of two single coil pickups, and he often played cheap Italian-made electric guitars. He wasn’t from the “milk a few notes” school of Albert King. He played with his fingers, like a lot of bluesmen, but his attack and vibrato were very pronounced and distinctive.
Perhaps his finest moments were in the series of (mostly Willie Dixon-penned) hits Wolf had in the early 60’s: 300 Pounds of Joy, Built For Comfort, Hidden Charms, I Walked All The Way From Dallas. This is Wolf at his most entertaining, even charming – a world away from the dark undertones 50’s era songs Smokestack Lightning, or You Gonna Wreck My Life. Sumlin’s playing on these sides is magic. When Wolf sings “I’m so glad, you understand, I’m 300 pounds of muscle and man” on 300 Pounds Of Joy, Sumlin’s repeated chord stabs are so funky, so galvanizing, just thinking about them now gives me goose bumps. His solo on on the uptempo Hidden Charms is delirious, joyful and so damn fun.
*******
Like so many white kids past and present, the love I had at 13 for Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, and the Rolling Stones turned into ravenous desire by age 16 for all things Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King.
As with all my other musical obsessions throughout the years, I found a mentor. This has always been my modus operandi from day one, regardless of musical genre. My blues mentor was Twist Turner and he was one of the greatest people – and biggest characters – I have ever met.
I met him at Seattle’s Bumpershoot Festival in the early 80’s. We were in the large auditorium to hear Koko Taylor, followed by Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. (Except no Junior Wells, which went unremarked until someone in the audience shouted “Where’s Junior?” “He missed the flight,” deadpanned Buddy Guy.) Twist was directly behind my friend Fletcher and me, sitting with Blackie Jo James, a local blues singer I had seen. I think I turned around to ask her a question about Koko Taylor’s guitarist – to me Blackie Jo James was a real blues celebrity. She replied “You should ask this guy,” indicating Twist, “he played with him for years.”
Twist Turner had a diamond in his front tooth, a full length fur coat, and carried a pistol. I am not making this up. He was a drummer who had grown up in Seattle and moved to Chicago the day after he graduated from High School, to play the blues. That was maybe fifteen years ago, and he was temporarily back in Seattle, living in his dad’s basement, trying to figure out what came next. He had released a couple of 45’s of his own songs, on his own label, in Chicago, which had gone nowhere. He had played a million gigs around Chicago, and on the road around the Midwest for $50 a night. He was white, but if you talked to him on the phone, you would have swore he was black. This could sometimes be awkward, when he showed up for a gig he had been hired for by someone he’d never met.
I spent a lot of time with Twist in his dad’s basement, listening to records, playing the blues, and hearing incredible stories of life in the blues trenches (the time a blues singer pulled a pistol and shot a rat in his apartment, the time someone’s girlfriend was hailing a cab completely naked, the bass player who could only play a medium shuffle…). He was extraordinarily kind to me. I went to most of his local gigs, standing out in front of the clubs because I was too young to get in, often in rather skanky neighborhoods. Once I sat in with his group, playing electric guitar out in front of the Pioneer Square club with a cable running from the sidewalk through the window to the stage. Once I was listening to Twist from the entrance to a bar and I was mistaken for a doorman by some tourists who inquired after the cover charge. I collected six dollars from them.
During the couple of years that he was back in Seattle (this is around 1982-83) Twist sometimes set up gigs for former employers and colleagues he had worked with in Chicago. I saw pianist Sunnyland Slim in this way, and I met and played a little with Hubert Sumlin. I spent the afternoon with Sumlin at Twist’s dad’s house. I don’t remember why I wasn’t able to go to the gig they played that evening; perhaps it was out of town, or maybe I had a family commitment.
He had probably had a couple drinks by the time I got there, in the early afternoon. He was very silly, very animated, and with a child’s utter spontaneity. We played together, on unamplified electric guitars, sitting on the shag carpet in the basement, almost knee to knee. We played for perhaps ten minutes, trading blues chorues. “Play what you feel, man!” he exhorted me. With a teenager’s chutzpah, what I “felt” was a Thelonious Monk-inspired emphasis on dissonance, minor seconds and tritones. He was unfazed by this, took it in stride. I was very familiar with his playing by the age of 16, had learned all of his parts on the classic Wolf records: Killing Floor, Forty-Four, Evil, How Many More Years. In my mind there was a link between Sumlin’s gloriously personal eccentric thumb and finger style and the piano playing of Skip James, Monk and even Cecil Taylor, who I had just discovered. I thought I would make the point evident to him – which of course makes me roll my eyes now.
Etched in my mind forever is the backward somersault he did, while playing, on that shag carpet. It came out of nowhere, and it was beautiful. He was exageratedly expressing enthusiasm for something I played, goofily pretending to be bowled over. I think my mouth was hanging open when he came up still playing and laughing. He laughed a lot.
I remember he talked about hearing Howlin’ Wolf as a teenager outside of a juke joint, standing on some crates to look into a window, because he was too young to get in. The story made an impression on me because I was already familiar with it from reading interviews with Sumlin. Here I was with one of musical idols, and I was thinking “Yes, yes, I know, I’ve heard this story before!” like he was my uncle or something. I remember too he managed to speak several times of his great fondness for sexual intercourse, although not in those terms.
So, that’s my Hubert Sumlin story. The meeting I had with him lasted maybe a couple of hours. But the hours I’ve spent listening to him on record and watching video tapes of him and Wolf could fill weeks. He gave me a lot of joy.
My wife is a Scrabble fanatic. She’s very, very good. I tried, when we first started going out, playing with her a couple times. She whupped me so bad, I quit. In one of our only games, I did something she teased me about for many years: I put down the letters “m-o-t-i-a-n”. “What’s that,” she said? “Motion”, I replied. “That’s not how it’s spelled!” she said, laughing in bewilderment at the obviously verbally challenged man-child opposite her. “Oh,” I said, feeling suddenly somewhat alone. “Well, to me it is.”
His name was beautiful, his sound was beautiful, his time was beautiful, and his songs were beautiful.
Were, are, is.
When Paul Motian spoke of Chick Webb, or Gene Krupa or, as in a short but memorable video youtu.be/dPfTjgc0wN4 Jimmy Crawford, he spoke of them as life changers, personal heroes, gods. Of course, that’s what Motian was to so many. For me he embodied everything I love about Jazz. For me he was someone who made getting older look like a real privilege. Someone who made improvising look easy, and yet masterful and elusive, somehow simultaneously.
Beauty, beauty, beauty. Swing, swing, swing.
Smile, surprise, sound, song.
Thank you Paul Motian. I’m sorry you didn’t get ten more years. Being on the road for sixty years takes its toll. But you gave and gave and gave, and your music is one of our communities’ most treasured possessions.
I had never seen footage of Paul Motion playing with Bill Evans before (which doesn’t mean there isn’t any, I’m far from systematic about watching jazz videos). But it’s wonderful to see him, here with Chuck Israels in April of 1962. Perhaps this is the earliest substantial footage of Evans? The sound and picture quality isn’t great, but it’s 26 minutes of “averagely great”playing, if you will. It’s just cool to see Motion at this point, on brushes throughout, and to be grateful that he’s still making such vital music almost fifty years later. They play Nardis, Blue In Green, In Your Own Sweet Way (Israels and Motion working it here), Time Remembered, Re: Person I Knew, Waltz for Debby (oh man, Motion is swinging!), and a teensy bit of Five.
