Ken Waldman

In this day and age of overproduced music, it’s good to hear someone who isn’t part of the “commercial pop” aspect of music, but who is out there making a living playing music the old fashioned way, with fiddle, mandolin guitar, and banjo. I just happened to meet someone like this the other day at work. I received a phone call from one of the music professors saying that this guy who was on campus speaking to classes and performing, would stop over to talk to me about some books and CDs he has out that might be of interest to the library. Well, in comes Ken Waldman carrying a fiddle case and a big bag over his shoulder. We get to talking, and had an interesting hour or so discussion on music, poetry, Alaska, the life of a touring musician/poet, and other stuff. Being a “musical instrument junkie” I asked what all he had and he pulled a mandolin and banjo out of his bag, and a fiddle. We noodled around a little bit on the banjo and mandolin, and then Ken played some of his tunes on the fiddle. Later that night, I took my family over to see the show, and had a really enjoyable time. In his show, Ken, who bills himself as an Alaskan Fiddling Poet, plays old-time fiddle tunes—both traditional, and ones that he has composed. Along with the music, Ken tells stories about his life in Alaska, and recites his poems. On the night that I saw him, he had other musicians with him: the Druckenmillers, who played fiddle, guitar mandolin and banjo; and Mark Tamsula who played banjo, fiddle, and guitar. All five of them played together, then they played some tunes in smaller groups of two and three. It was a really good show, and just reminds me that there’s more to music than what you hear on the radio. Good music is out there and sometimes you have to hunt it down, but other times it finds you.

 Check out some videos

And here's a video I took of Ken and Mark playing Miss Renee's Waltz (well the last minute of the tune)

Musical Styles

As I was saying in the post on Pink Floyd and David Gilmour, I don’t discriminate against musical styles just “because” (Well except for current corporate pop which is just about anything on the radio…)*

There’s a quote attributed to Duke Ellington, “There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.” I agree with this but there’s more to it than just good and bad. It means that someone has to decide what is good and what is “the other kind.” Someone has to “judge” this is good, and this isn’t. And what it comes down to is personal taste, and although I don’t particularly care for Death Metal, if someone likes it, what difference does it make to me? More power to them. And if I listen to a style of music that someone else doesn’t like, why should they care? If someone likes a style of music, then that music is valid, just don’t expect it to remain the same forever. Change is going on constantly.

Purity has a place in music, but if nothing changes, nothing advances. Every style of music is based on a preexisting style, not every change is going to be to my tastes, but if someone likes it then great. Dvorak, Copeland, and other composers took folk songs and made them “classical.” Duke Ellington took “classical” compositions and made them jazz. Pete Seeger played Ode to Joy on the banjo. Heck, I’ve even played it myself on the dulcimer. I actually like when someone takes a song or style of music and does something to it that makes me go, “Wow, I never would have thought of that!”

Here are some examples of people thinking outside the box. Taking one style of music and playing it with another style’s instrumentation, or taking an inane pop song and finding the underlying heart. Hopefully some of these will make you say “Wow!” Or maybe at least a “Well, that was interesting.”

Psychograss play Hendrix

Richard Thompson – Oops I Did It Again

Shine on You Crazy Diamond on ukulele

They Harder They Come on fiddle

Wailing Souls – Whiter Shade of Pale

Peter Tosh Johnny Be Good

*Okay disclaimer time. My niece did a lip sync video to Jessie J’s song Price Tag, which I then learned on uke to try playing it with her... and I actually kinda sorta liked the song.

Now Be Thankful

Song For Today

Happy Thanksgiving!



Fairport Convention from Maidstone an outdoor concert from 1970.
Dave Swarbrick  - Lead Vocals
Richard Thompson - Guitar
Simon Nicol - Guitar
Dave Pegg - Bass
Dave Mattacks - Drums

In looking for the chords online, what I find doesn't seem to match up.
For one thing, Simon is capoed on the fifth fret, and at 1:49, Richard appears to be reaching for a G chord.
These look a little better for what Richard is playing.
I haven't sat down to try and figure it out myself, but I may give it a try.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

David Gilmour and Pink Floyd

I put on a CD the other day of a band that I hadn’t listened to in probably over 15 years--Pink Floyd.

In the 80s, I was a huge fan of Pink Floyd and David Gilmour. Gilmour’s first two solo albums, Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, and Wish You Were Here were my favorites. I had a giant poster of Gilmour’s About Face album on my dorm wall in college, but again I hadn’t listened to them in a long time.

I recently read a Mandolin Cafe piece about Pink Floyd and heard a ukulele version of Shine on You Crazy Diamond on ukulele cosmos (requires registration), and another on YouTube, and it made me remember how much I used to love Pink Floyd. Although I like a lot of their albums, Ummagumma, Animals, Meddle, and enjoyed The Wall and some of The Final Cut, those albums don’t hold up for me. Dark Side of the Moon is overplayed, and I don’t care if I never hear it again, but Wish You Were here is an album I can still listen to.

To me, the best thing about Pink Floyd was David Gilmour. Now I’m not discounting Roger Waters or any of the others, I mean I bought The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking when it came out. I saw Roger Waters on the Radio K.A.O.S. tour, and then the refigured Pink Floyd (without Roger Waters) on the Momentary Lapse of Reason tour, and I actually thought that the Roger Waters show was better. However it was Gilmour’s guitar that drew me in, and like I said, I hadn’t listened to Pink Floyd for close to 20 years.

Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at is how musical tastes can change over time, and there’s no real rhyme or reason. It’s not that one musical style is better than another; there are good things in all good music. Here’s a quote from an interview with David Gilmour stating just that:

RC: “You’ve always had an ability to turn your hand to many different styles.”

DG: “I’m a real jack of all trades. I'm completely the anti-purist. I was never going to dedicate my life to being BB King. My influences were Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Bob Dylan, Hank Marvin, all the blues guys and everything. It was all a complete hotchpotch, a mass of different styles and influences. I saw no reason why all these influences could not co-habit reasonably and I still don't!”
(David Gilmour Interview - Record Collector May 2003)

This isn’t the first time that I’ve read/heard this from a musician, and it’s something I completely agree with, whether it’s Johnny Shines saying that Robert Johnson, the “King of the Delta Blues Singers” was a “polka hound”; Howling Wolf saying that he started “howling” because he was trying to yodel like Jimmie Rodgers; Martin, Bogan and Armstrong playing Polish, Italian, and other ethnic music depending on what section of town they were in; Anthrax playing with Public Enemy; Chris Thile playing Bach one minute, then Bluegrass or the Beatles the next; Richard Thompson playing “Oops I Did It Again”, or Darol Anger and Bruce Molsky playing Jimi Hendrix on fiddles.

To me, it’s all music and it’s all good. I want to show some examples of cross pollination in music from some well-known musicians and some unknown musicians, but before I get to that, here’s some David Gilmour and Pink Floyd:

David Gilmour – Shine on….

Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii - Echoes

Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii – One of These Days

David Gilmour – There’s No Way Out of Here

( Check out Ian McLagen of the Small Faces/Faces on organ)

Bellowhead

So far, all of the posts I’ve written have been about music that is OLD, twenty to seventy years or older. In this post, I’m going to feature a CURRENT band that I really enjoy.  Now when I say current, that isn’t really true, because although the music is new, the lyrics are often hundreds of years old.

The name of the band is Bellowhead.

 Bellowhead was started by John Spiers and Jon Boden, who play as a folk duo consisting of fiddle and melodeon (a type of accordion). In wanting to have a bigger sound, they decided to form a large band with both a horn section and a string section. They ended up with an 11-piece band whose members play melodeon, concertina, fiddle, guitar, trumpet, trombone, helicon, (and sousaphone), cello, oboe, saxophone, bagpipes, and percussion among others.

Bellowhead is huge in England, but virtually unknown in the U.S. I found out about them while reading the forum, TalkAwhile. After reading some forum posts about them I looked them up on YouTube, and was hooked. I’m a sucker for bands that combine horns and strings, “folk” bands that aren’t too concerned with being “purists,” and musicians who are willing to take a chance and try something different. I always liked when The Band put horns on their songs, when David Bromberg combined fiddles and horns, and when Lyle Lovett plays with his Large Band. In the English folk scene, a predecessor to Bellowhead is Brass Monkey, which was guitarist Martin Carthy (guitar), John Kirkpatrick (squeezeboxes), and a brass section playing traditional songs. To make the connection complete, John Kirkpatrick’s son Benji plays in Bellowhead.

Bellowhead takes traditional folk songs and makes new arrangements. They combine a number of music styles, the English Brass Band tradition, fiddle tunes, Morris Dancing, funk, disco, jazz, sea shanties, Brechtian Theater, and music hall. They sing songs dealing with whiskey, cholera, prostitutes, sailors, begging, and sex. Mix it all with a lot of energy and fun, and you end up with Bellowhead.

Here’s a sampling of their music.

Sloe Gin Set

Rigs of the Time

Jordan

New York Girls

London Town

Check out their Websites and Forum

Bellowhead
Spiers and Boden

Spiers and Boden/Bellowhead Forum

Slide Guitar

I love the sound of slide guitar. The slide adds a new dimension to what can be done on the guitar. It can add excitement, it can make the guitar “speak”, on an acoustic guitar, a slide can hold notes for what seems like forever, it can play legato (slurring the notes together), and it can play staccato (short, articulated notes).  A slide can add another voice to a guitarist’s bag of tricks.

There are a number of stories about who was the first to play slide on the guitar, but it is generally accepted that it was brought here by Hawaiian groups that toured America around 1918. The Hawaiians played with a metal bar with the guitar held flat on the lap. A lot of the early bluesmen picked up this technique and played slide with the guitar flat on their lap. Leadbelly’s few slide pieces were played this way, Booker White played songs this way, Kokomo Arnold, Casey Bill Weldon, and the Black Ace all played “Hawaiian” or lap style. It is also believed that Charley Patton’s slide songs were played “lap style.”

Who the first person was to put a metal or glass “slide” on their finger and play with the guitar in an upright position isn’t known, but this style became the predominant style in blues, and then rock, while lap style became the predominant style in country music.

But there were other ways to slide, there were “knife songs.” These were songs played with a pocketknife held in the hand and used as a slide. In fact, in W.C. Handy’s first experience of hearing the blues, while waiting for a train in Mississippi, he heard an unknown musician who used a knife in the same way that the Hawaiians used a steel bar.  Mance Lipscomb played with a knife, and Gus Cannon used a knife on his banjo. Booker White can be seen using a nail, and The Black Ace used a medicine bottle.

Mance Lipscomb – Jack of Spades

Booker White – Poor Boy

Black Ace – I Am the Black Ace

Some musicians who played with a slide (either metal or glass) on their finger were: Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, Elmore James, Hound Dog Taylor, Tampa Red, Earl Hooker, and many others.

Johnny Shines – Ramblin’ Blues

Son House – Yonder Comes the Blues

Muddy Waters – Long Distance Call

What you use as a slide, and how you play are personal preferences. I’ve seen slide played lap or upright, with the slide on the pinky, ring, middle, and even index.  The slide could be glass, brass, copper, steel, ceramic, socket wrench, or even bone.

 

Personally, I like to use either glass or brass. I wear my slide on my pinky, and I like it to go as far down the finger as it can, and to have the tip of my pinky sticking out. I also make my own glass slides. To make my slides, I use a bottle cutter and a candle.

This works pretty well, and I don’t have to go out and buy an expensive glass cutting saw. To make a slide, I score the bottle in two places, once right below the lip, and again 2 to 3 inches below that. I like the slide to be fairly straight, so I try not to use bottles that flare out from the neck. Once the bottle is scored, I hold the first score over a candle flame and slowly rotate. Every so often I take it away from the flame and run it under cold water, again slowly rotating. Do this a couple of times and the lip will just pop off. I then repeat at the second scored line. Usually this produces a clean break, sometimes though the glass will not crack on the score line, or will have cracks in the glass going up the slide.

After I have the neck off, I take some wet/dry sandpaper, and smooth down the edges. It doesn’t cost a lot, and is fairly easy to do.  If you aren’t the handy type, you could purchase a glass slide, there is a company in England that will sell you a glass bottle neck beautifully polished, and beveled:  www.diamondbottlenecks.com

However, I like making my own, and since I know that I’ll eventually break them, it’s cheaper in the long run. Today I cut three bottlenecks; one got too hot and cracked, the other two turned out perfect.

Bert Jansch

Bert Jansch – 1943-2011

Last week, Bert Jansch passed away. Bert was one of the major English fingerstyle guitar players to come out of the 1960s. His solo guitar albums were highly influential to a number of upcoming musicians ranging from Donovan, Nick Drake, Paul Simon, Neil Young and Jimmy Page. Jimmy Page even went so far as to record one of Bert’s arrangements of the song Blackwaterside. But in typical Zeppelin fashion, changed the title slightly, and claimed the song as his own.

Bert Jansch – Blackwaterside

Besides his solo albums, Jansch was a member of the group Pentangle. Pentangle also included John Renbourn on guitar, Danny Thompson on bass, Jacqui McShee on vocals, and Terry Cox on drums.  They combined folk, blues, jazz, and pop into a unique synthesis that could only have come out of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Pentangle – No Love is Sorrow (Folky)

Pentangle – Reflections (Jazzy)

I love the wine glasses on top of the amps in those videos.

So Long Bert, thanks for the music.