Center and Periphery
Published: Fri, 06/17/22
There is, of course, a certain degree of human socializing involved as well, though there are still some folks I only know as "so-and-so's owner," which is both potentially embarrassing on a personal level and no doubt more than a little offensive to the dog in question. That said, over the past year or so I have managed to proceed to a first-name basis with a handful of dog people, including the owner of gregarious golden Labrador who is, like me, a lifelong musician (the owner, not the lab) and more than happy to have someone to talk shop with at the park while our dogs are busy snoofling each other, eating weeds and otherwise occupied in degrees of variously acceptable behavior.
Which is how I found myself talking the other night about songwriting, narrowing one's focus, and how the other things you're interested in might potentially feed into and inform what you do choose to focus on, rather than prove to be scattering distractions that merely widen and dilute that focus. This idea was fueled, in part, by another Bob Reynolds post on Youtube, in which the saxophonist talked about how while he spends perhaps 10% of his visible career playing straight-ahead jazz, when it's time to practice, he finds himself returning to bebop again and again, as the foundational discipline for everything else he's involved in playing.
Having found myself in some fairly diverse (relatively speaking) circumstances over the past few weeks – sitting in on a set of swing tunes, getting up to play a few songs with a blues band, swapping songs at a folk festival and going with a couple of friends to a local blues jam – all while practicing for my first solo show in over two years this weekend, it's certainly got me thinking about what's the center and what's the periphery. There's a part of me that really romanticizes the idea of being prepared to solve any musical circumstance on the fly – within reason, at least, which is to say, within the general vicinity of American groove-oriented, improvisation-friendly roots music. But – and I'm not wrestling with this for the first time, only with, by definition, more perspective available to me now than I might have had at previous times – it is clearer to me than ever that the more love you give the periphery, the less you have left for the center.
So the mental sleigh-of-hand I'm attempting at this point is to reconsider those things at the periphery – swing and bebop improvisation, composition, electric blues – as foundational disciplines informing the thing at the center, which is the attempted funneling of those various musical perspectives and values into the way I write songs, work them out as a guitarist, and perform the results. It's a lot more interesting to me than simply being one more musician recreating the pre-war blues canon note-for-note, but a lot harder to explain. Which is hardly the end of the world, just something interesting to consider.
–––
Case in point: I had the good fortune to spend more than one occasion watching and assisting Duke Robillard teach, and received the benefit of his deep, careful study of, among other things, the Freddie Green style of comping chords. It's something that has subsequently sunk deep into my approach to playing fingerstyle blues, even though it has its origins in a completely different purpose. In this week's lesson, I use Freddie Green chord voicings to explain three ways of incorporating new chord substitutions into the twelve-bar blues. You can find it at the link below:
Three Kinds Of Chord Substitutions On The Blues
More soon,
David
P.S. I wrote this newsletter listening to Ike Quebec's album Soul Samba, which has Kenny Burrell on guitar. No piano, so you can hear a lot of what Burrell is doing, and Ike Quebec has a bit of that relaxed, breathy Ben Webster vibe on this early 1960s Blue Note recording. In short – recommended listening.
For organized, ongoing weekly lessons that help you learn tunes, turn them into complete songs, and start improvising, register for the Fingerstyle Five membership at www.fretboardconfidential.com