5 Jazz Music Artists That Helped Define Jazz By Adrian Banks Sometimes it is surprising to note how many people know nothing at all about instrumental music or any music other than rock, pop, R&B, or hip-hop. Jazz music in particular seems to be relatively inconsequential in many places, and a majority of the most well-known jazz music artists have passed on. Still, some people prefer listening to different types of music at times, and many who have been searching for unique vocal styles and improvisations have discovered the beauty and art behind jazz music. Here are 5 jazz music artists you should listen to if you really want to learn about jazz: 1. Billie Holiday When we discuss Billie Holiday today (-59) it can be said that she remains one of the most popular jazz songwriters and female vocalists who ultimately helped define the jazz genre.
Often referred to as "Lady Day", Billie Holiday was a singer who displayed a very distinctive vocal style which greatly influenced pop and jazz singing styles. Billie Holiday's most popular songs include: Good Morning Heartache, Lady Sings The Blues, God Bless The Child, and Strange Fruit. 2. John Coltrane No serious discussion of jazz can be had without talking about John Coltrane (-67). The impact he has had on jazz music is undeniable. Coltrane was a prolific composer, bandleader and jazz saxophonist who recorded over 40 sessions as a bandleader, and many more as a session sax player for fellow jazz musicians Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. Initially known for hard bop jazz and bebop, Coltrane is also recognized as one of the primary forerunners of free jazz. His most popular albums include: Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, and My Favorite Things. 3. Miles Davis For many jazz fans, there is the idea that there would be no jazz at all if were not for Miles Davis (-91). To many, his music is what jazz music is all about. In fact,
Miles Davis is often recognized as one of the most innovative and influential jazz music artists of all time. Davis was a trumpet player, composer, arranger, and bandleader who helped usher in several of the most important developments in jazz music including hard bop, bebop, cool jazz, and jazz fusion. Popular albums by Miles Davis include: Kind Of Blue, In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and Tutu. 4. Charlie Parker Mostly referred to as "Bird" or "Yardbird", Charlie Parker (-55) was a jazz composer and saxophonist known for his ground-breaking approaches to rhythm, melodies, and harmony. Working on the alto and tenor sax and dubbed an icon for "hipsters", Charlie Parker was also influential in helping to develop bebop. Many of his songs are now considered jazz standards. Popular songs by Charlie Parker include: Billie's Bounce, Ornithology, and Anthropology.
5. Oscar Peterson Though it can be said that jazz is primarily an American art form, Oscar Peterson (-07) was a Canadian jazz composer and pianist. With 7 Grammy Awards to his credit, many consider Oscar Peterson one of the most talented jazz pianists to have recorded. Popular works by Oscar Peterson include: Night Train, Cole Porter Songbook, and Live at the Blue Note Want to learn more about the top jazz music artists http://www.nujazzacid.com/10//05/jazz-music-artists/ who helped define jazz? Visit www.nujazzacid.com http://www.nujazzacid.com for a free ebook and learn more about jazz. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Adrian_Banks
The Jazz and Art on the Avenue at Delray Beach By Nicholas Jurkowski Delray Beach is a small, sophisticated town with a rich and interesting history, starting, like many Florida towns and cities, with a well-meaning tycoon who bought up an ugly plot of marsh-land infested with snakes, mosquitoes and alligators.
Through a long process, Delray has been transformed into quite an attractive little city, with a large number of things to see and do. Delray is a fantastic location for leisure, as it offers a wide variety of activities, from a fantastic 2-mile stretch of beach (offering all of the activities that you might associate with beaches), to a quaint downtown full of antique shops and art galleries, to a commendable offering of gourmet restaurants (Kyoto Sushi and Sake is quite good). Without a doubt, one of the best parts of Delray Beach, however, is probably the special events that they seem to be perpetually hosting. My favorite is the Jazz and Art on the Avenue series, which happens about five times a year (there are still two opportunities for 06 - October th and November 30th). The Jazz and Art on the Avenue events are an amazing mix of interesting art, eclectic music, and the always charming sights and sounds of Delray Beach.
There are countless bands (jazz and otherwise - on the th of August there were Taiko drummers) that provide a perfect evening of live entertainment for music aficionados. In addition to the music, there is also a "gallery-stroll" - art galleries open up for the duration of the event (6pm-10pm) so that you can peruse their collections. Be sure to stop by the Burton Gallery. As if this visual and aural feast were not enough, the local businesses around the event center open their doors to provide you with all manner of goods and services - from food to massages to office-supplies - generally at sale prices.
This is definitely something I try very hard not to miss. Hopefully my stirring descriptions pique your curiosity to the point that you visit Delray Beach (whether you visit for the festivals, the shops, the restaurants, or the beach). It is the perfect spot for a special occasion, and pairs perfectly with Millennium Limo. Imagine taking a limo to the jazz and art festival and then wandering around for a few hours taking it all in. You could eat, drink, and be merry with reckless abandon, secure in the knowledge that a professional limo-driver will be taking you home afterwards. In any case - Delray Beach is a great destination for any reason: a romantic outing, a family trip, or just to get away. Nick Jurkowski is a senior editor for MilleniumLimo.com: the essays above can be found on his night life blog, updated daily and available via RSS, at The Urban Adventure Blog
The Birth of the Blues Guitar By Steve Randazzo In the late th and early th century, African Americans who worked in the fields and work camps created the blues. Although the blues went in many different avenues, the most significant was created in a very special part of the United States, in an area of the Mississippi also known as the Delta. The area near the Mississippi River in between the Yazoo River, Memphis, and Vicksburg, the cotton growing regions are responsible for many of the early blues players. Although the area known as the delta is well known as the area in the Mississippi it is not limited to just that area. Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas also developed important artist as well. These areas helped develop the term know now as the Delta blues.
The blues now over 100 years old has become one of the most successful genres of music today, and as a result still packs night clubs, concert halls, and stadiums. We can all thank current musicians today for keeping the blues alive and active. The blues is still so popular and considered one of the more important styles of music because the songs deeply touch human feelings in a way no other music can. It captures the sole and essence of people which is missing in today's pop, rap, rock and digital music. It identifies and touches real people, with real life issues, and talks about real life lessons.
No music today will ever come close to providing the kind of emotions and feelings the blues can give. It is said that the blues is custom made for the guitar so it is a natural progression when learning the theory and development of playing the guitar that the blues is usually one of the first and most important steps in your journey and in the creation of any guitar god. While some music today sounds great without the guitar, it is very rare that you will ever find a successful blues band without one; it truly is the sole and voice of blues music and cannot be replaced by any other instrument.
The blues will never die and is in good hands with today's generation. There are many young players out there today that are developing the skills and creating new techniques that would pay respects to the blues guitar elders. They are keeping the blues alive and flourishing for the next generation of blues players. Steve enjoys writing articles on topics he has a passion for.
Not only does the author specialize in management, customer service, and team building, he ejoys relaxing by playing the guitar. Please check out his latest website at http://www.wirelessminicamerareview.com/ which helps people find the best Outdoor Surveillance Cameras http://www.wirelessminicamerareview.com/Outdoor-Surveillance-Cameras.html and information they are looking for when searching for wireless cameras. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steve_Randazzo
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre1 that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States around the end of the th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll is characterized by specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues chord progression is the most common. The blue notes that, for expressive purposes are sung or played flattened or gradually bent (minor 3rd to major 3rd) in relation to the pitch of the major scale, are also an important part of the sound.
The blues genre is based on the blues form but possesses other characteristics such as specific lyrics, bass lines, and instruments. Blues can be subdivided into several subgenres ranging from country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the th century. Best known are the Delta, Piedmont, Jump, and Chicago blues styles. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 60s and 70s, a hybrid form called blues-rock evolved.
"The blues takes many forms... It is variously a feeling, a mood, a nameless threat, a person, a lover, a boss man, a mob, and, of course, the Devil himself. It is often experienced as both cause and effect, action and reaction, and it can be used as both hex and counterhex, poison and antidote, pain and relief. Most importantly, the blues is both the cause of song, and song itself..."
One explanation for the origin of the "blues" is that it derived from mysticism involving blue indigo, which was used by many West African cultures in death and mourning ceremonies where all the mourner's garments would have been dyed blue to indicate suffering. This mystical association towards the indigo plant, grown in many southern U.S. slave plantations, combined with the West African slaves who sang of their suffering as they worked on the cotton that the indigo dyed eventually resulted in these expressed songs being known as "the Blues." The term may also have come from the term "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness; an early use of the term in this sense is found in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (98). Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to since , when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. Lyrics The lyrics of early traditional blues verses probably often consisted of a single line repeated four times; it was only in the first decades of the th century that the most common current structure became standard: the so-called AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars.9 Two of the first published blues songs, "Dallas Blues" () and "Saint Louis Blues" (), were -bar blues featuring the AAB structure. W. C. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times.10 The lines are often sung following a pattern closer to a rhythmic talk than to a melody. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative.
The singer voiced his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, and hard times."11 This melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook to life when they were enslaved. The lyrics often relate troubles experienced within African American society. For instance Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Rising High Water Blues" tells about the Great Mississippi Flood of 27: "Backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time And I can't get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine." However, although the blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the lyrics could also be humorous and raunchy as well:
"Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, Rebecca, Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, It may be sending you baby, but it's worrying the hell out of me." From Big Joe Turner's "Rebecca", a compilation of traditional blues lyrics Hokum blues celebrated both comedic lyrical content and a boisterous, farcical performance style. Tampa Red's classic "Tight Like That" is a sly wordplay with the double meaning of being "tight" with someone coupled with a more salacious physical familiarity.
Explicit contents led to blues sometimes being called dirty blues. Lyrical content of music became slightly simpler in post war-blues which focused almost exclusively on relationship woes or sexual worries. Many lyrical themes that frequently appeared in pre-war blues such as economic depression, farming, devils, gambling, magic, floods and dry periods were less common in post-war blues. Author Ed Morales has claimed that Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues" as a "thinly veiled reference to Eleggua, the orisha in charge of the crossroads".
However, the Christian influence was far more obvious. Many seminal blues artists such as Charley Patton or Skip James had several religious songs or spirituals in their repertoires. Reverend Gary Davis and Blind Willie Johnson are examples of artists often categorized as blues musicians for their music, although their lyrics clearly belong to the spirituals. Form The blues form is a cyclic musical form in which a repeating progression of chords mirrors the call and response scheme commonly found in African and African-American music. During the first decades of the th century blues music was not clearly defined in terms of a particular chord progression.
With the popularity of early performers, such as Bessie Smith, use of the twelve-bar blues spread across the music industry during the s and 30s. Other chord progressions, such as 8-bar forms, are still considered blues; examples include "How Long Blues," "Trouble in Mind," and Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway." There are also -bar blues, as in Ray Charles's instrumental "Sweet Bars" and in Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man." Idiosyncratic numbers of bars are also encountered occasionally, as with the 9-bar progression in "Sitting on Top of the World" by Walter Vinson.
The basic -bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of bars in a 4/4 time signature. The blues chords associated to a twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a -bar scheme. They are labeled by Roman numbers referring to the degrees of the progression. For instance, for a blues in the key of C, C is the tonic chord (I) and F is the subdominant . The last chord is the dominant turnaround, marking the transition to the beginning of the next progression.
The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the 11th bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the turnaround, can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords. Much of the time, some or all of these chords are played in the harmonic seventh (7th) form.
The use of the harmonic seventh interval is characteristic of blues and is popularly called the "blues seven". Blues seven chords add to the harmonic chord a note with a frequency in a 7:4 ratio to the fundamental note. At a 7:4 ratio, it is not close to any interval on the conventional Western diatonic scale. For convenience or by necessity it is often approximated by a minor seventh interval or a dominant seventh chord.
A minor pentatonic scale; About this sound play In melody, blues is distinguished by the use of the flattened third, fifth and seventh of the associated major scale. These specialized notes are called the blue or bent notes. These scale tones may replace the natural scale tones, or they may be added to the scale, as in the case of the minor blues scale, in which the flattened third replaces the natural third, the flattened seventh replaces the natural seventh and the flattened fifth is added between the natural fourth and natural fifth.
While the -bar harmonic progression had been intermittently used for centuries, the revolutionary aspect of blues was the frequent use of the flattened third, flattened seventh, and even flattened fifth in the melody, together with crushing—playing directly adjacent notes at the same time (i.e., minor second)—and sliding, similar to using grace notes. The blue notes allow for key moments of expression during the cadences, melodies, and embellishments of the blues. Detroit blues-rock shuffle - Chicago-blues shuffle Problems playing these files? See media help. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and call-and-response, and they form a repetitive effect called a groove.
Characteristic of the blues since its Afro-American origins, the shuffles played a central role in swing music. The simplest shuffles, which were the clearest signature of the R&B wave that started in the mid-40s, were a three-note riff on the bass strings of the guitar. When this riff was played over the bass and the drums, the groove "feel" was created. Shuffle rhythm is often vocalized as "dow, da dow, da dow, da" or "dump, da dump, da dump, da": it consists of uneven, or "swung," eighth notes. On a guitar this may be played as a simple steady bass or it may add to that stepwise quarter note motion from the fifth to the sixth of the chord and back.
Recorded by Victor Military Band. First known commercial recording of Handy's first commercially successful blues composition. Crazy Blues. The first commercial recording of vocal blues by an African-American singer: Mamie Smith's performance of Perry Bradford's "Crazy Blues" in . Keep your lamp trimmed and burning.
Traditional spiritual performed by Texas gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson (vocal and guitar) and Willie B. Harris. This example shows the close relationship between gospel and blues music. Dupree Blues Piedmont blues, performed in by Blind Willie Walker Milwaukee Blues Bluegrass, performed in by Charlie Poole, a bluesman of Irish descent Sweet Home Chicago Menu Sweet Home Chicago, performed by Robert Johnson, a Delta blues guitarist Good Liquor Gonna Carry Me Down Chicago blues of the late pre-war era, the so-called Bluebird sound, recorded by Big Bill Broonzy.
Deep Elem Blues Rockabilly version of a traditional blues recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis. Problems playing these files? See media help. Origins Main article: Origins of the blues The first publication of blues sheet music was in 08: Antonio Maggio's "I Got the Blues" is the first published song to use the word blues. Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" followed in ; W. C. Handy's "The Memphis Blues" followed in the same year. The first recording by an African American singer was Mamie Smith's rendition of Perry Bradford's "Crazy Blues". But the origins of the blues date back to some decades earlier.
They are very poorly documented, due in part to racial discrimination within American society, including academic circles, and to the low literacy rate of the rural African American community at the time. Chroniclers began to report about blues music in Southern Texas and Deep South at the dawn of the th century.
In particular, Charles Peabody mentioned the appearance of blues music at Clarksdale, Mississippi and Gate Thomas reported very similar songs in southern Texas around 01–02. These observations coincide more or less with the remembrance of Jelly Roll Morton, who declared having heard blues for the first time in New Orleans in 02; Ma Rainey, who remembered her first blues experience the same year in Missouri; and W.C. Handy, who first heard the blues in Tutwiler, Mississippi in 03.
The first extensive research in the field was performed by Howard W. Odum, who published a large anthology of folk songs in the counties of Lafayette, Mississippi and Newton, Georgia between 05 and 08.36 The first non-commercial recordings of blues music, termed "proto-blues" by Paul Oliver, were made by Odum at the very beginning of the th century for research purposes.
They are now utterly lost. Other recordings that are still available were made in by Lawrence Gellert. Later, several recordings were made by Robert W. Gordon, who became head of the Archive of American Folk Songs of the Library of Congress. Gordon's successor at the Library was John Lomax. In the 30s, together with his son Alan, Lomax made a large number of non-commercial blues recordings that testify to the huge variety of proto-blues styles, such as field hollers and ring shouts. A record of blues music as it existed before the s is also given by the recordings of artists such as Lead Belly or Henry Thomas40 who both performed archaic blues music.
All these sources show the existence of many different structures distinct from the twelve-, eight-, or sixteen-bar. John Lomax, pioneering musicologist and folklorist. The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known.43 The first appearance of the blues is often dated after the Emancipation Act of 63,34 between 70 and 00, a period that coincides with Emancipation and, later, the development of juke joints as places where Blacks went to listen to music, dance, or gamble after a hard day's work. This period corresponds to the transition from slavery to sharecropping, small-scale agricultural production, and the expansion of railroads in the southern United States. Several scholars characterize the early 00s development of blues music as a move from group performances to a more individualized style.
They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the enslaved people. According to Lawrence Levine, "there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington's teachings, and the rise of the blues." Levine states that "psychologically, socially, and economically, African-Americans were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did." There are few characteristics common to all blues music, because the genre took its shape from the idiosyncrasies of individual performances. However, there are some characteristics that were present long before the creation of the modern blues.
Call-and-response shouts were an early form of blues-like music; they were a "functional expression ... style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure." A form of this pre-blues was heard in slave ring shouts and field hollers, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content". Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural blacks into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States.
Though blues, as it is now known, can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the African call-and-response tradition, transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar,4950 the blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West African griots, and the influences are faint and tenuous. In particular, no specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues. However many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa.
That blue notes pre-date their use in blues and have an African origin is attested by English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "A Negro Love Song", from his The African Suite for Piano composed in 98, which contains blue third and seventh notes. The Diddley bow (a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of the American South in the early twentieth century) and the banjo are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary. The banjo seems to be directly imported from western African music. It is similar to the musical instrument that griots and other Africans such as the Igbo played (called halam or akonting by African peoples such as the Wolof, Fula and Mandinka).
However, in the s, when country blues began to be recorded, the use of the banjo in blues music was quite marginal and limited to individuals such as Papa Charlie Jackson and later Gus Cannon. Blues music also adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment.
The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music."60 Charley Patton, one of the originators of the Delta blues style, playing with a pick or a bottleneck slide. The musical forms and styles that are now considered the "blues" as well as modern "country music" arose in the same regions during the th century in the southern United States. Recorded blues and country can be found from as far back as the s, when the popular record industry developed and created marketing categories called "race music" and "hillbilly music" to sell music by blacks for blacks and by whites for whites, respectively.
At the time, there was no clear musical division between "blues" and "country," except for the ethnicity of the performer, and even that was sometimes documented incorrectly by record companies. Though musicologists can now attempt to define "the blues" narrowly in terms of certain chord structures and lyric strategies thought to have originated in West Africa, audiences originally heard the music in a far more general way: it was simply the music of the rural south, notably the Mississippi Delta.
Black and white musicians shared the same repertoire and thought of themselves as "songsters" rather than "blues musicians." The notion of blues as a separate genre arose during the black migration from the countryside to urban areas in the s and the simultaneous development of the recording industry. "Blues" became a code word for a record designed to sell to black listeners. The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals.
The origins of spirituals go back much further than the blues, usually dating back to the middle of the th century, when the slaves were Christianized and began to sing and play Christian hymns, in particular those of Isaac Watts, which were very popular. Before the blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord progressions, it was defined as the secular counterpart of the spirituals. It was the low-down music played by the rural Blacks.
Depending on the religious community a musician belonged to, it was more or less considered as a sin to play this low-down music: blues was the devil's music. Musicians were therefore segregated into two categories: gospel and blues singers, guitar preachers and songsters. However, at the time rural Black music began to get recorded in the s, both categories of musicians used very similar techniques: call-and-response patterns, blue notes, and slide guitars.
Gospel music was nevertheless using musical forms that were compatible with Christian hymns and therefore less marked by the blues form than its secular counterpart.65 Pre-war blues The American sheet music publishing industry produced a great deal of ragtime music. By , the sheet music industry had published three popular blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: "Baby Seals' Blues" by "Baby" F. Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews), "Dallas Blues" by Hart Wand and "The Memphis Blues" by W. C. Handy.66 Sheet music from "Saint Louis Blues" () Handy was a formally trained musician, composer and arranger who helped to popularize the blues by transcribing and orchestrating blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers.
He became a popular and prolific composer, and billed himself as the "Father of the Blues"; however, his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime;67 Handy's signature work was the "Saint Louis Blues". In the s, the blues became a major element of African American and American popular music, reaching white audiences via Handy's arrangements and the classic female blues performers. The blues evolved from informal performances in bars to entertainment in theaters. Blues performances were organized by the Theater Owners Bookers Association in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club and juke joints such as the bars along Beale Street in Memphis.
Several record companies, such as the American Record Corporation, Okeh Records, and Paramount Records, began to record African American music. As the recording industry grew, country blues performers like Bo Carter, Jimmie Rodgers (country singer), Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red and Blind Blake became more popular in the African American community. Kentucky-born Sylvester Weaver was in the first to record the slide guitar style, in which a guitar is fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle.68 The slide guitar became an important part of the Delta blues.69 The first blues recordings from the s are categorized as a traditional, rural country blues and a more polished 'city' or urban blues. Country blues performers often improvised, either without accompaniment or with only a banjo or guitar. Regional styles of country blues varied widely in the early th century. The (Mississippi) Delta blues was a rootsy sparse style with passionate vocals accompanied by slide guitar.
The little-recorded Robert Johnson70 combined elements of urban and rural blues. In addition to Robert Johnson, influential performers of this style included his predecessors Charley Patton and Son House. Singers such as Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller performed in the southeastern "delicate and lyrical" Piedmont blues tradition, which used an elaborate ragtime-based fingerpicking guitar technique. Georgia also had an early slide tradition,71 with Curley Weaver, Tampa Red, "Barbecue Bob" Hicks and James "Kokomo" Arnold as representatives of this style.72 The lively Memphis blues style, which developed in the s and 30s near Memphis, Tennessee, was influenced by jug bands such as the Memphis Jug Band or the Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers.
Performers such as Frank Stokes, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Wilkins, Joe McCoy, Casey Bill Weldon and Memphis Minnie used a variety of unusual instruments such as washboard, fiddle, kazoo or mandolin. Memphis Minnie was famous for her virtuoso guitar style. Pianist Memphis Slim began his career in Memphis, but his distinct style was smoother and had some swing elements. Many blues musicians based in Memphis moved to Chicago in the late 30s or early 40s and became part of the urban blues movement, which blended country music and electric blues.7374 Bessie Smith, an early blues singer, was known for her powerful voice. Urban blues City or urban blues styles were more codified and elaborate as a performer was no longer within their local, immediate community and had to adapt to a larger, more varied audience's aesthetic.75 Classic female urban and vaudeville blues singers were popular in the s, among them Mamie Smith, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Victoria Spivey.
Mamie Smith, more a vaudeville performer than a blues artist, was the first African-American to record a blues in ; her second record, "Crazy Blues", sold 75,000 copies in its first month.76 Ma Rainey, the "Mother of Blues", and Bessie Smith each "sang around center tones, perhaps in order to project her voice more easily to the back of a room." Smith would "... sing a song in an unusual key, and her artistry in bending and stretching notes with her beautiful, powerful contralto to accommodate her own interpretation was unsurpassed."77 Urban male performers included popular black musicians of the era, such Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Leroy Carr. An important label of this era was the chicagoean Bluebird label. Before WWII, Tampa Red was sometimes referred to as "the Guitar Wizard". Carr accompanied himself on the piano with Scrapper Blackwell on guitar, a format that continued well into the 50s with people such as Charles Brown, and even Nat "King" Cole.69 A typical boogie-woogie bassline Boogie-woogie was another important style of 30s and early 40s urban blues.78 While the style is often associated with solo piano, boogie-woogie was also used to accompany singers and, as a solo part, in bands and small combos. Boogie-Woogie style was characterized by a regular bass figure, an ostinato or riff and shifts of level in the left hand, elaborating each chord and trills and decorations in the right hand. Boogie-woogie was pioneered by the Chicago-based Jimmy Yancey and the Boogie-Woogie Trio (Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis).79 Chicago boogie-woogie performers included Clarence "Pine Top" Smith and Earl Hines, who "linked the propulsive left-hand rhythms of the ragtime pianists with melodic figures similar to those of Armstrong's trumpet in the right hand."75 The smooth Louisiana style of Professor Longhair and, more recently, Dr. John blends classic rhythm and blues with blues styles. Another development in this period was big band blues.80 The "territory bands" operating out of Kansas City, the Bennie Moten orchestra, Jay McShann, and the Count Basie Orchestra were also concentrating on the blues, with -bar blues instrumentals such as Basie's "One O'Clock Jump" and "Jumpin' at the Woodside" and boisterous "blues shouting" by Jimmy Rushing on songs such as "Going to Chicago" and "Sent for You Yesterday." A well-known big band blues tune is Glenn Miller's "In the Mood." In the 40s, the jump blues style developed. Jump blues grew up from the boogie woogie wave and was strongly influenced by big band music. It uses saxophone or other brass instruments and the guitar in the rhythm section to create a jazzy, up-tempo sound with declamatory vocals.
Jump blues tunes by Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner, based in Kansas City, Missouri, influenced the development of later styles such as rock and roll and rhythm and blues.81 Dallas-born T-Bone Walker, who is often associated with the California blues style,82 performed a successful transition from the early urban blues la Lonnie Johnson and Leroy Carr to the jump blues style and dominated the blues-jazz scene at Los Angeles during the 40s.83 50s The transition from country to urban blues, that began in the s, had always been driven by the successive waves of economic crisis and booms and the associated move of the rural Blacks to urban areas, the Great Migration. The long boom in the aftermath of World War II induced a massive migration of the African American population, the Second Great Migration, which was accompanied by a significant increase of the real income of the urban Blacks. The new migrants constituted a new market for the music industry. The name race record disappeared and was succeeded by Rhythm and Blues. This rapidly evolving market was mirrored by the Billboard Rhythm and Blues Chart.
This marketing strategy reinforced trends within urban blues music such as the progressive electrification of the instruments, their amplification and the generalization of the blues beat, the blues shuffle, that became ubiquitous in R&B. This commercial stream had important consequences for blues music which, together with Jazz and Gospel music, became a component of the R&B wave.84 Muddy Waters, described as "the guiding light of the modern blues school"85 John Lee Hooker Otis Rush, a pioneer of the 'West Side Sound' After World War II and in the 50s, new styles of electric blues music became popular in cities such as Chicago,86 Memphis,87 Detroit8889 and St. Louis.90 Electric blues used electric guitars, double bass (slowly replaced by bass guitar), drums, and harmonica played through a microphone and a PA system or a guitar amplifier. Chicago became a center for electric blues from 48 on, when Muddy Waters recorded his first success: "I Can't Be Satisfied."91 Chicago blues is influenced to a large extent by the Mississippi blues style, because many performers had migrated from the Mississippi region. Howlin' Wolf,92 Muddy Waters,93
Willie Dixon,94 and Jimmy Reed95 were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Their style is characterized by the use of electric guitar, sometimes slide guitar, harmonica, and a rhythm section of bass and drums.96 J. T. Brown who played in Elmore James's bands,97 or J. B. Lenoir's98 also used saxophones, but these were used more as "backing" or rhythmic support than as solo instruments. Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) are well known harmonica (called "harp" by blues musicians) players of the early Chicago blues scene. Other harp players such as Big Walter Horton were also influential. Muddy Waters and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters were known for their deep, "gravelly" voices. Bassist and composer Willie Dixon played a major role on the Chicago blues scene. He composed and wrote many standard blues songs of the period, such as "Hoochie Coochie Man," "I Just Want to Make Love to You" (both penned for Muddy Waters) and, "Wang Dang Doodle" and "Back Door Man" for Howlin' Wolf. Most artists of the Chicago blues style recorded for the Chicago-based Chess Records and Checker Records labels. Smaller blues labels of this era included Vee-Jay Records and J.O.B. Records.
During the early 50s, the dominating Chicago labels were challenged by Sam Phillips' Sun Records company in Memphis, which recorded B. B. King and Howlin' Wolf before he moved to Chicago in 60.99 After Phillips discovered Elvis Presley in 54, the Sun label turned to the rapidly expanding white audience and started recording mostly rock 'n' roll.100 In the 50s, blues had a huge influence on mainstream American popular music. While popular musicians like Bo Diddley88 and Chuck Berry,101 both recording for Chess, were influenced by the Chicago blues, their enthusiastic playing styles departed from the melancholy aspects of blues. Chicago blues also influenced Louisiana's zydeco music,102 with Clifton Chenier103 using blues accents. Zydeco musicians used electric solo guitar and cajun arrangements of blues standards. Overseas, in England, electric blues took root there during a much acclaimed Muddy Waters tour. Waters, unsuspecting of his audience's tendency towards skiffle, an acoustic, softer brand of blues, turned up his amp and started to play his Chicago brand of electric blues. Although the audience was largely jolted by the performance, the performance influenced local musicians such as Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies to emulate this louder style, inspiring the British invasion of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.104 In the late 50s, a new blues style emerged on Chicago's West Side pioneered by Magic Sam, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush on Cobra Records.105 The 'West Side Sound' had strong rhythmic support from a rhythm guitar, bass guitar and drums and as perfected by Guy, Freddie King, Magic Slim and Luther Allison was dominated by amplified electric lead guitar.106107
Other blues artists, such as John Lee Hooker had influences not directly related to the Chicago style. John Lee Hooker's blues is more "personal," based on Hooker's deep rough voice accompanied by a single electric guitar. Though not directly influenced by boogie woogie, his "groovy" style is sometimes called "guitar boogie". His first hit, "Boogie Chillen," reached #1 on the R&B charts in 49.108 By the late 50s, the swamp blues genre developed near Baton Rouge, with performers such as Lightnin' Slim,109 Slim Harpo,110 Sam Myers and Jerry McCain around the producer J. D. "Jay" Miller and the Excello label. Strongly influenced by Jimmy Reed, Swamp blues has a slower pace and a simpler use of the harmonica than the Chicago blues style performers such as Little Walter or Muddy Waters. Songs from this genre include "Scratch my Back", "She's Tough" and "I'm a King Bee." Alan Lomax's recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell would eventually bring him wider attention on both the blues and folk circuit, with McDowell's droning style influencing North Mississippi hill country blues musicians.111 60s and 70s By the beginning of the 60s, genres influenced by African American music such as rock and roll and soul were part of mainstream popular music.
White performers had brought African-American music to new audiences, both within the U.S. and abroad. However, the blues wave that brought artists such as Muddy Waters to the foreground had stopped. Bluesmen such as Big Bill Broonzy and Willie Dixon started looking for new markets in Europe. Dick Waterman and the blues festivals he organized in Europe played a major role in propagating blues music abroad. In the UK, bands emulated U.S. blues legends, and UK blues-rock-based bands had an influential role throughout the 60s.1 Blues legend B.B. King with his guitar, "Lucille". Blues performers such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York–born Taj Mahal. John Lee Hooker blended his blues style with rock elements and playing with younger white musicians, creating a musical style that can be heard on the 71 album Endless Boogie. B. B. King's virtuoso guitar technique earned him the eponymous title "king of the blues". In contrast to the Chicago style, King's band used strong brass support from a saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, instead of using slide guitar or harp. Tennessee-born Bobby "Blue" Bland, like B. B. King, also straddled the blues and R&B genres. During this period, Freddie King and Albert King often played with rock and soul musicians (Eric Clapton, Booker T & the MGs) and had a major influence on those styles of music. The music of the Civil Rights1 and Free Speech movements in the U.S. prompted a resurgence of interest in American roots music and early African American music.
As well as Jimmi Bass Music festivals such as the Newport Folk Festival1 brought traditional blues to a new audience, which helped to revive interest in prewar acoustic blues and performers such as Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Reverend Gary Davis.1 Many compilations of classic prewar blues were republished by the Yazoo Records. J. B. Lenoir from the Chicago blues movement in the 50s recorded several LPs using acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied by Willie Dixon on the acoustic bass or drums. His songs, originally distributed in Europe only,1 commented on political issues such as racism or Vietnam War issues, which was unusual for this period. His Alabama Blues recording had a song that stated: I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me (2x) You know they killed my sister and my brother, and the whole world let them peoples go down there free White audiences' interest in the blues during the 60s increased due to the Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the British blues movement.
The style of British blues developed in the UK, when bands such as The Animals, Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, and Cream and Irish musician Rory Gallagher performed classic blues songs from the Delta or Chicago blues traditions.1 The British and blues musicians of the early 60s inspired a number of American blues rock fusion performers, including Canned Heat, the early Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, The J. Geils Band, Ry Cooder, and The Allman Brothers Band. One blues rock performer, Jimi Hendrix, was a rarity in his field at the time: a black man who played psychedelic rock. Hendrix was a skilled guitarist, and a pioneer in the innovative use of distortion and feedback in his music.1 Through these artists and others, blues music influenced the development of rock music.1 Santana, which was originally called the Carlos Santana Blues Band, also experimented with Latin-influenced blues and blues-rock music around this time. At the end of the 50s appeared the very bluesy Tulsa Sound merging rock'n'roll, jazz and country influences.
This particular music style started to be broadly popularized within the 70s by J.J. Cale and the cover versions performed by Eric Clapton of "After Midnight" and "Cocaine". In the early 70s, The Texas rock-blues style emerged, which used guitars in both solo and rhythm roles. In contrast with the West Side blues, the Texas style is strongly influenced by the British rock-blues movement. Major artists of the Texas style are Johnny Winter, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and ZZ Top. These artists all began their musical journey in the 70s, but they did not achieve major international success until the next decade.1 80s to the 00s Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan Since at least the 80s, there has been a resurgence of interest in the blues among a certain part of the African-American population, particularly around Jackson, Mississippi and other deep South regions. Often termed "soul blues" or "Southern soul", the music at the heart of this movement was given new life by the unexpected success of two particular recordings on the Jackson-based Malaco label:0 Z. Z. Hill's Down Home Blues (82) and Little Milton's The Blues is Alright (84). Contemporary African-American performers who work this vein of the blues include Bobby Rush, Denise LaSalle, Sir Charles Jones, Bettye LaVette, Marvin Sease, Peggy Scott-Adams, Mel Waiters, Clarence Carter, Dr. "Feelgood" Potts, O.B. Buchana, Ms. Jody, Shirley Brown, and dozens of others. During the 80s, blues also continued in both traditional and new forms. In 86, the album Strong Persuader revealed Robert Cray as a major blues artist.1 The first Stevie Ray Vaughan recording, Texas Flood, was released in 83, and the Texas-based guitarist exploded onto the international stage. 89 saw a revival of John Lee Hooker's popularity with the album The Healer. Eric Clapton, known for his performances with the Blues Breakers and Cream, made a comeback in the 90s with his album Unplugged, in which he played some standard blues numbers on acoustic guitar.
However, beginning in the 90s, digital multitrack recording and other technological advances and new marketing strategies that include video clip production have increased costs, and challenge the spontaneity and improvisation that are an important component of blues music.2 In the 80s and 90s, blues publications such as Living Blues and Blues Revue began to be distributed, major cities began forming blues societies, outdoor blues festivals became more common, and3 more nightclubs and venues for blues emerged.4 In the 90s, largely ignored hill country blues gained minor recognition in both blues and alternative rock music circles with North Mississippi artists R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough.111 Blues performers explored a range of musical genres, as can be seen, for example, from the broad array of nominees of the yearly Blues Music Awards, previously named W. C. Handy Awards5 or of the Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary and Traditional Blues Album.
The Bilboard Blues Album chart monitors and therefore provides an overview over the current blues production. Contemporary blues music is nurtured by several blues labels such as: Alligator Records, Ruf Records, Severn Records, Chess Records (MCA), Delmark Records, NorthernBlues Music, Fat Possum Records and Vanguard Records (Artemis Records). Some labels are famous for their rediscovering and remastering of blues rarities such as Arhoolie Records, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (heir of Folkways Records) and Yazoo Records (Shanachie Records).6 Musical impact Blues musical styles, forms (-bar blues), melodies, and the blues scale have influenced many other genres of music, such as rock and roll, jazz, and popular music.7 Prominent jazz, folk or rock performers, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Bob Dylan have performed significant blues recordings. The blues scale is often used in popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night", blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You" and "Please Send Me Someone to Love", and even in orchestral works such as George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Concerto in F". Gershwin's second "Prelude" for solo piano is an interesting example of a classical blues, maintaining the form with academic strictness.
The blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds used in rock music (for example, in "A Hard Day's Night"). Blues forms are used in the theme to the televised Batman, teen idol Fabian Forte's hit, "Turn Me Loose", country music star Jimmie Rodgers' music, and guitarist/vocalist Tracy Chapman's hit "Give Me One Reason". Early country bluesmen such as Skip James, Charley Patton, Georgia Tom Dorsey played country and urban blues and had influences from spiritual singing. Dorsey helped to popularize Gospel music.8 Gospel music developed in the 30s, with the Golden Gate Quartet. In the 50s, soul music by Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and James Brown used gospel and blues music elements. In the 60s and 70s, gospel and blues were these merged in soul blues music. Funk music of the 70s was influenced by soul; funk can be seen as an antecedent of hip-hop and contemporary R&B. R&B music can be traced back to spirituals and blues.
Musically, spirituals were a descendant of New England choral traditions, and in particular of Isaac Watts's hymns, mixed with African rhythms and call-and-response forms. Spirituals or religious chants in the African-American community are much better documented than the "low-down" blues. Spiritual singing developed because African-American communities could gather for mass or worship gatherings, which were called camp meetings. Edward P. Comentale has noted how the blues was often used as a medium for art or self-expression, stating: "As heard from Delta shacks to Chicago tenements to Harlem cabarets, the blues proved—despite its pained origins—a remarkably flexible medium and a new arena for the shaping of identity and community."9 Duke Ellington straddled the big band and bebop genres. Ellington extensively used the blues form.0 Before World War II, the boundaries between blues and jazz were less clear. Usually jazz had harmonic structures stemming from brass bands, whereas blues had blues forms such as the -bar blues. However, the jump blues of the 40s mixed both styles. After WWII, blues had a substantial influence on jazz. Bebop classics, such as Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time", used the blues form with the pentatonic scale and blue notes. Bebop marked a major shift in the role of jazz, from a popular style of music for dancing, to a "high-art," less-accessible, cerebral "musician's music".
The audience for both blues and jazz split, and the border between blues and jazz became more defined.01 The blues' -bar structure and the blues scale was a major influence on rock and roll music. Rock and roll has been called "blues with a backbeat"; Carl Perkins called rockabilly "blues with a country beat". Rockabillies were also said to be -bar blues played with a bluegrass beat. "Hound Dog", with its unmodified -bar structure (in both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant), is a blues song transformed into a rock and roll song. Jerry Lee Lewis's style of rock and roll was heavily influenced by the blues and its derivative boogie woogie. His style of music was not exactly rockabilly but it has been often called real rock and roll (this is a label he shares with several African American rock and roll performers). Many early rock and roll songs are based on blues:
"That's All Right Mama," "Johnny B. Goode," "Blue Suede Shoes," "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On," "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," and "Long Tall Sally." The early African American rock musicians retained the sexual themes and innuendos of blues music: "Got a gal named Sue, knows just what to do" ("Tutti Frutti," Little Richard) or "See the girl with the red dress on, She can do the Birdland all night long" ("What'd I Say," Ray Charles). The -bar blues structure can be found even in novelty pop songs, such as Bob Dylan's "Obviously Five Believers" and Esther and Abi Ofarim's "Cinderella Rockefella." Early country music was infused with the blues.4 Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe and Hank Williams have all described themselves as blues singers and their music has a blues feel that is different to the country pop of Eddy Arnold.
A lot of the 70s-era "outlaw" country music by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings also borrowed from the blues. When Jerry Lee Lewis returned to country after the decline of 50s style rock and roll, he sang his country with a blues feel and often included blues standards on his albums. In popular culture The music of Taj Mahal for the 72 movie Sounder marked a revival of interest in acoustic blues. Like jazz, rock and roll, heavy metal music, hip hop music, reggae, country music, and pop music, blues has been accused of being the "devil's music" and of inciting violence and other poor behavior.5 In the early th century, the blues was considered disreputable, especially as white audiences began listening to the blues during the s.67 In the early twentieth century, W.C. Handy was the first to popularize blues-influenced music among non-black Americans. During the blues revival of the 60s and '70s, acoustic blues artist Taj Mahal and legendary Texas bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins wrote and performed music that figured prominently in the popularly and critically acclaimed film Sounder (72).
The film earned Mahal a Grammy nomination for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture and a BAFTA nomination.6 Almost 30 years later, Mahal wrote blues for, and performed a banjo composition, claw-hammer style, in the 01 movie release Songcatcher, which focused on the story of the preservation of the roots music of Appalachia. Perhaps the most visible example of the blues style of music in the late th century came in 80, when Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi released the film The Blues Brothers. The film drew many of the biggest living influencers of the Rhythm and blues genre together, such as Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, and John Lee Hooker. The band formed also began a successful tour under the Blues Brothers marquee. 98 brought a sequel, Blues Brothers 00 that, while not holding as great a critical and financial success, featured a much larger number of blues artists, such as B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Charlie Musselwhite, Blues Traveler, Jimmie Vaughan, Jeff Baxter. In 03, Martin Scorsese made significant efforts to promote the blues to a larger audience. He asked several famous directors such as Clint Eastwood and Wim Wenders to participate in a series of documentary films for PBS called The Blues.7 He also participated in the rendition of compilations of major blues artists in a series of high-quality CDs. Blues guitarist and vocalist Keb' Mo' performed his blues rendition of "America, the Beautiful" in 06 to close out the final season of the television series The West Wing. See also: List of films based on blues music
The Blues Guitar's Influence On Popular Music By Ricky Sharples Expert Author Ricky Sharples Anybody interested in modern music sooner or later asks the question, "Where did it begin?" Well, if you leave blues music out, you will not have much of an answer. So let us look at where the blues came from, where it went and who it met on the way. We will also take a look at the "blues sound" and how it has its unique effect on our feelings. The blues as a musical phenomenon began around 11 when W.C. Handy published popular songs, notably "Memphis Blues" and "St Louis Blues", which affected the hearts and souls of the black people. By the nineteen twenties the general population were beginning to hear this new music through its influence on jazz. Early blues singers like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday sang with jazz bands while others played with "jug bands" accompanied by fiddle, kazoo and washboard. Of course to people like W. C. Handy who were brought up singing in church, the piano was the natural instrumental accompaniment to their songs. But the guitar is portable and always was popular so it had to have a place in blues and jazz.
Blues guitar players like twelve string guitarist Leadbelly and future electric guitar player B.B. King were making sure the guitar would be an integral part of the blues. Other blues guitarists made their living in smoky saloons playing slide guitar using a bottle neck or the blade of a knife to fret the notes. After the Second World War young artists like Elvis Presley and Bill Haley were wrapping the blues in a new package called "rock'n'roll" and the players of the electric blues guitar like B.B. King were heralding the arrival of the lead guitar, soon to be a great attraction for both musicians and audiences. Throughout the evolution of the blues the guitar had always taken its turn for solos in jazz bands but now it competed with the singer for the attention of the audience. Blues guitar can be played in any key that takes your fancy and comes in three basic forms: eight bars, for example "Heartbreak Hotel", sixteen bars like "Saint James Infirmary" and twelve bars like "St. Louis Blues".
For some reason the twelve bar blues form is way more singer-friendly and popular with audiences than the other two, and it is the basis of many great songs outside the blues idiom. If you go poking around the internet you will find that the blues scales are just your garden variety major and minor scales except that the third, fifth and seventh notes are played flat. However, you may be astonished to learn that blues players managed for centuries without knowing about European musical theory. They learnt to sing and play from their families and friends just as many of the young white blues players of the nineteen sixties learnt from imitating the artists they heard on records. And this is where the blues takes another direction. After years of imitating their idols something odd happened to the white blues guitar players in Britain and the USA. They developed their own authentic, original styles.
The older blues players even began using the new arrangements of classic songs and adopting some of the unbluesy musical innovations introduced by young white guitarists like Eric Clapton. So the beat goes on. A foreign culture influences American popular music and in turn gets fresh input from a new generation of guitar players from all over the world. Ricky Sharples has been playing guitar his whole life, and is presently engaged in building a blog called Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free. Ricky's blog features free tools, lessons and resources for guitarists of all ages and stages. Ricky updates the blog regularly so if you are interested in learning to play guitar there will be an enormous variety of tip, tools and tutorials for you. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ricky_Sharples
Blind Lemon Jefferson King of the Country Blues By Bruce B Lamb Blues music has made itself popular over the years and great credit goes to all the blues artists who have come up so well and established this genre of music, and it made it renowned among people. There are many artists who are responsible for putting this form of music on the map and for making more than half the world fall in love with it. Blues music is very soft and hits the soul instantly. One can even dance and sway to it with a great amount of enthusiasm. Some of the best known blues artists have all taken their inspiration from the country side and from the melodious tunes that they can gather from there.
People like Blind Lemon Jefferson are now known all over and their music is still played and listened to in many pubs and bars all around the world where blues music still prevails. Blind Lemon Jefferson was popular in the early nineties and that was the time when blues music also began to put itself in view of other listeners of music. He recorded a number of albums, some of which are great hits even today. His music has always provided inspiration to many young and old people alike. Most of the youth that is into blues music would have heard of him because of the wonderful tunes that he created in his time. They still take inspiration from him and it is great to be able to hear his music and look at his videos even today because those itself are a great source of inspiration and many people are able to make their own compositions by just taking a tiny bit of help from his works.
If you are someone who is greatly into blues music and would love to learn to play the blues guitar, then the time is now, because if you do not learn it now, you will be putting it off for later which will cease to come and blues music is something that has to be learnt when your heart and soul is completely in it. If you want to learn how to play like the great Blind Lemon Jefferson blues guitar itself, then you must practice and take a good look and hearing to his music on the daily. If you are wondering that learning how to play the blues guitar is tough, then you must think twice.
These days everything has become so easy with the advent of the internet and you will find blues guitar lessons and tutorials on the internet itself, free of cost. Thus, what are you waiting for? You should instantly just pick up that guitar and get into the groove. Bruce Lamb is the founder of The Guitar WorkShop, and inventor of the Guitar Flight Case the Clam. Visit http://TheGuitarWorkshop.com for awesome learn to play blues guitar lessons. Also check out the crazy videos http://www.Casextreme.com if your ever thinking about taking your guitar on an airline. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bruce_B_Lamb
Simple Tips to Learn to Play Blues Piano By Lauren Paltrow While many may think that learning to play the piano is a task that should be undertaken only by those with the music playing skill, learning to play the piano is actually much simpler than you may realize. Since everyone has their own style of music that is their favorite, whether rock, pop, jazz, alternative, or rhythm and blues. What you may not realize is that any one of these styles can be played on the piano with the right training. Regardless of your goal, one of the best ways to achieve that goal is to learn to play blues piano. What exactly is a blues piano, you may ask? It is actually a music style and once you learn to play blues piano, you will have less problems learning how to play other styles when the time comes. Here are some simple tips that can help you learn to play blues piano so you can obtain the skills needed to play the tunes you have always dreamed of playing. First, you need to learn -bar blues. In order to be successful with learning how to play blues piano, you will need to become proficient with -bar blues.
To play this form the most common approach most pianists make is to utilize seven chords. Since songs are usually broken into three sets, and each set consists of four bars, you will want to start playing the song on key C. As an example we will utilize I to illustrate C, IV for F and V for G. Your initial set should be played as I-I-I-I and the next will be played as IV-IV-I-I with the final set being played as V-IV-I-I. You will want to use your right hand when playing these sets on the piano. In order to create the sound just like a blues piano you will need to try and master playing the 7th chords. Second, in order to successfully learn how to play blues, you will need to learn how to play blues music. Since many successful pianists started out playing the blues before moving on to the music they love, it can be perceived as a common stepping stone for any piano player. This skill can be used as a solid stepping stone that can make learning other skills that much easier when you finally reach that point.
Lastly, look for a good teacher who can teach you how to play blues piano. Whether you utilize private lessons, DVD, CD or even online courses, lessons are a must when it comes to successfully mastering the blues piano. Regardless of the method you choose, your drive to succeed will help you choose the right method to help you successfully learn how to play blues piano. These are just a few of the tips that can help you successfully learn how to play blues piano. Take the time to master the bar blues, and enlist the help of a skilled piano player to help you master blues music, and you will be on your way to gaining the skills you need to play the style of music you have always dreamed of playing. Lauren Paltrow of LearnPiano-Reviews.com, specializes in helping aspiring pianists get the info that they need to make the right choices. Lauren leads her team of piano experts in constantly reviewing new courses and products in the market to make sure you get the best value products that work for you. Check out actual user reviews of the best piano courses and products at LearnPiano-Reviews.com.
The Early History Of Blues Music By Jeff Horn Blues music history can be traced all the way back to the nineteenth century. By far, the earliest genre of traditional blues music, comes directly from a musical technique termed the "country blues", dating back to around the 's. Obtaining the facts surrounding the oldest origins of blues music is something a good number of historians have focused a lot of energy and money trying to uncover (some going as far as visiting locations within west Africa in order to discover whether or not this unique music genre was created because of an influence from conventional African music). While there does actually appear to be some parallels, blues music carries a distinct and unique sound which began with the African American community inside the southern part of the U.S. The very meaning of "blues" inside the dictionary implies "1. depression 2. melancholy kind of jazz". Musicians are accustomed to associating the blues with the typical and famous bar blues.
This particular type of chord progression utilizes three chords which may be played inside any key. Together with the profound vocals which most often goes along with the chords, blues music expresses and also invokes a different feeling of emotions generally in most of its listeners and supporters. A number of well-known, early blues musicians who helped form the blues music we all know today. Some of these artists were Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Huddie Ledbetter, Willie Brown, Son House and Tommy Johnson. Many of these blues artists were born within the Mississippi delta, with the exception of a few like Blind Lemon Jefferson (who was from Texas) and Huddie Ledbetter (who was from Louisiana). The two beginning methods associated with blues music were:
1. classic blues (composed of mainly female performers) 2. the country blues (composed of generally guy performers). Every type of blues offered distinct variations in form and tone. Classic blues singers had a relatively stringent adherence on the bar blues as the country blues performers strayed just a little out of the conventional bar blues form. Furthermore, classic blues singers desired to get a band to compliment with them while a country blues performer would usually want to include only his guitar as well as voice to produce music. Blues music actually started to take off during the early times of the 's, once one particular organization took their music revenue to a whole different degree. A lady singer named Mamie Smith, part of the classic blues form, served to start the blues by selling more than 1 million copies of her music within just twelve months.
Figuring that each of the records were less than $ 1 (low-priced by today standard nevertheless in those days it absolutely was quite a lot for this type of music) that could have added up to a whole lot of money for a new to the scene industry. Blues music is a special aspect of our history that is uniquely American. Not many styles of music fire up deep emotion and move us the way that the blues does. Around the world, the best jazz and blues fests http://www.jazzandbluesfestivals.com are transpiring annually. For anyone who is thinking about tracking down more schedules or more knowledge about universal jazz and blues festivals http://www.jazzandbluesfestivals.com, there are a lot of different resources out there to assist in your festival planning.
Beginning Blues Guitar - The History of Blues Music In America and Why It Is Important By Ryan Gilliam Expert Author Ryan Gilliam The blues music became popular in America during the early 00's. Guitar, piano and harmonica were the basic blues instruments. Blues style had started with mainly the instrumental type of music but later singing also played a key role in most blues songs. This music was mainly originated by the African-American community in the southern United States. The origin of the style is also closely related to the religious music of the African-American community. The original blues songs were played by slaves and poorer white people mainly conveying sorrow and defiance.
Later the style developed into various forms such as country and played a great role in development of rock and roll. This style of music got the name "Blues" in . The name "The Blues" which meant sadness came from the one-act farce "Blue Devil" by George Coleman. The "Dallas Blues" was the song given by Hart Wand which was attested and became the first copyrighted blues composition. The style blues can be further subdivided ranging from country to urban blues. Delta, Piedmont, Jump and Chicago Blues styles are the most popular forms of the blues music form. The style transformed from acoustics to electric blues and by 70 a new form called Blues-Rock came in. By 00 the music moved from group performances to more of individualized styles. A few characteristics remained common in all forms of blues music.
However things like call-and-response shouts were present long before the creation of modern blues. From a vocal music of slaves, the blues developed to a wide variety of styles in United States. However, no specific African-American music can be identified as the single ancestor of the blues. The recorded music of blues can be found from as back as 's. The history and music of blues remains to be very important for America. The songs and guitar playing styles given by the Blues were adapted by different other music. The Blues singing and guitar methods became the heart of American musical culture.
The guitar techniques and vocal phrasings are still being followed in most of the styles of American modern music. All the American music is rooted in the Blues. The Blues songs have become very important to of American music. Many new guitar players start by listening to the blues and by listening to famous artist like B.B. King, Bo Dudley, Eric Clapton, Howlin' Wolf, and Robert Johnson. All these are the legends of the blues and their music wins the hearts of many Americans still today. A history of Blues illustrates the important points about American popular culture. Even the music is playing an important part in education and schools systems in the United States.
Remember that Blues evolved into many other forms of music and shaped the American music to what it is today. Want to become a legendary blues guitarist? Becoming a great blues guitar player is not an easy ordeal. It takes time and patience! When beginning blues guitar there are many methods to help you learn. Learn the tricks and techniques used by the classic bluesmen. If you'd like to play like the old masters read on at http://TheBeginningBluesGuitar.com. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ryan_Gilliam
T-Bone Walker - Master Guitar Playing Blues Man By Bruce B Lamb Blues music has been famous for a long time and there are many renowned artists in the music industry who are responsible for making it this way. There are many young and old people across the world today who are so influenced by this kind of music that it is the only source of their inspiration. There have been many artists on the rise who have tried to become great blues musicians however, no one can really beat the power of the blues musicians from the 90s era. They were some of the best and are so regarded even today. Many of them were even awarded well and have been inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Their music still sells worldwide and their concerts are something people would still give so much to attend. These people have really carved a niche for themselves and created a very powerful kind of genre for the world of music. Blues is very soulful music and it is something that touches the heart. Over the years, there have been a number of variations of this kind of music as it has slowly descended from the nineties into the two thousand era. But even then, till about fifty years ago, there was a man by the name of T-Bone Walker who is solely responsible for making some of the best blues music that people have ever heard and even today in many bars, pubs and cafes, his music is widely played and acknowledged. It is also a source of inspiration for many young people all around the world because his unique style of playing blues music incorporates the use of the electric guitar as well and is not all soft and harmonious.
If you want to learn to play the blues guitar then you must learn to take inspiration from people like him. He has been known for his music, and if anything, you will definitely learn the art of making music and new compositions by listening to his stuff. He himself has taken a great amount of his inspiration from people like Jimi Hendrix and BB King and if you go along his footsteps then the music you make yourself will be bound to have a lot of variation of fresh tunes and grooves. You can easily learn how to play guitar by taking up beginner guitar lessons either on the internet or by joining some guitar tutorials in your area.
This way you will also meet a number of people interested in the same kind of music and it will be easier for you to jam with others and come up with new compositions and lyrics all the time. Bruce Lamb is the founder of The Guitar WorkShop, and inventor of the Guitar Flight Case the Clam. Visit http://TheGuitarWorkshop.com for awesome learn to play guitar lessons. Also check out the crazy videos http://www.Casextreme.com if your ever thinking about taking your guitar on an airline. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bruce_B_Lamb Did you find this article helpful?
John Mayall From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search John Mayall John Mayall 1.jpg Mayall performing in 04 Background information Born 29 November 33 (age 80) Macclesfield, England Genres Blues rock, harmonica blues, British blues, electric blues Occupations Musician, songwriter, producer Instruments Vocals, guitar, harmonica, keyboards, piano, synthesizers, organ,drums Years active 56–present Labels Decca, DJM, ABC, Eagle, Snapper, One-Way Records, Polydor, Silvertone, GNP Crescendo Associated acts John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, Canned Heat, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Keef Hartley Band, Mark-Almond, Pure Food and Drug Act Website johnmayall.com
Notable instruments Fender Telecaster Fender Stratocaster John Mayall, OBE (born 29 November 33) is an English blues singer, guitarist, organist and songwriter, whose musical career spans over fifty years. In the 60s, he was the founder of John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, a band which has included some of the most famous blues and blues rock musicians. They include Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jack Bruce, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Mick Taylor, Don "Sugarcane" Harris, Harvey Mandel, Larry Taylor, Aynsley Dunbar, Hughie Flint, Jon Hiseman, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Andy Fraser, Johnny Almond, Walter Trout, Coco Montoya and Buddy Whittington.
Born in Macclesfield, Cheshire in 33,1 Mayall's father was Murray Mayall, a guitarist and jazz music enthusiast. From an early age, John was drawn to the sounds of American blues players such as Lead Belly, Albert Ammons, Pinetop Smith, and Eddie Lang, and taught himself to play the piano, guitars, and harmonica.2 Mayall spent three years in Korea for national service and, during a period of leave, he bought his first electric guitar.
Back in Manchester, he enrolled at Manchester College of Art (now part of Manchester Metropolitan University) and started playing with semi-professional bands. After graduation, he obtained a job as an art designer but continued to play with local musicians. In 63, he opted for a full-time musical career and moved to London. His previous craft would be put to good use in the designing of covers for many of his coming albums. Since the end of the 60s Mayall has lived in the US. A brush fire destroyed his house in Laurel Canyon in 79, seriously damaging his musical collections and archives.
Mayall has been married twice, and has six grandchildren. His second wife, Maggie Mayall is an American blues performer, and since the early 80s took part in the management of her husband's career. The pair divorced in 11. In 05 Mayall was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Honours List. Early years In 56, with college fellow Peter Ward, Mayall had founded the Powerhouse Four which consisted of both men and other local musicians with whom they played at local dances. In 62 Mayall became a member of the Blues Syndicate. The band was formed by trumpeter John Rowlands and alto saxophonist Jack Massarik, who had seen the Alexis Korner band at a Manchester club and wanted to try a similar blend of jazz and blues. It also included rhythm guitarist Ray Cummings and drummer Hughie Flint, whom Mayall already knew.
In 62 John and his band were a frequent and a popular artists at all night R&B sessions at the 'Twisted Wheel' cellar club in central Manchester. Alexis Korner persuaded Mayall to opt for a full-time musical career and move to London, where Korner introduced him to many other musicians and helped them to find gigs. In late 63, with his band which was now called the Bluesbreakers, Mayall started playing at the Marquee Club. The lineup was Mayall, Ward, John McVie on bass and guitarist Bernie Watson, formerly of Cyril Davies and the R&B All-Stars. The next spring Mayall, obtained his first recording date with producer Ian Samwell. The band, with Martin Hart at the drums, recorded two tracks : "Crawling Up a Hill" as well as "Mr. James."3 Shortly after, Hughie Flint replaced Hart, and Roger Dean took the guitar from Bernie Watson. This lineup backed John Lee Hooker on his British tour in 64. Mayall was offered a recording contract by Decca and, on 7 December 64, a live performance of the band was recorded at the Klooks Kleek. A single, "Crocodile Walk", was recorded later in studio and released along with the album, but both failed to achieve any success and the contract was terminated.
In April 65 former Yardbirds guitarist Eric Clapton replaced Roger Dean and John Mayall's career entered a decisive phase.4 Mid-60s through 71 Mayall in 70 Eric Clapton as guitarist, 65-66 In 65, with Eric Clapton as their new guitar player, the Bluesbreakers began attracting considerable attention. That summer the band cut a couple tracks for a single, "I'm Your Witchdoctor" b/w "Telephone Blues" (released in October).5 In August, however, Clapton left for a jaunt to Greece with a bunch of relative musical amateurs calling themselves the 'Glands'. John Weider, John Slaughter, and Geoff Krivit attempted to fill in as Bluesbreaker guitarist, but finally, Peter Green took charge. John McVie was dismissed, and during the next few months, Jack Bruce, from the Graham Bond Organisation, played bass. In November 65 Clapton returned, and Green departed as Mayall guaranteed Clapton his spot back in the Bluesbreakers whenever he tired of the Glands.6 McVie was allowed back, and Bruce left but not before a live date by the Mayall-Clapton-Bruce-Flint line-up was recorded on Mayall's two-track tape recorder at London’s Flamingo Club in November.
The rough recording provided tracks that later appeared on the 69 compilation Looking Back and the 77 Primal Solos.78 The same line-up also entered the studio to record a planned single, "On Top of the World", which was not released at that time.9 Mayall and Clapton cut a couple tracks without the others (although some sources give this as occurring back in the summer): "Lonely Years" b/w "Bernard Jenkins" was released as a single the next August on producer Mike Vernon's Purdah Records label (both tracks appeared again two decades later in Clapton's Crossroads box set). In a November 65 session, blues pianist-singer Champion Jack Dupree (originally from New Orleans but in the 60s living in Europe) got Mayall and Clapton to play on a few tracks.10 In April 66 the Bluesbreakers returned to Decca Studios to record a second LP with producer Vernon.
The sessions, with horn arrangements for some tracks (John Almond on baritone sax, Alan Skidmore on tenor sax, and Dennis Healey on trumpet), lasted just three days. Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton was released in the UK on July 66. Several of the tracks were covers of pure Chicago blues (side 1 kicking off strong with Otis Rush's "All Your Love" and Freddy King's hit instrumental "Hide Away" here spelled without a space as “Hideaway”); Mayall wrote or arranged 5 (such as "Double Crossing Time", a slow blues with a scorching solo by cowriter Clapton); and Eric debuted as lead vocalist, and began his practice of paying tribute to Robert Johnson, with "Ramblin' on My Mind".
The album was Mayall's commercial breakthrough, rising to #6 on the British chart, and has since gained classic status, largely for the audacious aggressiveness and molten fluidity of Clapton's guitar playing. “It’s Eric Clapton who steals the limelight,” reports music mag Beat Instrumental, adding with unintended understatement, “and no doubt several copies of the album will be sold on the strength of his name.”11 In the meantime, on 11 June the formation of Cream—Clapton, bassist Jack Bruce, and drummer Ginger Baker—had been revealed in the music press, much to the embarrassment of Clapton, who had not said anything about this to Mayall.
(After a May Bluesbreakers gig at which Baker had sat in, he and Clapton had first discussed forming their own band, and surreptitious rehearsal jams with Bruce soon commenced.) Eric's last scheduled gig with the Bluesbreakers was July in Bexley, south-east of London; Cream made a warmup club debut 29 July in Manchester and its "official" live debut two days later at the Sixth National Jazz and Blues Festival, Windsor. Peter Green as guitarist, Mayall had to replace Clapton, and he succeeded in persuading Peter Green to come back. During the following year, with Green on guitar and various other sidemen, some 40 tracks were recorded. The album A Hard Road was released in February 67.
Today its expanded versions include most of this material, and the album itself also stands as a classic. But Peter Green gave notice and soon started his own project, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, which eventually was to include all three of Mayall's Bluesbreakers at this time: Green, McVie, and drummer Mick Fleetwood. Mick Taylor as guitarist, Mayall's first choice to replace Green was -year-old David O'List, guitarist from the Attack. O'List declined, however, and went on to form the Nice with organist Keith Emerson. Through both a "musicians wanted" ad in Melody Maker on 10 June and his own search, Mayall found three other potential guitarists for his Bluesbreakers, a black musician named Terry Edmonds, John Moorshead, and -year-old Mick Taylor. The latter made the band quickly, but Mayall, curiously, also decided to hire Edmonds as a rhythm guitarist for a few days.
In the meantime, on a single day in May 67, Mayall had assembled a studio album to showcase his own abilities. Former Artwoods drummer Keef Hartley appeared on only half of the tracks, and everything else was played by Mayall. The album was released in November titled The Blues Alone. A six-piece lineup—consisting of Mayall, Mick Taylor as lead guitarist, John McVie still on bass, Hughie Flint or Hartley on drums, and Rip Kant and Chris Mercer on saxophones—recorded the album Crusade on 11 and July 67. These Bluesbreakers spent most of the year touring abroad, and Mayall taped the shows on a portable recorder. At the end of the tour, he had over sixty hours of tapes, which he edited into an album in two volumes: Diary of a Band, Vols. 1 & 2, released in February 68.
Meanwhile, a few lineup changes had occurred: McVie had departed and was replaced by Paul Williams, who himself soon quit to join Alan Price and was replaced by Keith Tillman; Dick Heckstall-Smith had taken the sax spot. Following a U.S. tour, there were more lineup changes, starting with the troublesome bass position. First Mayall replaced bassist Tillman with -year-old Andy Fraser. Within six weeks, though, Fraser left to join Free and was replaced by Tony Reeves, previously a member of the New Jazz Orchestra. Hartley was required to leave, and he was replaced by New Jazz Orchestra drummer Jon Hiseman (who had also played with the Graham Bond Organisation). Henry Lowther, who played violin and cornet, joined in February 68. Two months later the Bluesbreakers recorded Bare Wires, co-produced by Mayall and Mike Vernon, which came up to #6. Hiseman, Reeves, and Heckstall-Smith then moved on to form Colosseum.
The Mayall lineup retained Mick Taylor and added drummer Colin Allen (formerly of Zoot Money's Big Roll Band / Dantalian's Chariot, and Georgie Fame) and a young bassist named Stephen Thompson. In August 68 the new quartet recorded Blues from Laurel Canyon. On June 69, after nearly two years with Mayall, Taylor left and officially joined the Rolling Stones. Mark-Almond period, 69-70 Chas Crane filled in briefly on guitar. Drummer Allen departed to join Stone the Crows. This left as the only holdover bassist Thompson who would also eventually join Stone the Crows. Mayall tried a new format with lower volume, acoustic instruments, and no drummer.
He recruited acoustic fingerstyle guitarist Jon Mark and flautist-saxophonist John Almond. Mark was best known as Marianne Faithfull's accompanist for three years and for having been a member of the band Sweet Thursday (which included pianist Nicky Hopkins and future Cat Stevens collaborator Alun Davies, also a guitarist). Almond had played with Zoot Money and Alan Price and was no stranger to Mayall's music—he had played baritone sax on 4 cuts of Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton and some of A Hard Road. This new band was markedly different from previous Mayall projects, and its making is well documented both on the double CD The Masters and on the DVD The Godfather of British Blues: The Turning Point. Along with the big change in sound, Mayall decided on a big change in scenery: a move to Los Angeles.
The new band made its U.S. debut at the Newport Jazz Festival on 5 July, whilst the July performance at the Fillmore East provided the tracks for the live album The Turning Point. A studio album, Empty Rooms, was recorded with the same personnel, with Mayall's next bassist, former Canned Heat member Larry Taylor, playing bass in a duet with Thompson on "To a Princess." Harvey Mandel as guitarist, Mayall continued the experiment of formations without drummers on two more albums, although he took on a new electric blues-rock-R&B band in guitarist Harvey Mandel and bassist Larry Taylor, both plucked from Canned Heat, and wailing violinist Don "Sugarcane" Harris, lately of the Johnny Otis Show.
On USA Union (recorded in Los Angeles, 27–28 July 70), though, Mandel was compelled to make do without his remarkable sustain and usage of feedback as musical, even melodic, technique; and on Memories the band was stripped down to a trio. In November 70 Mayall launched a recording project involving many of the most notable musicians with whom he had played during the previous several years. The double album Back to the Roots features Clapton, Mick Taylor, and Mandel on guitar; Sugarcane Harris on violin; Almond on woodwinds; Thompson and Larry Taylor on bass; and Hartley on drums. Ventures guitarist Gerry McGee came along with Larry Taylor to the L.A. sessions and appears on a couple tracks; Paul Lagos was with Sugarcane and ended up drumming on five. Mayall wrote all the songs and sang all the vocals, as usual by now, plus played harmonica, guitar, keyboards, drums, and percussion.
The London sessions took place in January 71 and as such represent some of Clapton's last work before Derek and the Dominos' attempted Layla follow-up sessions and band disintegration that spring. Back to the Roots did not promote new names, and USA Union and Memories had been recorded with American musicians. Mayall had exhausted his catalytic role on the British blues-rock scene and was living in L.A. Yet, the list of musicians who benefited from association with him, starting with ruling the London blues scene, remains impressive. 70s-90s Mayall reunited for a brief tour in the early 80s By the start of the 70s Mayall had relocated in the USA where he spent most of the next years, recording with local musicians for various labels. In August 71, Mayall produced a jazz-oriented session for bluesman Albert King and a few months later took on tour the musicians present in the studio. A live album Jazz Blues Fusion was released in the following year, with Mayall on harmonica, guitar and piano, Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Clifford Solomon and Ernie Watts on saxophones, Larry Taylor on bass, Ron Selico on drums and Freddy Robinson on guitar. A few personnel changes are noted at the release of a similar album in 73, the live Moving On.
During the next decade Mayall continued shifting musicians and switching labels and released a score of albums. Tom Wilson, Don Nix and Allen Toussaint occasionally served as producers. At this stage of his career most of Mayall's music was rather different from electric blues played by rock musicians, incorporating jazz, funk or pop elements and adding even female vocals. A notable exception is The Last Of the British Blues, a live album excused apparently by its title for the brief return to this type of music. The return of the Bluesbreakers Mick Taylor during his return to the Bluesbreakers on tour in Cleveland, Ohio in the early 80s In 82 Mayall was reunited with Mick Taylor, John McVie and Colin Allen, three musicians of his sixties lineups, for a two-year world tour from which a live album would emerge a decade later. In 84 Mayall restored the name Bluesbreakers for a lineup comprising the two lead guitars of Walter Trout and Coco Montoya, bassist Bobby Haynes and drummer Joe Yuele. The mythic name did perhaps something to enhance the interest in a band which by all standards was already remarkable. A successful world tour and live recordings achieved the rest. In the early 90s most of the excitement was already spent and Buddy Whittington became the sole lead guitarist in a formation which included then organist Tom Canning.
On the occasion of the 40th year of his career Mayall received carte blanche to invite fellow musicians for the recording of a celebratory album. Along for the Ride appeared in 01, credited to John Mayall and Friends with twenty names listed on the cover, including some Bluesbreakers, old and new, and also Gary Moore, Jonny Lang, Steve Cropper, Steve Miller, Otis Rush, Billy Gibbons, Chris Rea, Jeff Healey, Shannon Curfman and a few others. Mayall's "Pistoia Blues", Pistoia, Italy To celebrate his 70th birthday Mayall reunited with special guests Eric Clapton, Mick Taylor and Chris Barber during a fundraiser show. This "Unite for Unicef" concert took place on July 03 at the Kings Dock Arena in Liverpool and was captured on film for a DVD release. In 05, Mayall was awarded an OBE in the Honours List. "It's the only major award I've ever received. I've never had a hit record or a Grammy or been in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame." commented Mayall. In November 08, Mayall announced on his website he was disbanding the Bluesbreakers, to cut back on his heavy workload and give himself freedom to work with other musicians. Three months later a solo world tour was announced, with: Rocky Athas on guitar, Greg Rzab on bass, and Jay Davenport on drums. Tom Canning, on organ, joined the band for the tour which started in March 09. An album was released in September 09. Since then, Mayall has continued to tour with the same backing band, minus Canning, who left due to other priorities.
