IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE TUNE, DON’T PLAY. I don’t care if “all you’re doing” is “just” playing accompaniment. IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE TUNE, DON’T PLAY.
Hey! You there with the acoustic bass guitar hiding on the outskirts of the session where you think we can’t hear you. IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE TUNE, DON’T PLAY.
You, boomchucking a I-IV-V progression in A to accompany a tune in D mixolydian. YOU CLEARLY DON’T KNOW THE TUNE. DON’T PLAY.
If you do know the tune, but your rhythm is so shaky that you couldn’t carry a steady beat if it were stapled to your forehead, DON’T PLAY. If we’re playing a jig and you don’t know how to play in 6/8, DON’T PLAY. If we’re playing a slip jig and you don’t know how to play in 9/8, DON’T PLAY. If we’re playing one of those twisty screwball Larry Redigan tunes and you don’t know where the downbeat is, DON’T PLAY.
If you’re new to a session and one of the regulars is playing accompaniment, DON’T PLAY WHILE HE OR SHE IS PLAYING, at least not without introducing yourself and asking if it’s ok. This is especially true if the person in question is a tall guy with tattoos and a shaved head, because it’s me.
But especially, IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE TUNE, DON’T PLAY.
And lastly, IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE TUNE, DON’T PLAY.
Always happens when I’m singing and playing guitar…on my own. Sometimes it will be a new song that I’ve just written, so no one except me is going to know the tune anyway! Someone “helpful” will always “try” to join in. I end up listening to their mistakes, and not to what I’m playing! Very off putting! A friend was playing whistle at a folk club nearby (a slow aire, unaccompanied), and someone started singing along really loudly. He just stopped, told them to shut up because it sounded ****** awful, then carried on playing. It worked (and is still working!)
Well, that is, if you’re lucky. Sometimes the “accompaniest” who wanders into a session is little more than a beginning guitarist with a few chords under his belt, or a bodhrán “player” who doesn’t know a tipper from a roll of toilet paper.
Another bit of advice for the accompaniest…if you’re playing so loudly that the people on melody can’t even hear their own instruments, that’s not accompanying…that’s OVERPOWERING! It’s RUDE! It ruins the music! A session is not the place to demonstrate how hard you can strike guitar strings!
Accompaniment is kind of like nude photography: When it’s done really, really well, people call it “tasteful.” (In order to distinguish it from the other kind…)
As both an accompanist and melody player, I think this rant can easily apply to melody players as well:
IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE TUNE, DON’T PLAY! Sure, you’re trying to figure out that tune in 3 tries, but if all you’re doing is holding whole notes to find a note here and there, get the name of the tune and learn it for next time. Especially when you have no idea of the tonal center and are playing notes clashing with a backer’s ideas or (gasp!) clashing with the melody itself.
If you don’t know the tonal center of the tune------FIND OUT!!! Explore some theory and progressions, it will help you to develop variations that make sense and that can work with others’ playing.
If you can’t play the tune in time, are constantly rushing or slowing down, DON’T PLAY THE TUNE!! Keeping time is everyone’s responsibility, not just a backer, especially if they CAN’T PLAY THE TUNE BECAUSE THEY DON’T KNOW THE TUNE–it will be up to the melody players to exclusively hold time. By themselves.
Spot on, Rob. While I’m generally in the line of encouraging people’s interest in trad sessions, this doesn’t extend to letting anyone take advantage of others in order to get a few cheap jollies with no prior investment in practice/listening time. Some folks, anxious to get a start as a trad musician and possessed of a D-28 and a small selection of basic chords, see a voluntary gathering of musicians and immediately swell with a sense of self-importance and entitlement, to wit: “this is a free country; I’ll sit down and play if I want.” Wrong. The good time you’ll have by jamming along freely will almost certainly crimp the enjoyment of everyone else, and let’s just assume that everyone else includes players with years of hard graft assimilating the music.
Sessions are fun, and there’s always the old playground temptation to just barge in and disrupt the game when you see the other kids are having fun and you aren’t. It’s called bullying. You may not think you’re doing any harm, but to play a guitar or bouzouki (to keep with the theme of this thread) at a session is to wield great power over the rhythm and the perceived harmony; . With great power comes great responsibility, and it’s especially incumbent on accompanists to respect this fact. After all, even a great accompanist is only doing a bit of backing; if the other players stop, there’s be nothing to listen to, or to back. As a backer of any experience, you’re entirely subservient to what’s being played by the melody players, so at the slightest whiff of trouble, back off.
In closing, I really would discourage seeing accompaniment as the quick way into having fun at the session. It’s a subtle art, and a good practitioner makes it seem so simple, so logical, so do-able that it’s easy to get lulled into thinking that there’s nothing to it. The best backers generally play at least one other instrument, and have a thorough understanding of the tunes through having learned to play a good selection on a melody instrument. To that end, I’d suggest that anyone of rank beginner status interested in playing accompaniment for Irish music look on it as a future goal, and immediately set out to familiarize him- or herself with the tunes through listening and through learning a melody instrument. Hard to beat a tinwhistle for accessability. Cheers,
I agree with you on the majority of this, Rob. I think many of the best backers have a good concept of the melody and more than likely can play a melody instrument, if not tunes themselves on their backing instrument.
This one bit is dependent on the situation at hand, however, especially if any sessions include dancing:
I don’t how many times I’ve been playing for dancers (especially set) where a guitarist, bodhrani, or other accompanist has saved a figure on a tune change. Either all the melody blanks on the tune change or someone misses a repeat on an A or a B section, and the backer holds the music together for the dancers. In this type of situation, if the other players stop prematurely, the dancers wouldn’t be able to keep going! And this is dance music, after all.
True, sessions attract a lot of backers who aren’t familiar with the tradition, and they tend to think this is just another big jam session. As a session leader, I’ve seen this happen, and I’m quick to point out to these players that this is a different situation. I’ll give them names of albums to check out for inspiration on backing tunes, names of teachers, and the importance of absorbing how Irish music works before jumping into sessions. The same goes for a number of melody players that show up (violin players who haven’t studied the tradition or someone who just bought a tin whistle and thought they could sit in right away). Although I do this politely, many of them don’t return, simply because they weren’t aware of the effort someone needs to give to this music. Fair enough. But hopefully they’re out there listening to the music and practicing, or seeking lessons from other backers to get involved with the music.
I’ve been playing Irish Trad for about 30 years, starting on whistle and eventually playing tenor banjo, mandolin, and dabbling in Uillean pipes. All that time I also played guitar. For the last 8-10 years I’ve been strictly trad on the guitar, switching to DADGAD exclusively. I’m a pretty fair guitar player, and I’d rather play accompaniment than melody. I play with a trad band with pipes, fiddles and flutes. We play various gigs including set dances every month. It’s gotten to the point that they dread playing a gig without me on the few occasions they’ve had to do so.
It’s been 15 years or more since I’ve been to a session. Marriage and 5 children can really cramp your social life. The kids are growing up though, and I’ve been thinking I’d like to start going to sessions again. But every time I visit the Chiff and Fipple there’s nothing but guitar bashing on every thread. It would seem that I haven’t been missing much; guitar players are apparently most unwelcome at sessions. I’ll probably stick with band gigs and forget the session idea.
I take exception to this allegation. There is a lot more than guitar bashing going on on every thread. There is a hell of a lot of threads dedicated to bodhran bashing, more than a fair share of banjo bashing treads, some accordion bashing, no end of spoons bashing, some singer bashing as well as pipes, concertinas, whistles and practically every other instrument bashing to boot.
There would never be another session if the players of every instrument which got bashed here refused to attend. Now stop being so bloody sensitive and head off down to your local sesh for a few tunes.
And please remember: IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE TUNE, DON’T PLAY.
Did you actually take the trouble to read this thread? I was absolutely not guitar bashing. I’m a guitarist. A lot of the people who have commented here are guitarists too. I haven’t seen anything yet that could be described as guitar bashing. It must be hard to play with that chip on your shoulder.
My philosophy is a little different. I respond to what the melody players are doing, I collaborate with them to create a total musical event. I don’t think of that as being subservient, exactly. If the melody player is one of those who think accompaniment is best when it’s totally ignorable or (even better) inaudible, I don’t play. But that’s another rant.
(And you really should get yerself up to DC sometime soon, Rob. It’s been years.)
Right again, Rob. It really should be a conversation between everyone, and I like nothing better than playing with melody players who listen and respond to what I’m doing on the guitar. But on the other hand, hardly anything makes me quite so peevish as an accompanist with an agressive agenda. We’ve all been subjected to the backer who knows better what tempo we should be playing at, or who really isn’t concerned with the conversational aspects of the session so long as he can work that altered llth chord into his Balkan rhythm a few more times. Or, who doesn’t know the tune, and still insists on playing.
Personally, I love backing tunes when everyone is listening, or being backed under the same circumstances. In fact, I choose my musical partners more or less on this basis; everyone needs to be on board the spaceship if we’re ever to get the darn thing off the ground and en route to that “other place.” To me, the idea of playing together is really about that, to combine in order to attain something higher, travelling as it does under many different names (lift, craic, draiocht, nyaah, etc.). Sadly, all it takes is one member of the group to let down his or her end of the deal, and the whole thing fails to get off the ground. By “the deal,” I mean that by being included in the session, everyone is being trusted to not let their own pursuit of a good time impinge on anyone or everyone else’s good time. That doesn’t mean that everyone has to be on the same level as far as musical accomplishment; to me, it means that beginners know and respect their own limitations, and advanced players don’t intentionally try to shake everyone else off for the whole evening. And, to return to the thread, accompanists don’t try to push the melody players around or take advantage of the situation to selfishly "rock out,"and melody players don’t heap scorn and resentment on the backer(s) for merely being there.
My feeling about this and all other issues that arise at sessions between the experienced players and the less advanced is that a little humility on both sides is called for. Speaking for the backers now, and of the trad world in general rather than anyone in particular, isn’t it funny how the same folks that are always giving out about accompanists at sessions change their tune as soon as there’s an aul’ gig or album in the works? Even old Tony MacMahon himself will ring up Stephen Cooney for a bit of a dig-out on stage from time to time. But then, maybe I’m making a mountain out of a Noel Hill…
Rob
p.s. Dying to get up to DC for the craic…but why you no come down to Nellysford no more? I keep expecting you to ruck up at a party.
Good post Rob. One thing that caught my eye that I disagree a bit with is
Maybe it’s a terminology thing but if I am looking for nyaa or draiocht I look for solo or possibly duo playing. For me the essence of the tradition is self expression through ornamentation and variation. Until about 100 years ago it was an art form pretty much exclusively based in solo performance. It is hard for a high level of self expression to come across in ensemble playing.
If I am looking for craic I look for a good driving session with accomplished tune players, plenty of reels and good accompaniment. I am also looking for good conversation between tunes and good Guinness! There is no doubt that with good musical understanding between players great and exciting music can be created in a session environment.
As I said it may be a definitions or terminology thing but for me nyaa/draoicht and craic are important but distinct elements of ITM.
Fair enough. To be honest, I am a tiny bit contemptuous of most uses of any of these terms, since it has been my experience that they are so often bandied about in deadly earnest by folks who don’t really know what they mean. You yourself are obviously not guilty of this! They are indeed different concepts, and I didn’t intend to suggest that they were interchangeable. Thanks for the opportunity to clarify.
