I want to play Blues

[Denny]

I think that it's like this friend of mine tryed to talk me into teaching him now to improvise...

After picking up my jaw and stopping laughing, I told him that I give it a shot as soon as he developed an imagination.

[dfernandez77]

Look

If you've ever sat close enough to BB King to hear Lucile's strings ping off his fingertips and dodge the spittle as he sings.

Or sat next to John Hammond while he grinds out "Cat Man Blues." Guitar crying, harmonica weeping, palms slapping, toes drumming, and voice growling (all from one human) in a melange of musical magic that could never be described, let alone coded, examined, classified, defined, or (lord preserve us) notated.

If you ever had...

...you would know.


You,
dead simple,
cannot
play
the
blues
on
a whistle.

However!

You can, even as a novice such as I, use the simple instructions in the link provided by swizzlestick

This link was posted on the board some time ago:
http://www.wikihow.com/Play-Blues-on-an-Irish-Whistle

to play some entertaining bluesy tunes, and quickly play along with many basic rock tunes.

And though I haven't tried it, I'd bet that Daniel Bingamon's High-D Blues Scale with C Extension whistle - though not likely to make you a bluesman - it is probably a gas.

In closing. Anyone who can get their music theory knickers all in a twist because some fellow asks how he can knock out some blues on a whistle.....
...well,
you need a hip flask of "Comfort" and a couple hours with your Muddy Waters collection. You just wear me down.

Relax

[Denny]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAZfxLVL ... ed&search=

[Wombat]

So Blind Willie Pomegranate did get up, studied a music theory book and invented the blues. In my ignorance I thought it was an offshoot of Field Hollers and hymns. Was he a graduate of Juliard?

You told us what you were doing in the 50s. Where have you been since then? You're just mouthing off noble savage primitivist myths invented in the 30s and 40s by a couple of influential European critics to justify their rejection of swing and bebop. All the studies conducted since then present a much more complicated picture of origins.

The bottom line is that primitive unsophisticated blues did and still does exist but it always shared the stage with blues music played by schooled musicians. The earliest recorded blues are not country blues but vaudeville blues played by musicians on the vaudeville and medicine show circuit. These musicians all had a training amounting at least to a fairly daunting apprenticeship. The earliest known blues songs were copyrighted by people like W.C.Handy and were, like all copyrighted tunes of the time, written out using conventional musical notation. St.Louis Blues, written in 1915, already has much of the sophistication evidenced in Monk's blues and this almost 10 years before the first country blues records appeared. Many of the early blues players who didn't have vaudeville backgrounds did have ragtime, string band or brass band educations, all of which would give you some affinity with dots and musical theory. The backwoods players who did eventually record were, more often than not, professional musicians of some sophistication, not moonlighting field hands, whose repertoire would have included many of the popular songs of the day. They didn't get to record many non blues because, in the 20s, all the majors wanted to record by 'race' artists was blues and hot music. The myth of the rural guy who played nothing but blues was not grounded in any social reality known to African Americans but in the commercial (and one suspects insultingly racist) prejudices of white record company A&R men. It was then perpetuated by anti-modernist European critics who did no serious research. You, and other 'noble savage' myth-mongers are of course, free to continue believing a 50 years out-of-date origins myth if you want to. Flat earth anybody?

No I don't play blues on a whistle but can cope reasonably on a renaissance recorder, keyless flute, Böhm flute, MIDI keyboard and guitar. Bit of a show off aren't I?

My question, actually, was how does 'Blue Monk' sound when you play it on a diatonic instrument. But if you can play it convincingly on keyless flute that would be impressive. But would you recommend it to a beginner?

If pressed can cope on a slide banjo too, however i am beginning to believe that, as the old sore went, the only live culture in Australia is in a yoghurt pot.

I take it this lame substitute for answering the questions I actually asked you is an admission that you can't answer them. It'll fool nobody. Why not try honesty?

See, told you that would get them going.
Bill.

Oh, well done you.

[C age ing]

Wombat,
Mujo asked can I play the blues on a whistle. He asked a simple question and deserved, despite thread spread, a simple answer. That answer is surely try, if it sounds good, it is good.
Yes I was involved in the heart versus cerebral jazz wars of the late fifties/early sixties, but we've all come a long way since then and now wish I could have witnessed Mintons.
To reiterate, let's get Mujo walking before trying to teach him to run
Bill
postscript:-Just to illustrate what a simpleton I am, managed to play Blue Monk on the MIDI in C using the three chord trick and it still works.

[Wombat]

Wombat,
Mujo asked can I play the blues on a whistle. He asked a simple question and deserved, despite thread spread, a simple answer. That answer is surely try, if it sounds good, it is good.

Threads move on, without necessarily losing sight of where they came from. I didn't start the technicalities. Still, once I see mention of several modes and gappy scales and the like, and I play and teach this stuff, and I know it to be wrong, do I correct it or do I just let it stand? I happen to know that blues whistlers more advanced than Mujo were reading the thread with some interest; they told me.

Yes I was involved in the heart versus cerebral jazz wars of the late fifties/early sixties, but we've all come a long way since then and now wish I could have witnessed Mintons.

If you actually read what I posted instead of going off half-cocked, you'd see that I wasn't siding with the 'head' against the 'heart.' I said explicitly that blues expression has to be learnt by ear and demonstration.

To reiterate, let's get Mujo walking before trying to teach him to run

I agree, up to a point. I think the immediate lurch off into scale technicalities was probably a mistake although you have to say something about scales to explain why you would normally play blues in A or E on a D whistle. Also, while the 'minor scale' approach might well get someone started, unless you tell people from the outset that it is a gross oversimplification of what is going on, when they come to tunes that won't yield to that approach, which they will within a few days of beginning, they'll probably wrongly blame themselves rather than their teachers. The technicalities I employed didn't go beyond anything you would find in an introductory book on blues guitar until others started challenging the appropriateness and accuracy of what I was saying. (Others lurched off into technicalities you wouldn't find in any book on blues no matter what the level.)

Further, nobody around here regards threads as super glued to the needs or wishes of the original poster. Although we try to at least meet those needs, if we get sidetracked that is OK. Mujo is free to pick and choose what advice is helpful; it's not my business nor yours to speculate on his or her level of sophistication.

postscript:-Just to illustrate what a simpleton I am, managed to play Blue Monk on the MIDI in C using the three chord trick and it still works.

Again, that isn't the exercise I asked you to perform. I asked you two things. First, play it on a diatonic instrument; in your case keyless flute. Second, to play the melody of bar one against the chords for bar two and vice versa and report back on how well that worked. I asked that question for a reason which had nothing to do with questioning your competence to play the tune. It was the quickest way I could think of to demonstrate that appropriate note selection in a blues depends on where you are in the twelve bar structure and how the underlying harmonies are moving.

[C age ing]

If you actually read what I posted instead of going off half-cocked,

Wombat,
When you get to my age, half-cocked is all you can expect.
Bill.

[talasiga]

Wombat,
Mujo asked can I play the blues on a whistle. He asked a simple question and deserved, despite thread spread, a simple answer. That answer is surely try, if it sounds good, it is good.
Yes I was involved in the heart versus cerebral jazz wars of the late fifties/early sixties, but we've all come a long way since then and now wish I could have witnessed Mintons.
To reiterate, let's get Mujo walking before trying to teach him to run
Bill

.................

Hear here

[BoneQuint]

You,
dead simple,
cannot
play
the
blues
on
a whistle.

One of the oldest "blues" instruments was probably the panpipe, or "quills" as they were called.

From the notes to "Roots of the Blues":
http://dram.nyu.edu/dram/note.cgi?id=24853

Track 7

More on the eclectic repetoires of early "blues" musicians, and a mention of the quills:
http://www.emusic.com/features/spotligh ... 00411.html
Emmaline, Take Your Time

Alec Askew, panpipes

Panpipes are one of the oldest and most widespread instruments. Joel Chandler Harris and other nineteenthcentury writers noted that they were very popular among the rural blacks of Georgia, who called them "quills," perhaps because they were made out of measured sections of cane bound together. Since panpipes are fairly common in parts of Europe (notably Galicia, Lombardy, Rumania), in aboriginal Central and South America, and somewhat less so in Africa, and since they have long been a common children's toy instrument, one cannot be sure of the origin of the quills. The pentatonic scale, the altogether rhythmic attack, the consistent use of variation, and the hooting of notes (which I have heard in other southern black and in pygmy playing but nowhere else) give this music a strongly African cast. Indeed, if I were to pick one sound, recorded in America, to lead off a series of African musical survivals, I think I would begin with this piece. Its considerably varied two-phrase litany tune is close to the preceding fife tune, and the rhythmic phrasing is simply part of the idiom of Mississippi Valley dance music, including the blues.

Also check out this, including an MP3 recording:
http://www.lyon.edu/wolfcollection/song ... g1287.html

Dr. Wolf: “Are there any other quill players that you can think of?”
Mr. Pat: “I don’t know no . . . I don’t know nobody else could blow ‘em.”
Dr. Wolf: “Red Davis used to play them a little bit, you say?”
Mr. Pat: “Yeah, he’d blow the whistle.”
Dr. Wolf: “He’d blow the whistle. Are there any other people around that blow the whistle?”
Mr. Pat: “No.”

And another article about the sources of the blues, which mentions the quills:
http://www.emusic.com/features/spotligh ... 00411.html

[mujo]

Looking around I found Henry Thomas who played panpipes and seems in the little Iv,e read seems to be associated w/ the earliest of Blues.
He also seems to fit the bill of the mentioned trained (on the job) vaudvillian, Medicine cart, folk, ragtime, Blues working men mentioned before

[jim stone]

No, no you can sho play the blues on the whistle.
Like I say, get yourself a skanky ol whistle
with a raspy, half broken sound,
and bennnnnd those notes, slide round
those holes, and
wail like your heart is breaking.
It's there, I swear the blues is there.

Again it helps to have accompaniment.
What a whistle probably cannot do is carry
the blues alone.

[blackhawk]

No, no you can sho play the blues on the whistle.
Like I say, get yourself a skanky ol whistle
with a raspy, half broken sound,
and bennnnnd those notes, slide round
those holes, and
wail like your heart is breaking.
It's there, I swear the blues is there.

Again it helps to have accompaniment.
What a whistle probably cannot do is carry
the blues alone.

I'd love to hear a sound clip of someone playing the blues on a whistle. I'm intrigued.

[Wombat]

Looking around I found Henry Thomas who played panpipes and seems in the little Iv,e read seems to be associated w/ the earliest of Blues.
He also seems to fit the bill of the mentioned trained (on the job) vaudvillian, Medicine cart, folk, ragtime, Blues working men mentioned before

Dead right, Mujo. He has a very enjoyable CD on Yazoo and he is often referred to as a 'songster' by which it is meant that he recorded a lot of songs other than blues that would have been part of the repertoire of most African-American entertainers of the time. (A lot of them played for white parties and dances so they would have to have known fiddle breakdowns, waltzes, pop tunes novelty numbers and so on.)

Older members here will probably remember a Canned Heat number called 'Goin' Up the Country' which was a hit in the late 60s, one of the few country blues tunes ever to be generally popular. It's a reworking of a 20s theme and a flute plays the part that would originally have been played on pan pipes. I would assume the flute part would be pretty easy on low whistle and just as effective. From memory, though, the flute plays a major melody, not a minor melody, so your choice of whistle would need to take this into account.

[Wombat]

No, no you can sho play the blues on the whistle.
Like I say, get yourself a skanky ol whistle
with a raspy, half broken sound,
and bennnnnd those notes, slide round
those holes, and
wail like your heart is breaking.
It's there, I swear the blues is there.

Again it helps to have accompaniment.
What a whistle probably cannot do is carry
the blues alone.

I agree entirely, Jim. It's hard, and you have to identify your limitations and play within them, but by no means impossible.

Larry Nugent is reported to be able to play Irish music in any key on a D whistle. Obviously, if he can play blues at all, he'd be able to play as chromatically as any tune calls for. Mere mortals have to accept that our half-holing might not always be clean and facile. Howard Levy can play chromatically on a diatonic harmonica. What I mean is that he can bend a reed and play any note in the chromatic scale cleanly without you hearing the bend and without a delay. I guess he'd be able to play blues in any key on a single harmonica. He plays wonderful jazz. But let's face it; most of us are never going to come close to mastering skills like this.

[mujo]

'goin to the country'='bull doze blues', no?
Listened to clips on Amazon, then bought it at Ipod for about $10 less after S/H. Wonderful music.