Monday, January 10, 2011

Ted's got the Blues!

Hi everyone, happy Monday!
I will post some more fast tempo stuff later this week but for now I thought I would talk about some stuff I've been listening to. For about a year now I have been working on learning the diatonic harmonica or "blues harp". The great thing about this is that I have discovered (or rediscovered) a lot of great blues because of all the great harp playing. This music is also very important to drummers too though. I think it's important to note, that like many musics from Africa, Cuba, Brazil, etc., Blues, one of the great American world musics, pre-dates the drum set. Early drummers joined blues bands and had to figure out how to best accompany this music with few examples to draw upon. (In fact, the drum set itself was very young at this point.) These artists used mainly their ears and creativity to set the drumming foundations for the Blues.

Here's a particular favorite of mine, Fred Below playing with Howlin' Wolf on "Back Door Man".
Check out the halfway between shuffle and straight 8th feel on this, it's killer!






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