Hummers and Strummers

The problem with a "folk" music education over a traditional academic music education is that you are limited by the scope of the guitar. Since "folk" music traditionally seems to revolve around the strumming of an acoustic guitar, that music is really severely limited or else simply defined by that idiom. Okay, nothing wrong with a singing, harmonica blowing, strum-strum-strummer. I will explain that particular rhythmic concept is not exceptionally innovative. Upon more scrutiny it actually reveals not much of anything, except a very square pulse in time. I knew there was a reason I was not attracted to guitar "hum and strum" music as a child. There was something offensive about it even, and I did not know what it was. I just knew as a trained pianist it didn't connect with me. The Jeff Lorber Fusion did. Spyro Gyra did. Tom Scott did, and all those bands had good keyboard players. There was nothing strummy about their musical concept. Not so with what is blasting over our airwaves. Every country band seems to be a bevy of jean clad, bleeding heart, good-old-boys standin' around strumming on those infernal guitars. It is just not that interesting. Stevie Ray Vaughn made the guitar interesting as did Jimmi Hendrix and Jay Graydon. I am not that fond of urban blues, but Robert Johnson's Mississippi Delta Blues effect me. There are a lot of ways to play guitar, and I have come to realize the strummed version is the least interesting musically. Unless you are Segovia or a Gypsy King, better stick with Eric Clapton. In working cruise ships for over three years, I have come across musicians that seem to know nothing other than this rhythmic concept. It was a startling surprise to me, having spent countless hours studying and analyzing different musical "feels." This particular feel was elusive to me, mainly because it is not generated by the keyboard. Imagine being thrust into a musical environment, where your particular instrument is not a part of the musical concept. I had never encountered this before, a musical situation where my instrument was not included. Having to accommodate such an issue took its toll on me. Literally you have to be a fighter in what would normally be a giving situation. You are required to give good feel, all the while resisting a rhythmic concept that in no way even acknowledges the existence of your instrument. That is a challenge, one that took me a while to understand, accept, and solve. In reality there is no real musical solution, because music that uses two differing rhythmic concepts ultimately is unsuccessful. The exception is early Rock 'n' Roll where swing feel continued, while musicians experimented with this new electric guitar driven rhythmic feel. The easiest example of this concept is Jerry Lee Lewis. He swung with his left hand while playing straight 8th notes with his right hand. He played a boogie woogie type pattern in his left hand while playing rock with his right hand. This worked well for a while, but eventually bands decided to cooperate as a rhythmic unit. Swing was lost, until the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Cherry Poppin' Daddies came along. Then there was a brief revival of swing dancing, but it didn't last. Bands that ultimately succeed agree on a rhythmic concept, and that has to be one or the other. It needs to be either or. Either you take the feel of the piano, or you take the feel of the guitar. The test is easy. If a band decides to use the latter of these, ask a keyboard player to TRY to emulate that strumming pattern of the guitar. All he can so is either play those strum 8th notes between his two hands from bass to treble, or loosen his wrists so much that the flapping motion of the hand replicates an "upstroke." No trained keyboardist would ever want to do this, and why should we ask them to? Just accept that most of the music produced in the last decade has been guitar oriented music, and therefore not that memorable or artistic.
I offer a simple test to the myriad of young, inexperienced, and arrogant ship musicians that know nothing except their own talent. Having never taken the time to study or appreciate the vast catalog of commercial music available, they use the crude philosophy, "I think everyone should just play the way they feel it." The Beatles Sgt. Pepper album should be the prime offering to counteract this statement. What is unique about Sgt. Peppers although unique just the genre of Rock 'n' Roll? It was the first "concept" album. A concept changes the focus of a project. A concept replaces a "brainstorming" type of group experience with ONE particular idea that holds the project together. It is a mission statement of sorts that dictates what will work and what doesn't. To conceptualize is merely to come up with a broad idea, something like an outline, that defines like architectural plans of the music. Things can't just be haphazard offerings of late night drunken cries of love. Miles Davis pioneered conceptual recordings with examples such as Kind of Blue, Birth of the Cool, Miles Ahead, and Bitches Brew. A concept simply tells the musicians what they are doing and how they are trying to achieve it. The catch is you have to know what the concept is AHEAD OF TIME! It is a way of allowing the music evolve. Miles was a genius in this sense, and I will say along with his trumpet playing was his strongest influence in jazz. As an artist he played what he felt and from his own personal experiences, but he only did that in a group construct that had formal boundaries. There were never endless improvised choruses of solos. There were rarely "dead spots" in the music, where the musicians didn't know what was happening. In a group that is unprofessional or immature many of things are prone to happen. Jazz musicians, unlike some like to believe, adhere to a strict set of rules in performance not unlike other genres of music. Although some music in jazz is improvised, there is still a tune or structure upon which to base the improvisation. If asked I think most people will say the human being can more easily understand a succinct exposition and development of a theme. Endless choruses of self-absorbed improvisation may not reach many listeners, unless they have the same emotional psyche, energy, and inspiration of the improviser. Miles knew, because of the limitations of the 45 and 33 r.p.m. vinyl record, that "jazz" cuts needed to be short and to the point to make it on the disc. It was only with the inception of the 33 that his group projects began to expand and lengthen. This short analysis could be extrapolated to become a broad definition of "popular song form." Jazz used this form along with the 12 bar blues as its base. When asked the definition of jazz, I usually reply, "A swing based improvisational music based on the popular song form and 12 bar blues." To this day young, uneducated musicians think jazz is a potpourri of anything. There are reasons in music why rules exist, and it is for the underlying success of the music. Logical rational thought is what makes music transcend time. Mozart is often cited as an example, because when his music is played for fetuses in the womb or for toddlers, they seem to develop a higher intelligence. It is simply because what they are listening to is highly organized and logical with hints of humor, satire, or other overt cognitive processes. Rarely in art music is the product just the result of a drug-induced rave.
The ill effects of guitar-oriented "folk music" should be refuted in this way. If one were to place a pitch to MIDI converter on a guitar, ask a musician to strum, and then record the results into a computer-based sequencer, you would find that the placement of 8th notes are inhumanly close together. The very nature of producing sound with a down and up stroke is unnatural. Upon reflection I can not think of any other instrument in the orchestra that uses this device. Maybe that is why the genre of folk music is and should be defined by this technique. It is both individual and exclusionary. Unfortunately this excludes the folk genre from being able to integrate with traditional forms of music making. "Glory the rebel, the very nature of the United States in her prime!" Because the symphony orchestra, the concert band, and the chorus do not integrate this strumming guitar should support the contention, like religion, that this music is the true history and therefore the foundation of music education. Religion in a similar way should sustain the test of time and remain as the backbone of our societies, even with daily and constant tests of its integrity and faith.
I have another test that should be enacted when supporting or refuting other forms of current music. Should music be inhuman? Should there, like what television and cinema have become, be media that is not conceived by and therefore not meant to be absorbed by the human being? Who is going to watch or listen to it!? Droids? Computer characters? Toy dolls? Why would anyone in media produce something that is not human? Are we wishing for the demise of the human race? Are we hoping for that cyber-existence so well forshadowed in many Sci-Fi movies? Is the human race destined to become Vulcan, or Borg, or Sony Playstation? Why should we at this point in time abandon our entire artistic and cultural history for processes that are being driven by money? Because a computer can have four chips, should we change the product it produces for its sake rather than for the consumer's? That is why our economy is failing, because business has lost sight of the needs of the human being. Life has become more difficult, because a healthy spiritual and emotional life is more difficult. With the "Rise of the Machines" the human being has taken a back seat. Our young minds are not being fertilized and nurtured, our creativity is not being supported, and the human being roughly defined as democrat has been outsourced. What are the new beings, unfeeling, dictatorial, and propagandist?
The test I spoke of earlier is this. Take a strumming guitar player, a mallet player, and a keyboard player and put them beside one another in a recording studio. Ask them to play and see who can play the fastest. I guarantee it will not be the keyboard player, because he is the only one limited by the response of his instrument. He does not have an "upstroke." The piano is a percussion instrument, but it differs from most percussion instruments. You do not use a mallet to strike the key of a piano. The piano as a result is a unique instrument, kind of like the genre of folk music. It has its on unique approach. The difference between the two is that the keyboard has been part of the traditional music making system since its inception in the 1720's. As Dizzy Gillespie said, "If you really want to learn jazz music, then you need to learn the piano." Only on this instrument can you see the relationship of notes to one another and play them as groups to realize harmony as chords. You can actually SEE the intervals between notes and the patterns in our traditional diatonic and 12 tone chromatic system.
All of this aside this test would still reveal the guitar player and mallet player could play faster than the piano player, because the only thing they have to wait for is their own extremity. The guitar player is only limited by the speed of his hand, wrist, or arm. The mallet player holds a stick or mallet in his fingers, but that stick is free to oscillate quickly, more quickly than a key can respond on the piano. The speed of that repercussion on an instrument only is governed by the pressure and skill exerted manipulating the stick. Therefore the keyboard player is at a disadvantage when playing both with strumming guitar and rapidly oscillating sticks or mallets.
The beginnings of this strumming guitar I think defined the idiom of "pop" music. When someone picked up the guitar and realized they could sing along with this fairly effortless process, "pop" music was born. I don't think the word popular has much to do with it. The phrase "easily accessible" is more accurate, because many people can do this process. As a result it has become popular, and I feel that is has been an injustice to music. Much like how our government underestimates the intelligence of our general population, pop music assumes its style is the only one people can enjoy because it is simple. I don't think Americans are simple, and as a result there are in existence many styles of music other than pop. Unfortunately they are not getting the same airplay or exposure. Why is this? Is it because that intelligent music empowers the mind and the soul? Is it because pop music dumbs down the people. A nursery-rhyme like melody over an insipid rhythm doesn't accomplish much, except for maybe pacifying a baby. I think the American people deserve more.