BTW, Boom Boom with Buddy Guy is now being used as the theme song for CSI New Orleans. When I first heard about Indigenous, I was told they sounded like Big Head Todd & the Monsters, so I can't leave them out. ![]() My favorite of theirs is still probably their debut, but there's plenty of other good stuff They have a dozen or so albums if you dig blues rock. Indigenous is driven by guitar force Mato Nanji. Tedeschi Truck Band is gaining momentum, but Susan Tedeschi's first two albums are gems:Īnother album I really dig is Mike Zito's Pearl River, I've only begun to explore this young bluesman's work. He took some time to help out in Louisiana after Katrina hit. Surprisingly, no one has mentioned Tab Benoit yet. In the 2000's blues did kind of dry up for me as well, but there are some great players out there. I was really into modern blues in the late 90's. Hopefully there's enough of us left behind ( both artists and audiences ) to sustain the genre in between spikes. Some of them will hang on after the circus leaves town ( I was one of those as I had developed a bit of a taste for the blues when Alligator got hip for a while ) while the rest move on. Then the genre gets an up in the public consciousness again for a while and is fashionable among people who wouldn't normally listen to it much. Every now and then you have somebody figure they can make some money off it like the Chess brothers or Bruce Iglauer at Alligator ( which is not to say these guys didn't necessarily like blues as much as they liked money ) or whoever is driving Gary Clark Jr.'s hype as the NEXT BIG THING OF THE BLUES. And that's why the blues can have trouble drawing a crowd. Otherwise it all starts sounding the same to them and they move on. It's the inability to differentiate the subtleties within a pretty rigid musical genre structure that leads people to not appreciate what is actually the essence of fine blues and so they start being wowed by notes-per-minute or knee-high prodigies making a lot of noise. Others, like SRV and Hendrix, moved the ball down the field so that cats like Joe Bonamassa could bobble it. And unique in his approach where a lot of his imitators just ended up sounding busy and boring. Buddy Guy? Flashy as hell, but an originator, not an imitator. Think Albert King wasn't a player? Try doing what he did. Just wasn't all flashy and all over the place while he did it. It always has so why shouldn't it now? And there's different ways to demonstrate skill: Muddy Waters wasn't the splashiest slide player but he was a unique one and highly-skilled at what he did. So authenticity can co-exist with skill in the genre. So tell us again - exactly what is lost on who, now? Would you rather work your ass off in a meat-packing plant in Chicago until you couldn't anymore or would you rather "play your ass off " into a working band, make better money, party and live "the life"? So for these folks both on and in front of the stage, you'd better believe that the blues was about celebration and commiseration. A lot of the players themselves found that becoming musicians was a step up the ladder socially and economically from where they were up to that point. ![]() Hard working people paid good money to see these performers and to be distracted by them from what they had to go through every day to get over and to support their families. As is that canard about how the blues isn't about some happy celebration. That business of "what the blues really is" coming down to authenticity equaling some old guy with missing fingers shoutin' out a holler, sittin' in a cotton field or on a porch in Misssissippi while he bashes away on a "gittar" he built himself from an apple box is a stereotype pure and simple. You can be "the stinkiest guitar player around and still have the blues" and so will everyone around you when you start playing bad blues. They weren't there because they didn't "play their asses off". The genre has a history of guitar-slinging and head-cutting sessions going back to the legend of Robert Johnson selling his soul to Satan in return for prowess and all that would come with - money, fame, women. A lot of the greats became well-known precisely because they were hot-sh!t guitar-slingers or harp players or pianists or. That's a pretty romanticized and seemingly ill-informed view of what the blues are and have been. " No Sense Of History": Because people know what it's all about. Click to expand.The above post brought to you by " No Sense Of History."
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