radical druid

This is a reprint of a blog entry from 2002:

When in doubt of where to go musically, when questioning one's ability to hear harmonic structures, to find the “in” groove or chord, or if just in need of a general aural cleansing, there is nothing that will substitute for Ornette Coleman.

I first experienced Ornette's harmolodics at Berklee, where often friends and I would spend late nights with the eightfold attack of of Coleman's Free Jazz: A Improvision by the Double Quartet "barrelling forth from the speakers like the Mongol horde” (a quote from my journals at the time). Now, when you want to learn about phrasing, you turn to Miles' Sketches of Spain; when you want close-knit harmony that weaves in and out around the beat, I always like to put on The Gerry Mulligan Songbook; and when needing to hear just how much you can do in just two choruses (and how anything more than that is simply unnecessary, if you do it right), there's nothing like Charlie Parker. Doesn't matter what your instrument is, or what style you think you play. If you want to focus on these aspects of music, here's where the clues are.

But if you want to know the secret of space, to stretch your ears, to cut to the bare bones, there's no substitute for Ornette Coleman. Just like James Brown can teach you, particularly on Love Power Peace (live in Paris, 1971) that there is nothing outside of a groove (or maybe, cosmologically, it's THE groove), Ornette can help you understand just how melodic the entire world is. Ah ... but I digress ...

Did I mention that it makes great headphone music?

Back to my wonderful cup of tea, a darkened room, and that plastic saxophone ...

Here's a poem that I wrote one night in Memphis after listening Ornette and discussing Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein over endless strong coffee ...

Plastic Pocket Harmolodics

(1993)

Run down changeling boots the funk,
improves the shunned extractionary;
"Stove" in traction rips rough, ready,
pocket not for inner sanctums.

Cherry cola coughs surrender:
queasy Compton did the mother,
freaking heat in slumber tumble;
his xray eyelids slip the winking.

Bop, the Bird, the sticky finger ---
fallen anglos sin cojones
open quiet, quick and greasy;
down the town round wound up lounging.

Run down starlings, cop the mutants;
the groove pontificates for Shiva.
Flip the whip trip, banned in Boston,
this Coleman-ation's green and hunchbacked.

Cherry, copper-coated, kicks
mazal tov and "Off the Mutha!"
speaking shit in rumble mumble;
"X" the spot where Malcolm put it.

Stop the word, the slippery jungle,
pent up houses of the holy.
Open skies bleed hard and humble;
Central busts the changes open.

OK, so here it is. The current list of songs by other people that I might throw into a set.

Ain’t No Sunshine
Almost Cut My Hair
Baby What Do You Want Me To Do
Back Door Man
Bartender’s Blues
Blue Christmas
Born in Chicago
Brown-Eyed Girl
Call Me the Breeze
Casey Jones
Cheap Thrills
Cocaine
Crazy
Crying Time

OK ... so here it is.

Last night whilst playing my usual gig with Hardrick Rivers and company at the Pioneer Pub in Natchitoches, I believe that I discovered a new (and potentially revolutionary) technique for playing slap, pop and funk bass.

I had been thinking on two different wavelengths prior to last night.

The first was Victor Wooten's right hand technique, particularly the thumb technique where he uses his thumb as if he were wearing a thumb pick - as opposed to a Larry Graham/Bootsy Collins thumb technique which approaches the strings vertically (i.e., the thumb pops up vertically from the string in a primarily percussive thwack), Victor's technique involves popping with the thumb horizontally so it can perform an upstroke for additional speed and effect. When he combines this with left guitarist technique for hammer-ons and pull-offs, the end result is dazzling speed.

The second was Jaco Pastorius' use of chording and false harmonics. When exploring different chord shapes and voices around the neck, I sounded the chords out using arpeggios played with my thumb, index, middle (and sometimes ring) fingers - not an unusual approach when one is playing acoustic fingerstyle guitar - or banjo. Particularly claw hammer style banjo.

The innovation is the claw hammer approach. I admit I was troubled with the "double-thumb" technique of Victor's. Why not just use a thumb-pick, as you would on a banjo, instead of resting (and in a sense, limiting the range of motion of) your thumb. I've always avoided techniques that involved resting the hand in anyway on the strings or nearby props (like the old Precision thumb rests). And my thumb slap technique was deeply rooted in the vertical style.

But to use the thumb and first fingers in combination, and move the thumb for a second combination stroke with subsequent index and ring finger "plucks"? Keeping an underlying rhythm going consisting of sounded notes and/or muted string unsounded notes while the hand floats above the strings (and along the neck)? That, my friends, is "claw hammer funk" bass.

I'm still working out the details and some of the mechanics. But the end result should be (provided that you have sufficient hand strength) a bass style that provides both thumb and finger pop and slap, with a fluidity and dexterity akin to Earl Scruggs banjo technique.

And there you have it.