Anyhow here's an excerpt I thought was kind of good, completely divorced of its concept:
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Critics of popular music tend to throw around the word “virtuoso” pretty liberally when referring to musical artists of a particular expressive power. Certainly Eddie Hazel is often tagged with this admittedly well-intentioned compliment, but doing so does a disservice to the amount of craft and imagination he was able to put into his playing. Eddie Hazel was no “virtuoso,” at least not by the terms that virtuosity is often defined (like most rhythm & blues guitarists of the time, he was not one to notate his music, nor was he likely to play lightning fast scalar solos or indulge in “fret-tapping”)—he was simply a blues guitarist, and the more one looks at the Steve Vais and Joe Satrianis of the world (Guitar World-sanctioned “virtuosos” both), the more it becomes absolutely clear that blues is the relative opposite of virtuosity. At the risk of generalizing about a subject that I know way too much about, it should be noted that electric blues playing has never been about playing fast or effortlessly—on the contrary, it’s about striving, sweating, desperately searching for some sort of truth or happiness in the form of that perfect note, upon which the blues player realizes that this note is far from perfect, and the journey must continue, ad finitum, ad nauseum. The tone of melancholy that pervades 99% of guitar blues is, at its basest level, the guitarist struggling to achieve transcendence, possibly as a way of communicating with his or her audience, possibly as a way of keeping the hell hound temporarily off the trail.
But I am getting way too hippy-dippy here. On a purely technical level, and Hazel is as perfect an example as one can think of, blues guitar solos revolve around fairly simple patterns and often involve the same notes played over and over again. What gives the guitar a special edge over many blues instruments is that, as a string instrument, it allows the player to bend the string and therefore slightly change the pitch, which simultaneously provides the player with two advantages: first, it can give the note a more interesting “crying” tone, moving the pitch back and forth as if it was a weeping baby, and second, it allows the guitarist to cover up for any mistake by “bending” the note to a more pleasing pitch. From the earliest delta blues records to Led Zeppelin, even untrained ears can pick up moments on studio albums where the guitarist flubs a note and quickly covers it up by bending it or moving back to the original note.
Professional musicians wouldn’t like to admit it, but it’s pretty easy for even a novice guitarist to play a convincingly “bluesy” solo if he plays the same three or four notes in a particular pattern (I submit Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” as the absolute nadir of bendy three-note solos). But in the end, it’s not about that. Great blues guitarists have a personality and vocabulary that they make their own—they might play the same three notes over and over, but it’s three notes that no one else would play in that particular way at that particular time. There’s a reason one can tell that it’s clearly Hazel and not fellow Funkadelic guitarist Michael Hampton playing the solo on, say, “Red Hot Mama,” and it comes down to the fact that listeners over time learn to notice the particular choices that great, unique guitarists make, even on the dime (and Hazel’s solos were rarely written beforehand).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Thoughts?
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