Many of the great musicians of the past were illiterate and
obviously not being able to the read and write they were not going to be
reading music either therefore their musical learning came from listening to
other people play and working things from recording. They also didn’t really
have any significant understanding of scales and chords for the most part sand
therefore understood music as if they were phrases spoken by famous musician so
for instance a line that Louis Armstrong played would have been referred to as
something that Louis said.
I once heard the quote by Albert King referring to Jimi
Hendrix in which Albert said, ‘Jimi Hendrix plays my blues and he should go and
play his own’, at the time I found this a rather ridiculous remark but in
hindsight he was referring to something from a completely different paradigm of
musical thinking than my with a different understanding of how music was
formed. Indeed as Albert King was one of the great sources of inspiration to
Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and many others it was quite true that these
people were playing his blues as saying it with his ‘words’.
What is significant here is that we understand these great
players were so driven by what they heard and not what they intellectualised;
they understood music as a language form which if we can get back to that way
of thinking would help our playing to be more musical and not so scale
orientated.
Just
express words and rhythms through the notes that you play and by developing
ideas of others remembering that these are truly phrases of a language; this is
a great way for children to learn to play.
www.bluescampuk.co.uk Three
days of learning to play music in a band. The music summer school
