Ethan Iverson had some idle Sunday thoughts on tablature: scordatura, reentrant tuning, and pieces in natural harmonics are all arguments in favor of tab over against sight-reading snobs

I guess Ethan Iverson's idle Sunday thoughts as a pianist on guitar tab is a reminder that he's not a guitarist.

https://iverson.substack.com/p/idle-sunday-thoughts

 

As a pianist, I can sight-read almost anything within reason, including orchestral scores and choral music. I can’t get to first base with guitar tablature, which always struck me as the ultimate capitalist feint: “Here, we will give you something easy to start with that will ineluctably cripple your growth after a certain point and keep you walled off with the self-same community (other guitarists). Please don’t learn to read music, that is a distraction from our main interest, which is selling you more and more guitar gear to compensate for the fact that you can’t play in bands that use any conventional notation.”

Yesterday: guitar tab. Today: A.I.

…

Counterpoint one: Henry Kaiser on guitar tab.

Counterpoint two: Joni Mitchell’s Blue is the one of the greatest albums of all time, and she wrote a lot of it on guitar.¹

 

The real counterpoint can be summed up as "scordatura".  There are several layers to this counterpoint, as would be fit a "counterpoint" rebuttal.

Blind Willie Johnson's "Go With Me To That Land"/congregational singing of "Come and Go to That Land"

Regular readers know Wenatchee The Hatchet is a Blind Willie Johnson fan so, no surprise, here's Blind Willie Johnson's "Go With Me To That Land"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgTY1AwDGxU

Thanks to reading William T. Dargan's Lining Out the Word I discovered a recording of lining hymns performed at a number of African American churches. So once I heard the following track I had to post a juxtaposition of Blind Willie Johnson's performance with a congregational singing form of the song.  

from Wade in the Water Volume 2, ℗ 1995 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm5ZDt-ezC8

I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say · The United Southern Prayer Band (amazing stuff I'm hearing thanks to reading through William T Dargan's book on the lining hymn tradition in African American churches)

For Blind Willie Johnson fans you'll already know "I heard the voice of Jesus say ... " as a text from his song repertoire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I_6VJb5Q7M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlhVEEPtytw

and you will also know that "Dark Was the Night" is an instrumental adaptation of the lining out hymn singing tradition.  But in case you've never heard what that singing tradition among African American churches actually sounds like, well, then you need to listen to this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyuAZGs62c8

Wade in the Water, Vol. 2: African-American Congregational Singing

℗ 1995 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

You can hear the song leader/deacon "deaconing" the words for the well-known lyrics before each wave of  responsorial heterophony.  Dargan put it well saying that it's neither a prescribed harmonic pattern nor a simple unison melody.  It most certainly sounds nothing at all like the tune Blind Willie Johnson famously recorded and Dargan explained that there's a propensity to "flatten out" melodic contours along a series of revolving and recycling melodic tropes which you can vividly hear in this remarkable performance.

Because it's an old lo-fi recording you might not hear the foot stomping and hand clapping rhythms at first but that's another element that you can hear in this tradition where a completely non-measured set of congregational phrases emerge and are progressively given firmer rhythmic accompaniment that has a tempo shift about half-way through. 

I learned of this album from William T. Dargan's book

Lining Out the Word: Dr. Watts Hymn Singing in the Music of Black Americans

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520234482/lining-out-the-word

and if you want an even more radically different variation on a popular text from the African American Christian music traditions check out this recording by Doris Akers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAx1_P8SONw

I'm still working through Dargan's book but I intend to blog about it once I'm done.  Meanwhile, I can't resist sharing tracks from albums he recommended for listening.  Fortunately the Wade in the Water series is Smithsonian Folkways which means it's not some wildly out-of-print thing you'd have to impoert or order from a university press you might not have heard of before like a couple of other albums Dargan recommends.  

a postscript to earlier thoughts on "Dark Was the Night", if we consult the tunes associated with the text at hymnary.org ... the hymn tunes associated with the hymn texts have absolutely nothing to do with Johnson's performance

One of the things about Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night" that is mysterious is exactly which tune he was extrapolating his performance from.  The text of "Dark Was the Night and Cold the Ground" is relatively well-known. We can establish that it's credited to Thomas Hawells.

https://hymnary.org/text/dark_was_the_night_and_cold_the_ground

The text is listed as follows:

1 Dark was the night, and cold the ground

On which the Lord was laid;

His sweat like drops of blood ran down;

In agony He prayed.

2 "Father, remove this bitter cup,

If such Thy sacred will;

If not, content to drink it up

Thy pleasure I fulfill."

3 Go the the garden, sinner, see

Those precious drops that flow;

The heavy load He bore for thee;

For thee He lies so low.

4 Then learn of Him the cross to bear;

Thy Father's will obey;

And when temptations press thee near,

Awake to watch and pray.

So if you want to understand what Blind Willie Johnson was adapting into music you'll have to know the text he was working from even if he never sang the words.  Mahalia Jackson, by contrast, did sing the words and it helps us get a clearer sense of how flexible this text has been in terms of melodic settings.  The hymn is also mentioned as being in an African Methodist Episcopal hymnal.

Ethan Hein discusses the Kronos Quartet playing Jimi Hendrix and ... Blind Willie Johnson (for which I can never forgive them!)--update: I've found exactly ONE academic monograph on the lining hymn traditions so far, included at the end of the post

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/the-kronos-quartet-play-jimi-hendrix/

I agree with Ethan Hein about wondering whether the Kronos Quartet's attempt to play Jimi Hendrix was successful.  I lean "no".  The tempi for the different sections of the "Purple Haze" arrangement jack knifes away any possibility of either attempted groove actually working.  The down tempo intro is slower than what Hendrix did and the verse-and-chorus arrangement is faster than what Hendrix did and in neither case does a steady groove happen as the cumulative result.  

And the quartet arrangement of "Dark Was the Night" is frustrating beyond words.  Ethan Hein notes there's no groove but there's also no low end.  The groove that lives and breathes beneath Blind Willie Johnson's amazing performance is bolstered by those droning bass strings. 

Mahalia Jackson did an amazing solo voice performance of the lining hymn, so a spare, minimalist approach to the song can absolutely work.  

As for jazz violin, I tend to think of Ray Nance's wonderful solo on "Bakiff".

The thing I'm thinking is that if a string quartet isn't going to get the groove of folk blues and they have the chops to get at timbrel variation and microtonal inflections there should be two things going on. The first is low end.  The second is that some kind of heterophony that replicates the heterophony that often shows up in lining hymn performances should have happened and the Kronos arrangement doesn't get any heterophonic/quasi-polyphonic patterns going for long.  That would also, probably, require an arranger and ensemble to find out what groove against which the heterophony or polyphony would be playing against.  

Blind Willie Johnson: Dark Was the Night

It's a tradition here at Wenatchee The Hatchet to post a link to Blind Willie Johnson's legendary recording of this hymn for Holy Saturday. There are other recordings of this hymn meditating on Christ's entombment but Johnson's performance is justifiably the most famous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNj2BXW852g

Blind Willie Johnson (1897 to 1945)

Today is the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the greatest rural blues musicians the United States has ever given the world, Blind Willie Johnson

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWb4XcVwIeI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNj2BXW852g

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/johnson-blind-willie

So little can be firmly documented about Johnson's life that even if there is officially a biography about Johnson reader consensus is that the biography adds little to nothing you can't find out in liner notes.  It "may" be better to run with Jas Obrecht's book Early Blues instead.  There is now agreement that he died September 18, 1945, although an earlier account placed Johnson's death in 1949, so there's an outside possibility that if the later date could be confirmed as correct this wouldn't be the 75th anniversary of Johnson's death, after all.  Still, to go by contemporary consensus, today is that day.

https://www.amazon.com/Early-Blues-First-Stars-Guitar-ebook/dp/B014GKFZXG/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=blind+willie+johnson+biography&qid=1600391861&sr=8-5

https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-soul-of-a-man/

If you have never heard Blind Willie Johnson's music and have any interest at all in early blues then do yourself a favor and get his complete recordings, whether through Amazon or maybe preferably your local music shop. 

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Blind-Willie-Johnson/dp/B0000028QB