Here’s another one of these posts that is going to jump around a bit, though I’ll keep it brief, and there’s a heartbreak poem set to music that I’ll end with.

I don’t post every time some figure influential to me dies. It should be apparent to long-time readers of this that that group of influences is wide, and therefore large. Still sometimes the spirit moves me. This week a midlist musical figure, John Mayall, died. He was 90 — so not a surprise to any actuaries in my audience — but his extraordinarily long musical career (he was still regularly touring up until the last few years) might have masked the imminence of that death.

I can’t quite figure how many of you will recognize his name, and of those that do, how many will see why I’d count him as an influence. I often worry, what with the variety of the musical settings I publish here for strangers to listen to, that someone listening to one, two, or three of the Parlando musical pieces will think that I’m fixed in some musical genre. “Oh, he does folk-song-like stuff with solo acoustic guitar.” “Some kind of rough garage rock thing, isn’t it?” “Do you know you sound like Bob Dylan?” “What’s with all those orchestral instruments — and was that a sitar?” “You know, that beatnik to poetry slam kind of spoken word over spare Jazz backing stuff.”

To my mind, my aim is to vary the music, just as it’s my intent to present different sources for the words. But what’s that got to do with John Mayall who was not generally filed in any of those genre bins. If you look for Mayall’s work, he’ll be filed under “Blues.”

Blues, that great Afro-American musical approach, is (while often imperceptibly) as close as a center as I can find in my music. The other day one of the household teenager’s friends arrived when I was in another part of the house practicing guitar over an entirely not-Blues chord progression I had ginned up. I stopped, wanting not to intrude sonically on their get-together. When I met up with the young visitor (who plays guitar themselves) I apologized for the racket, and they replied, “Blues is always cool.”

Odd, I thought. I certainly didn’t think of the idea I was working with was Blues, but then the things I was playing over it used embellishments that I learned from musicians who played within a recognizably Blues song and harmonic structure.

In an interview with the Guardian newspaper later in his career Mayall was asked to define the Blues. His answer? :

“[Blues] is about – and it’s always been about – that raw honesty with which the blues express our experiences in life, something which all comes together in this music, in the words as well. Something that is connected to us, common to our experiences. To be honest, though, I don’t think anyone really knows exactly what it is. I just can’t stop playing it.”

Read the whole interview in that link above if you want an overview of the man’s career and its variations on what you might think defines the Blues— but I admire Mayall regardless of genre borders, because his career exemplified something I call the Indie Spirit. He was a “get in the van” sustainable-costs touring musician when D. Boon was a fresh kindergarten graduate. Like Grant Hart, he did the graphic design for his band’s records from the very start. He played for small audiences in small venues through most of his career, and ballroom and converted movie theater venues were about as big a draw as he could muster at the height of his popularity. If that bothered him (it didn’t seem to) it didn’t stop him. He played his music without a thought to maximizing its commercial potential, a genial stubbornness that I admire. Furthermore, every band he put together over around 60 years of music-making had musicians that were better than he was, and he based his bandleading on letting them shine. Every obit tries to list those once bandmembers, but the list extends over the horizon because that group of boosted musicians, like the bandleader, included many individual talents that never became big stars while making fine music.*

A song not by John Mayall: “You look to me like misty roses…” The roses from a morning walk my wife took. The picture of Mayall is on a pillar overlooking where Dave Moore plays in my studio space.

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That went on longer than I expected, but here’s a piece I just finished, with words from the American poet Sara Teasdale. Teasdale is another writer from the first third of the 20^th century whose poetry I can’t resist setting with music. Much of Teasdale’s poetry is short and compressed like today’s selection “Dooryard Roses.”  And much of it expresses heartbreak, as this poem does. But like the Blues, it tries to be honest and straightforward about it, and to sing it so we can say back to the singer “Yeah, I’ve been there too. Is that what you figured about it? Well, we’re both still here, so sing it some more!”

You can read the text of Teasdale’s short poem at this link.

The music I composed for this piece, is it Blues? Maybe I don’t know, but I don’t think it is. I just can’t stop playing it. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This highlighted link is your alternative then.

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*A personal factor in my connection to John Mayall’s music: alternative voice and frequent keyboard player in this Project, Dave Moore, is the person who introduced me to Mayall’s records. In those 20^th century days when one might fruitfully evaluate a person by their record collection contents, Dave didn’t need any help there — I’d already heard his poetry — but he’s why I came to hear and follow Mayall’s music.