Man, you just can't go wrong with Chopin. I always thought a lot of the Romantic composers would have made some awesome saloon music if they had been born into the Wild West instead of 19th century Europe. Great stuff.

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Gordon Rekcikssa
Man, you just can't go wrong with Chopin. I always thought a lot of the Romantic composers would have made some awesome saloon music if they had been born into the Wild West instead of 19th century Europe. Great stuff.

I'm kinda curious about what type of music was actually played in the Wild West...

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LionsMouth

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Gordon Rekcikssa
Man, you just can't go wrong with Chopin. I always thought a lot of the Romantic composers would have made some awesome saloon music if they had been born into the Wild West instead of 19th century Europe. Great stuff.

I'm kinda curious about what type of music was actually played in the Wild West...

I'm relying on my increasingly faulty memory here, but my great-grandfather played piano in some saloons down here in southwest Florida back when this was still cattle country sometime between 1885-1910. He passed away in 1974 when he was roughly 105 years old (no birth certificate, so no way of really knowing his age, however the general family consensus was that he was born in 1869), but when I was very young, he would sit at his piano and play some old songs for us in the evening.

He was completely self-taught, and I certainly can't vouch for the authenticity of what he played as to whether or not it was similar to what others were playing at the time, but it was somewhere between ragtime and a waltz. He would keep time in the lower registers with his left hand while playing the melody with his right. And I mean he treated those lower registers like a drum kit, just pounding out a really solid rhythm. All the while, when there was a minute break with either hand, he would be swigging from his bottle of homemade whiskey, so as the evening wore on the music got more and more raucous.

Anyway, the old guy was full of awesome stories about playing in those rough cowboy bars and talked quite a bit about some of the other musicians that would just show up and start playing with whatever instruments they had. Homemade guitars and fiddles, gut-strung washtubs and jaw harps were some of the favorites as I recall, and I remember him telling me about some other guy named George Penshaw (I think that was his name, this was a long time ago) that was a master saw player. I always imagined these guys to be the original punk rock crew, just jamming out DIY style and seeing what happened.

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Awesome story.

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Cecil Taylor - Unit Structures

Listening to this for the first time now, and digging it. Definitely on the avant-garde side as far as Blue Note releases go.

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