20 names mostly not revealed

By Robbie on July 7, 2009

Recently I mentioned that I might try and name the twenty living musicians I would be most excited to play with. The list would exclude celebrities in order to retain a certain purity -- no big restriction, as the area of intersection between musicians and celebrities is pretty small, if you leave out singers. (Admittedly a voice in the back of my head whispered that one or two of my grandees might get wind of my posting and I'd get some wishes granted -- so much for purity!)

Over this morning's coffee I gave it a shot. The names came quickly, but the results, uncensored and spilled forth, were so unflattering that I thought I had better keep the list to myself. I like to think of myself as an broad-based equal opportunity listener, but my list included no less-than-very-well-known people, no non-Americans (!), only one black guy (Don Byron), no one under fifty, no women, and, with the exception of a few New York jazzbos, no one outside the bluegrass, country, or "roots-rock" recording scenes. It turns out that, all earnest self-elevating effort notwithstanding, I'm about as provincial as Kaspar Hauser. This development is awfully wounding. I'm a fellow who's conscientious in maintaining a varied diet, interlarding the four or five styles nearest to his soul with classical and electronic and Irish and Indian and bang-on-a-glockenspiel and so on. To learn that this eclecticism is shallow, that within the body of the discriminating consumer of Papo Vazquez's paella and Harry Partch's liver snacks beats the engorged heart of a meat-and-three tourist -- I am crestfallen. I might as well have stayed chained in the attic of dreamy adolescence, worshipping the names on dusty LPs. At heart, I have.

There was another aspect to my list that was a little depressing. Hardly anyone I want to play with lives near me. Geography counts for a lot in collaborative music, because the easiest way to create an intimate performance is not to feign it, as you do with varying degrees of success when you fly in a stranger for a gig or recording date. If I lived in Woodstock, I might have gotten to play or write with Levon Helm by now. As conceivably, if my home base was in the dreaded N-word, the unchallenged industrial capital of the music I play, I'd've gotten to pick up Michael Rhodes for a gig somewhere, or had the pleasure -- let me dream -- of jamming on a fiddle tune with David Grier. I imagine (maybe I'm kidding myself?) that some of the players on my list with whom I've got some long-distance acquaintance (Buddy Miller, Marty Stuart, or Bill Frisell) could have graduated to tone-companions if I was able to bike over to their houses.

Chicago is rich in punk-rock and Irish and classic-rock and polka and, obviously, blues; it might behoove me to take a stronger interest in one of those musics. Sometimes I think I'd like to forge a friendship with someone who is strong at electronics and programming, ideally someone who has proved himself assembling commercial records using computer-generated beats. There are people like this around Chicago but I don't know them. Working what you do well, diligently layering the bedrock, is a primal pleasure, and makes for the clearest path forward. After a certain age you need to push yourself harder to take a peek down some less-paved trails.

Also I need to push past what seems to be a preoccupation with, if not celebrities, well-known players with thick recording resumes. Some of my top twenty (Van Dyke Parks, Doc Watson -- gee, I've given away half my list by now) had an immeasurable influence on music through the influence of their many recordings, but music isn't exactly synonymous with "records" or "influence," is it? Only in the last 75 years or so have we steered into this confusion. I had never heard of the magnificent Manuel Galban before Ry Cooder put out a record with him, or, until friends hipped me to them, Lionel Belasco or Jacob de Bandolim or Morton Feldman...all people outside the American mainstream, outside even NPR and satellite radio and music-snob magazines (unless you read all the really fine print in Mojo). There are plenty of master players out there -- still! -- who don't document themselves heavily, being too busy making a living or screwing around or woodshedding. I guess the average music fan can keep oblivious to those people in good conscience, but I'm sure a good musician can't.