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Thread: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

  1. #76
    Mando-Afflicted lflngpicker's Avatar
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    My father: who started me on the guitar in 1962 at 7 years because I begged him to let me start. When at 13 years old I heard the Bee Gees do Massachusetts on my little transistor radio I was hooked. Years later, I was influenced by Elvis, Jackson Browne and particularly, SRV and Albert King. Bill Monroe is the latest artist to inspire me to work on blue grass mandolin skills. He also reminds me how far I have to go yet! The Cafe is a great catalyst and I have learn so much from so many of you. Thank you for the thread!
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    This is tricky, there are so many inspiring compositions. For me it was a theme from some classical pieces on guitar. I must confess that I need more work with playing good solos. So I have promised myself just for warming up again to practice Bourree again to warm up. I must also confess that I have not played as much as I ought to since the passing of my husband. Usually music gets me through things, though last year was just filled with firsts.

    Though this year I am going to use my cassettes to improve bluegrass music and jazz! Though a song that inspired me was Green Sleeves and I love playing it as I did at a street concert in 2014. One of the last concerts my late husband was with me when performing live.

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  3. #78

    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    For me it was seeing the David Grisman Quintet in the summer of 1995. I was going into my sophomore year of college in Albany, NY. I had played guitar since 10th grade and was totally immersed in traveling around to see the band Phish at different venues all over the east coast. I heard about this David Grisman guy though some dead deads that I was friends with. When I saw his band play, I was completely changed. I bought a mandolin within a week after that show and started learning to play. Now 20 yrs later I'm still playing, enjoying all types of acoustic music, and still in awe about how cool this 8 stringed instrument is.

  4. #79
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    Mine wasn't actually a mandolin album, but Eric Clapton Unplugged and then Nirvana Unplugged were the beginning of my exploration of acoustic music. Lead acoustic guitar wasn't something I thought about before the Unplugged series, but that sound just captivated me. From there I began to search out acoustic music, first looking to the acoustic offering of mostly electric bands (The Grateful Dead Reckoning, An Evening With the Allman Brothers, etc), and then through the Dead I was introduced to David Grisman, Bluegrass and Django Reinhardt.
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    Quote Originally Posted by allenhopkins View Post
    Pete Seeger first, then his half brother Mike.
    My parents played his music a lot and also Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.
    My favorite music as a child. I don't remember fiddle, mandolin or many
    instrumental solos except for Seeger's oldtime banjo.

  7. #81
    Registered User Al Trujillo's Avatar
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    Two of my greatest influences: Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and my two sons.

    Nitty.. the mandolin playing in Mr. Bojangles has always struck a chord with me.

    My two kids who played various instruments throughout their lives and made me wish that I had tried harder as a kid to learn to play an instrument - any instrument.

    This last year Nitty celebrated its 50th anniversary and my kids are grown and gone - I figured it was time that I got started on burying regrets.

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  9. #82
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    I always loved the sound of the mandolin, but didn't grow up with acoustic music (other than pianos in church). Until a teen music wasn't a huge thing, but when it hit it was on the punk side of things. So much great music...

    For me that one album was The Pogues If I Should Fall From Grace with God that made me realize the instrument I loved the sound of could work with the musical styling I preferred. A few years later I worked with someone who introduced me to the New Grass Revival. Now I basically listen to everything.
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  10. #83

    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    without a doubt, in terms of perspective,
    Aereoplain John Hartford

    up until that release, I thought of bluegrass, which I liked a lot, as southern redneck hillbilly rigidly traditional, etc.
    I was fifteen, a rocker, and former folkie, and it was the Vietnam era, to add context.

    Similarly, Jimmy Buffet's first two albums made me hear "country" in a new perspective as well.

    in terms of musical "aha" moment , which is how I read the OP, more likely Strange Days and Dark Side of the Moon, and Kind of Blue, but really there have been many, and on going. Grisman absolutely made me see mandolin in an entirely new way, (andy the statman too) as Bela did banjo.

  11. #84

    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    Chris Ethridge playing bass on "Close up the honky tonks" with the Flying Burrito Brothers (including Gram parsons) at the Seattle Pop festival in July 1969. I continue to aspire to play walking bass that well today.



    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc7YIP8qR5s
    Last edited by MichelD; Feb-13-2017 at 12:02pm.

  12. #85

    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    There have been many...

    Most recently, it was The Lonesome Trio, Ed Helms's band. I'm a fan of Ed, and decided to check out his band. I liked it, and started down the Bluegrass rabbit hole. The next day, down said rabbit hole, I saw a video from The Bluegrass Situation (also Ed Helms related) with Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer playing "Why Only One?" I borrowed a mandolin from my dad shortly thereafter and it's been all downhill since
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    "Samy Faly" (Everybody Happy) by Rakotozafy of Madagaskar, among others.

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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    I'm with you Denny. I was a wanna be rocker until I heard the Circle album. I decided then and there that, for me, acoustic players are better than any rocker. If you blow it on acoustic you own it; if you blow it on electric you can use a wah-wah or some other electrical majic to make it come out ok, or at least better.
    Been listening to acoustic ever since and trying, in my own way, to get where others have been.

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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    I'm surprised I never commented on this on. Must have been similar threads a bit earlier.

    The first/earliest BIG ones?
    No contest - Richard Thompson (guitar),
    Dave Swarbrick (fiddle, mandolin),
    Sandy Denny (vocals)

    Fairport Convention (Full House, Liege & Leif, Unhalfbricking), Fotheringay
    then onto RT and Sandy solo, Steeleye Span, Nick Drake, John Martyn, Martin Carthy.....

    There was also John Renbourn & Bert Jansch (Pentangle), early Jethro Tull (Stand Up, Benefit), (pre-Dino) Quicksilver Messenger Service, Workingman's Dead But, it was the UK folk-rock stuff that shifted the axis. (Favorite country rock outfit was Commander Cody!)

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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?


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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    Coltrane, Sun Ship

  20. #91
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    Can't really do this because I was deeply affected by so many at so many points in life ...

    At three or four it was Homer & Jethro albums, think Don't Jump Off Of The Roof, Dad

    At 5 & 6 it was Burl Ives, Hank Williams, Marty Robbins

    Preteen years, Elvis, The Beatles

    But after I began accompanying myself on guitar and had learned to play songs and all, for some reason two things spoke to me and motivated me rhythmically. The first was Richie Havens' Woodstock performance, the second was George Harrison's playing For You Blue in the Let It Be movie.

    In later life it was my backward journey from Stevie Ray and Clapton to the Chicago Blues players and on back to the Robert Johnson recordings.
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  21. #92
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    Although the Beatles album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was the awakening when it first came out, it was their album "Abbey Road" that changed my perspective forever. I listened to that album over and over again during the New Year's celebration between 1969 and 1970. Perfect album at a perfect time. Shortly after, I really enjoyed Cat Stevens, especially his albums "Tea for the Tillerman," "Teaser and the Firecat," "Mona Bone Jakon," and "Catch Bull at Four." Nowadays, I listen to mostly 60s and 70s music, along with a lot of Jerry Jeff Walker. And, of course, anything where the mandolin sings...
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    The Redheaded Stranger and Viva Terlingua were seminal for me in the country vein, made country music cool for me again.
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    "Beatles '65" made me want to play pop music, complicating my classical-music progress.

    It was a couple of years before I figured out how to play Lennon's opening guitar part in "I Feel Fine".
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    Stevie Ray Vaughan " Texas Flood".

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    Registered User Rick Jones's Avatar
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    Peter Frampton, "Frampton Comes Alive" (and in concert) - made me understand what "melodic" means
    George Benson, "Bad Benson" - wait ... he really DID that??????
    Django Reinhardt - wait ... he really DID THAT???
    Mr. Stiernberg - wait, you can do that on MANDOLIN??

    Thanks to all of them for guiding me along the path.
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  27. #97
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    Eugene O’Donnell and Mick Maloney, “Slow Airs and Set Dances” . I found it in a thrift store a couple years ago and it’s set me off on a Irish Trad quest ever since , and what with the pandemic led me to taking up the mandolin

  28. #98
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    I remember Eric Clapton's band called the Cream as a big influence. James Taylor and the Beatles used acoustic guitar, and that was the instrument for me. At a very early age I listened to my grandfather play tunes from the Mills Brothers. Then in 1978, Kevin Burke and Irish fiddle became 'everything'. It was not until I brought my fiddle to learn basic classical music at a community music school that Haydn and Bach became a 'big deal'. There, we needed a mandolin for a piece from Vivaldi and guess who got a mandolin?
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  29. #99
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    A series of vinyl records I borrowed from my local UK branch library (and taped) in the 1980s changed my perspective on jazz, a music that had baffled and bored me in turn in previous decades.

    These were :
    “Maple Leaf Rag” (NW 235)
    “Jive at Five, The Stylemakers of Jazz, 1920's1940's” (NW 274),
    “Little Club Jazz, Small Groups in the ‘30's” (NW 250) and
    “Bebop” (NW 271).

    They were on New World Records, the project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, according to this 1977 article in the NYT although I seem to remember they were on Library of Congress labels when I borrowed them.

    The album sequence, and the track sequence, artfully stepped the listener through the progress of jazz and it all just opened like a flower for me.
    They stepped you through early days, through the great popular period and into bebop,which finally made sense to me when I realised how they got there.

    The tracks were representative of certain step changes, all enjoyable in themselves for the casual listener, but few of them were well-known classics.

    Just the best album sequence I've ever heard and I would recommend it to anyone if they were still available in the same sequence with the same terrific sleeve notes.
    Bren

  30. #100
    Registered User Bren's Avatar
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    Default Re: What song, Album, Musician changed your perspective on music?

    I found these sleeve notes from the Jive at Five volume.

    Jive at Five notes

    Great reading.
    the link is 15 pages of pdf with track listings on pp 13 & 14, and detailed info and commentary on each track in pp 5-12
    Bren

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