{"id":6754,"date":"2015-05-05T14:07:14","date_gmt":"2015-05-05T18:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6754"},"modified":"2015-05-05T18:32:02","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T22:32:02","slug":"sometimes-progress-diminishes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6754","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes progress diminishes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not news to long-time followers of this blog that I love listening to virtuoso guitarists. Once, long ago in the 1980s I went to see a guitarist named Michael Hedges who astonished the crap out of me.  The guy made sounds come out of a wooden flattop that were like nothing else on Earth.<\/p>\n<p>Hedges died a few years later in a car crash, tragically young, and is no longer very well remembered.  But I was on IRC yesterday taking music with a friend  who mentioned a harmonica and a whistler doing Jimi Hendrix in a &#8220;laid back, measured,  acoustic style&#8221;, and I brought up Hedges because I remembered his cover of <cite>All Along The Watchtower<\/cite> as an utterly amazing thing.<\/p>\n<p>Afterwards, in a mood of gentle nostalgia, I searched YouTube for a recording of it.  Found one, from the Wolf Trap festival in &#8217;86, and got a surprise.<\/p>\n<p><!-- more--><\/p>\n<p>It was undoubtedly very similar to the performance I heard at around the same time, but&#8230;it just didn&#8217;t sound that interesting. Technically accomplished, yes, but it didn&#8217;t produce the feeling of wonder and awe I experienced then.  His original <cite>Because It&#8217;s There<\/cite> followed on the playlist, and held up better, but&#8230;huh?<\/p>\n<p>It didn&#8217;t take me long to figure this out.  It&#8217;s because in 2015 I&#8217;m surrounded by guitarists doing what Hedges was doing in the late 1980s. It even has a name these days: &#8220;percussive fingerstyle&#8221;,  Andy McKee, Antoine Dufour, Erik Mongrain, Tommy Emmanuel; players like these come up on my Pandora feed a lot, intermixed with the jazz fusion and progressive metal.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes progress diminishes its pioneers. It can be difficult to remember how bold an artistic innovation was once we&#8217;ve become used to its consequences. Especially when the followers exceed the originator; I must concede that Andy McKee, for example, does Hedges&#8217;s thing better than Hedges himself did. It may take memories like mine, acting as a kind of time capsule, to remind us how special the moment of creation was.<\/p>\n<p>(And somwhere out there, some people who made it to Jimi Hendrix concerts when they were very young are nodding at this.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m here to speak up for you, Michel Hedges. Hm..I see Wikipedia doesn&#8217;t link him to percussive fingerstyle.  I think I&#8217;ll fix that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not news to long-time followers of this blog that I love listening to virtuoso guitarists. Once, long ago in the 1980s I went to see a guitarist named Michael Hedges who astonished the crap out of me. The guy made sounds come out of a wooden flattop that were like nothing else on Earth.&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6754\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Sometimes progress diminishes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6754"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6760,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6754\/revisions\/6760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}