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Topic: Interview of me on a blues blog from Greece |
Mike Perlowin
From:
Los Angeles CA
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Posted 26 Feb 2017 5:39 pm |
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Before you guys open the link, I have to mention something. In 1964, when I was 18 years old, I rehearsed with a blues based garage band for 2 days. Two of the guys in that band were Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, who went on to become the nucleus of Canned Heat. I never actually played with Canned Heat, but somehow my name is on their web site.
From time to time, people contact me about the band, and I tell them about the steel and my efforts to play classical music on it, at which point they usually lose interest.
This link is to a blues blog in Greece. The person who runs the blog interviewed me at length. Here is the blog entry and interview.
http://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/q-a-with-multi-instrumentalist-mike-perlowin-introduced-the-magic
_________________
Please visit my web site and Soundcloud page and listen to the music posted there.
http://www.mikeperlowin.com http://soundcloud.com/mike-perlowin |
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Damir Besic
From:
Nashville,TN.
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David Mason
From:
Cambridge, MD, USA
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Posted 27 Feb 2017 9:50 pm
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| I'm happy to consider Mike a friend, and there's an aspect to what he's done that gets glossed over - he's a FABULOUS MONSTER on this doohickey. He claims that it's his secret magic studio that did all the work, but pop that "Spanish Steel" CD into your "auxiliary in", warm up your vibrator and try to PLAY some of those licks. Classical is mean - you're not allowed to simple it up or leave out the tricky parts. You can't fake that level of precision. "West Side Story" has huge mood shifts (courtesy of Berstein) and Mike drills it. |
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Mike Perlowin
From:
Los Angeles CA
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Posted 28 Feb 2017 12:40 pm
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Brother Dave, I appreciate your enthusiasm. But the truth is that while I'm an adequate player by professional standards, I'm not nearly as good as you say I am. There are a lot of people on this forum like Jim Cohen and Herb Steiner who are far more accomplished than I am.
The CDs were constructed, sometimes by recording one note at a time and carefully editing everything together. But beyond that, almost everything I play when I perform is no more difficult than songs like Faded Love or Last Date.
Let me elaborate on that. Much of this music is not harder to play, it's harder to learn. For Example, the opening steel part on my version of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (from my CD of the same name,) is played by mashing the A and B pedals, just like we do in a country song, while simultaneously moving the bar up one fret. The chords are F and B natural. Normally we would go from F to Bb, without moving the bar, but moving up a fret is no big deal.
What is a big deal is that although this music isn't particularly hard, it's impossible to figure out by ear. The only way to learn it is to read it. And the one thing I can do that most steel players cant, is read music.
I can't look at a piece of sheet music and instantly play it, the way classically trained musicians can, but I can slowly figure out how to play stuff from reading it. Sometimes this takes a few minutes, and sometimes a few days or even weeks.
I've mentioned this before: I've written a short (4 pages) article explaining how to read music on the E9 neck, which I will send for free to anybody who requests it. My method is not quick and easy. It requires some real effort and studying on the part of those who want to learn. But it really does work, and anybody who puts in the time and effort will learn how to read.
For those of you who have not yet heard any of my recordings, here is my version of Claude Debussy's Prelude to the afternoon of a Faun. The therimin like sounds were done with an E-bow.
http://www.perlowinmusic.com/DebussyAfternoonofaFaun.mp3
_________________
Please visit my web site and Soundcloud page and listen to the music posted there.
http://www.mikeperlowin.com http://soundcloud.com/mike-perlowin |
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