We talk about our beloved blues today as if it’s the place where everything started, the spark that guided all those enthused musicians into new realms of creativity and innovation, a basecamp for everybody rustling through the wilderness of artistic pursuits without any means of becoming like their heroes unless they studied them closely first.
We discuss blues as if it held all secrets, which, obviously, it did, but for people like David Gilmour, it was also a point of contention where approaching it with flexibility was the ultimate faux pas. This is also an interesting take, considering it provided many, like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, with the grounds to be completely musically liberated beyond the stone-cold exterior of traditional rock ‘n’ roll.
If we’re to apply a simplistic lens, it could be said that jazz, although ablaze with all the same patterns, rhythms and notes blues boasted in those years when its roots flowered out into every musical corner possible, somehow dominoed into a sort of antithesis, of blues and of other traditional conventions, representing the cause and response effects that most innovators sought after when looking to break the mould and turn the page onto something completely new. Or something more exciting, where it was simply about the desire to be limitless rather than the fear of it.
Quincy Jones said something similar when he once argued, “People were telling us not to mix jazz with rock, that myopic mentality,” Jones told Uncut. “That’s bullshit. Miles, Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Hancock and myself used to talk about this, how you should try everything.” Similarly, Gilmour’s view on blues and people like Clapton feel strangely similar, not just with appreciating being eclectic as the basis for innovation but with the ways blues felt inherently…restrictive, even though it’s something he loves deeply.
Once describing how blues infiltrates a lot of his playing and how, when he was young, he studied the work of major players like Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, Gilmour explained how his focus shifted when he became more melodically-inclined, seeing blues as something of a blocker to accessing the parts of his art he wanted to shine a light on with purpose. “I don’t consciously delve into that area now. Blues lines as such are fairly specific,” he told Guitar World.
Continuing, “It’s like, you’ve got a series of things that you can put together in different combinations, but there aren’t that many moves you can make. Instead, I try to approach things, given my limitations and strengths, from a more melodic standpoint and just work on it until it sounds… nice.”
He elaborated, “I don’t really have any plan in hand that helps me to deal with this. I try not to be too tied down by rules and regulations. So the blues influence may come out at times, but I like to think I come at it from a different angle.”
Somehow, this makes his take on Clapton even more intriguing. Gilmour loves Clapton – always has – but he also sees him without the dreamy heroism that drew him to such players in the first place, now standing as a porous figurehead whose flexibility comes not from blues but from absorbing all of its sensibilities to become the name he is today.
“I have to confess to a certain sort of jealousy of Eric Clapton’s position,” he said. “Where he has his wealth of material, and he’s such a consummate blues player that he’s got a wealth of older people’s material that he can play that’s not so well known.” Adding, “He can take out a new band every time, and do his stuff, and that would be a nice position to be in.”
While this cynical outlook was caveated with the fact that Gilmour has never had such a luxury because he’d always been focused solely on Pink Floyd, it says a lot about how blues only carried him so far, and when he eventually became a part of a fully established project that lingered far away from any other players who emerged from the depths of blues, he became starkly aware of just how stagnant their progress would have become had he not listened to his own intuition.
It also reflects the journey to self-discovery most of his peers embarked on, even if it didn’t specifically end with them realising the perils of solely focusing on blues as a guiding principle. In this case, it seemed using Clapton as a springboard in those early days was necessary in learning the ropes of being a good and knowledgable musician, but when he began to feel a responsibility (or a loyalty) to his own artistic voice, all of that became a little more obscured, allowing him to loosen the reigns on source texts and create his own worlds.
