I forgot to get the girls downstairs tonight before they went to bed, so I closed my eyes and picked today’s rips. Two from blues legend Muddy Waters and Wilhem Kempff’s Schubert Sonata box set.

The first of the Muddy Waters discs is a set of field recordings that were captured in Mississippi in the 1940s. They sound quite a bit like most of the most of the other excellent Alan Lomax recordings that were done as part of a large Library of Congress recordings put into motion by Roosevelt’s public works projects that were contained in the New Deal. When the recordings were made, Muddy Waters (in his mid-20s) was living in a cabin on a plantation. There are interviews between him and Lomax on the disc as well, and I am stunned by how well these recordings capture a sense of what it must have meant to be a country blues musician in Mississippi during the great depression. When Lomax asks: “How did you learn to play with a bottle” Muddy Waters says “I found it on the ground and I picked it up”. They talk some more then Lomax asks him to play another song and they record it. Most of these are solo recordings, though a couple feature a second person. A couple of years later Muddy Waters would move to Chicago, and within a few more years he would become a very successful blues musician. By the time the recordings for “Folk Singer” were done in Chicago in the early 60s, Muddy Waters has a full band and much more then a portable recorder at his disposal. He has a full band and a full studio. You can also tell how much better Muddy Waters had been able to eat from comparing the pictures contained in both discs.

But between both, Muddy Waters still plays and sings like a traditional blues singer. His music was influencing rock singers in the US and UK by this time, and in return he was able to make a living in Chicago and record his music in a studio (so – in a way the music industry that he was influencing was also effecting how he worked!). And while the recordings in Chicago are made by a much more established and comfortable musician, the feeling is still all there. He is the older version of that amazing musician that Alan Lomax caught in the fields of Mississippi. There is change that has occurred, but the ‘Folk Singer’ recordings feel like as much of a document as the field recordings do. The first ‘Ooooh!’ in ‘My Captain’ has the echo of the music in the Lomax recordings. But it is an echo, and you get the sense that what has changed is that the 1960s Muddy Waters remembers his roots as well as the hard work that found him success making a living as a musician in Chicago.

The Schubert box is one that I purchased mostly because of how much I love Kempff’s Beethoven playing. I wasn’t familiar with Schubert’s sonatas when I bought it and had no idea what I was in for the first time I listened to 21 minute first movement to the B-flat sonata. This is huge, expansive and lyrical music. At first it seems to hold such a direct relation to Beethoven, but as the music expands Schubert’s gifts for lyricism become more and more apparent. When I played piano more, I always had a great amount of difficulty in handling the dense textures that Schubert often uses in his accompaniments. Large block chords that are repeated under the melody. To me they always seemed to be a mistake, as though they were actually supposed to be scored for strings (partly because it is a texture that Schubert uses so much in his string quartets as well!). But hearing Kempff play them, there is almost no attack – no repetition. Just swells and decrescendos of pulse and texture. He is able to pull them back like curtains to reveal a counter-melody, then let them fall and obscure again. His touch is amazingly nuanced with these gestures, and after I heard him play these pieces, I felt like I knew what I had to work towards.

I have never been happy with how I play Schubert as a result. And I remember thinking that it must just be something about the recording. How could anyone actually play these block chords so smoothly? But I’ve heard other pianists play this music since (both live and on other recordings), and I am constantly amazed at the effect. How can someone can strike the strings so softly, even when playing loudly? While I feel comfortable playing Bach and even some Beethoven and Chopin, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to figure out the touch that is needed to really play Schubert well.