Friday jazz profile: Buddy Emmons, and something different

 Let's have something different today.  When you think of the steel guitar/pedal steel, what do you think?  Generally, either country, or Hawaiian.  It started in Hawaiian music, and then moved over to country, but it is a misunderstood instrument.  The greatest master to expand its potential into other genres?  Buddy Emmons (sometimes spelled "Buddie"), who recorded a straight jazz album in '63 (Steel Guitar Jazz), and in the process, made some interesting observations, implicitly, about jazz.  Here's "Witchcraft."  Famous song.

OK, so let's go through what Buddy did and didn't do.  Note what's missing.  A lot of long slides over a fuckload of notes.  That's lounge-music territory.  Instead, Buddy would pick up the bar, then put it down again, on the same string elsewhere, or on another string.  Or, and this is really important.  If you lay the bar across the strings, you have a chord, and if you pick within that chord-- leaving the bar there, at least momentarily-- you have a chord voicing created by the instrument that you don't get on other instruments.

The instrument defines how you play the piece.  Nothing prevents jazz-style improvisation on a pedal steel, save cultural bullshit.  Yet once someone chooses to do so, new avenues for improvisation open that weren't available before.  What you can play on a piano is different from what you can play on a trombone, and vice versa.  The same principle applies with the pedal steel.

Emmons improvised using jazz structures, but the chords around which he could work were different, because his instrument was different.  Jazz is ever-expanding, for those who bother to listen.