Live and Local - Mitch Morrill

Listen. The greatest and most influential musician of the twentieth century was Louis Armstrong. I’ll argue around it with you if I must, but it’s not even close. To paraphrase the Eagles, I could be wrong, but I’m not.

I say it that way, because it’s certainly possible to be one and not the other. Kiss was incredibly influential, but, lordy, they ain’t great. Adrian Belew is great, but not nearly as influential as he deserves to be.

Pops is both. As Stanley Crouch has talked about, once people heard Louis sing compared to his contemporaries at the time, they never looked back. That would just be a bad choice. There’s some debate about this, but he probably invented “scatting”, which is singing the notes to a melody instead of words. He did it in a recording session when he forgot the words and it was so great, they told him to just keep going with it. It changed everything.

By the way, lest I forget, he also played a little trumpet.

I don’t mean to speak for everyone in a group… but lets say I’m willing to bet you a pint that you can’t find a competent horn player, brass OR woodwind, that wouldn’t tell you that Louis Armstrong was the end of the road, and then there’s everyone else.

 If all you know is “what a wonderful world” or “hello dolly”, I implore you, go and find louis’ versions of  “west end blues” or “I cover the waterfront” or (a personal favorite of mine), “stardust”.

But that’s all just preamble. What I really wanted to tell you about Louis Armstrong is that he didn’t create a genre of music, or a style… he created an entire fundamental ASPECT of musical context and defined what was the good parts of all other styles of music that came after: Louis Armstrong invented swing.

Now, full disclosure… I’m not a musicologist or an art historian…hell, I’m barely a musician at all (shut up, Morris). But I’m not wrong about this. Go ask a smart person.

Swing is a nebulous thing. As has been said about another art form, you can’t really define it, but you know it when you hear it. You can be a competent musician, even good, without swinging. Perhaps you need some examples.

Dave Mathews – competent guitarist and song writer, I suppose. Does not swing. Like a wet towel hanging on a stick on a day with no wind.

Tom Petty – could take the most simple three chord ditty imaginable, and swing it like a goddamn pendulum.

Difference between Beatles and Stones…? Yep. Swing.

And yeah… I went there. Joan of Arc me in the comments, go ahead.

And now, I’ll get to the point. The reason I gave you my defense of Satchmo and alienated the beatles fans (DMB fans can go scratch your collective ass) is so that I can talk about Mitch Morrill.

Because he swings.

Hard.

If you don’t know Mitch, he comes out of the Chambersburg area, and doesn’t play in Gettysburg near enough for me. I’ve seen him play on the square and in Ploughmans in three different ways. First, solo on gentle Thursday. He gets up there with a telecaster or an accoustasonic (single coils are a sign of purity of soul and goodness in all things). Now, you may think that a guy by himself with an electric guitar getting up there and playing classic rock and blues for a couple hours might be ho hum…and in most cases you’d probably be right. But Mitch can rock a room just on his own, and that’s saying something. I can have the shittiest day up to then, but I sit down and hear a mitch set, and I always feel better.

It's the way he puts it out there. He’s got the raspy rocker voice like Paul Rogers, plays rhythm guitar in which he swings so hard, you don’t miss the drummer or bass, and you don’t even need a lead. He’s got that archetypical front man energy, and he does it like he’s breathing. Look for that energy in Ann Gallagher too, BTW. You heard it here first.

Other times I’ve seen him with a band that includes a great bass player and drummer, and he usually has a tremendous lead guitarist with him, though they vary. In one case, he had a very strong guy playing a red Gibson Explorer (something you don’t see every day), who could scream, no question. I was unable to recall his name, but will let you know if I can find it. But, in any case,  it was still Mitch’s stage.

More recently, he’s in a band with Dennis Mickley and their sons, called Fatso (get it? Father and sons?). they gig pretty regularly, and you should absolutely do yourself a favor and go and find them. Or ask Rob to get him into G’burg more…

Mitch Swings. You can disagree with me about everything else I’ve said here, but if you go and see him, you’ll agree about that.