http://musiqology.com/2009/10/13/pulling-blues-out-of-the-attic-john-mayer-and-the-blues/ Where Music's Past & Present Collide Wed, 16 May 2012 21:34:15 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://musiqology.com/2009/10/13/pulling-blues-out-of-the-attic-john-mayer-and-the-blues/#comment-8 Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:18:19 +0000 http://musiqology.com/?p=282#comment-8 The way JM keeps the genre alive by infusing his brand of pop music with the blues, following in the footsteps of guys like Eric Clapton and Robert Cray, is definitely commendable. I think what people often don’t appreciate is how relatively complex some of his earlier pop tunes were. You’d be hard pressed to find an artist at the top of the pop charts these days who throws as many major 7th and minor 9th chords in the mix as Mayer does. He’s not a jazz musician, but he certainly picked up a lot of “jazzy” ideas during his time at Berklee and it shows in a song like “Saint Patrick’s Day,” where harmonically the concepts may be standard fare in jazz but are almost nonexistent in pop these days.

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