| Jared Karol Music |
blues and ragtime guitar |
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Music has been a part of my life since my early childhood. It wasn’t until my late teenage years, however, that my musical tastes and interests began to develop into what they are today. You could say that my life has been one of constant musical evolution. I was in high school when I discovered in my mother's record collection three albums that greatly affected my musical evolution: Hot Tuna Live, Taj Mahal - De Ole Folks at Home/Gian Step and Mississippi John Hurt - The Last Sessions. I can still remember hearing the fingerstyle guitar and not believing that it was one person making all that sound. Before this crucial discovery, I had been a fan of 60s and 70s classic rock, and before that an ardent listener to anything "alternative", whatever that meant. The finding of this new blues music started me on my journey back to the roots of popular music. I learned that "Love in Vain" on the Rolling Stones album "Let it Bleed" was actually written in 1936 by a man named Robert JOhnson from Mississippi. Findings such as this continually pointed me back to traditional blues and I soon became infatuated with this "new" musical genre. It wasn't until my senior year in college that I started playing guitar. After a stint playing harmonica, I picked up a guitar and learned a few chords from my roommates. I branched out from there, taking lessons from masterful fingerstyle guitarist Kenny Sultan. My contiually evolving musical tastes had taken me down the ragtime and country blues route. I learned quickly and was soon picking out tunes on the guitar that I had first heard back in high school. "Hesitation Blues" by Gary Davis, "Pallet on Your Floor" by Mississippi JOhn Hurt and "Freight Train" by Elizabeth Cotton were some of the earlier tunes I learned how to play. I remember writing my first song in December 1996 called "The Grocery Song." It was a simple 12-bar blues about getting even with a girl because she didn't love me like I wanted her to. Many of my earlier songs had a similar bitter or melancholy tone. As my songwriting and guitar playing skills improved, and as I matured, my songs began to diversify in content more reprensentative of what they are today. Musically, I have stuck mainly to the fingerstyle ragtime blues style that I love so much. Lyrically, I have expanded my topics as well, interweaving songs of love, politics, humor and satire. Of course, you'll always get a heavy dose of guitar instrumentals in there as well.
Music has been a part of my life since my early childhood. It wasn’t until my late teenage years, however, that my musical tastes and interests began to develop into what they are today. You could say that my life has been one of constant musical evolution. As a young boy of seven or eight years old, I used to love to listen to the radio. Growing up in San Diego, the popular station at the time was actually on the AM dial, 690AM, the Mighty Six Ninety. It played an array of pop, rock, alternative, and oldies. At the time I couldn’t discern the different types of music, I just knew what songs I liked. I would call up the station and make requests, and then I started buying 45s. They were cheap, and I knew what I was getting, whereas the albums (CDs were a year or so away) were full of strange songs that I wasn’t interested in. As I got a little bit older, and my musical tastes were changing and developing, I had a difficult decision to make: Should I keep listening to the Mighty Six Ninety or should I switch to the more hip and alternative station 91X, 91.1 on the FM dial? I vividly remember arguing with a friend that AM was way better than FM, and our stations of comparison were The Mighty Six Ninety and 91X. Soon, I reluctantly was persuaded to switch my affiliation to the hip FM station. How could I not with such bands as the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, INXS and the Thompson Twins crooning away night and day? Yes, I had been converted. I started going to concerts, both with and without parental knowledge and supervision. Although I did not play a musical instrument at the time, music was a big part of my life, seeing live shows, wearing the t-shirts of my favorite bands, etcetera. My best friend played the drums and was into more of the rock ‘n’ roll side of things, listening to KISS, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin. I thought these bands were all right, but they were nothing in comparison to my alternative music scene. I was pretty esoteric in my musical interests. Then, when I was about fifteen or so, my mother showed me a few of her old records that she had from her youth in the late sixties and early seventies. The first ones I listened to were Led Zeppelin III and Let It Bleed by the Rolling Stones. Of course, I had heard of these bands through my best friend, but I had never really listened to them because they weren't "my type of music." I had to admit, against my will, that these two albums were awesome. As a non-musician, I couldn’t fully appreciate the musicianship of Jimmy Page or Brian Jones, but I knew they were good. This started a new stage in my musical evolution.
I listened to the Hot Tuna, Mississippi John Hurt and Taj Mahal albums constantly, and my collection of blues CDs was growing rapidly. I also found some Bob Dylan, Allman Brothers and Ray Charles records in my mother's collection and I began listening to these too on a more consistant bases. I still listened to my other stuff occasionally, but my interest in my old genres of music was fading quickly as I headed of to college at the age of eighteen. My sophomore year in college I got a gig doing a blues radio show on the AM dorm station. I probably had a collection of maybe 30 or 40 blues CDs and I borrowed from the college radio station’s collection heavily as well. At the time, I was really into harmonica blues and would play performers such as Sonny Boy Williamson (I and II), Sonny Terry, Little Walter, Junior Wells and Rod Piazza. Then one day I was talking to a friend of mine about my show and my appreciation for the harmonica and she suggested I see a local acoustic blues harmonica and guitar duo called Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan. I went to see them shortly thereafter and I was blown away. Tom Ball shredded that harmonica making sounds I thought weren’t possible for humans to make. His partner, Kenny Sultan, played a smooth style of ragtime and blues guitar. I was hooked on their sound and their vibe. I didn't know it at the time, but Tom's main influence was Sonny Terry, and Kenny was the second coming of Blind Blake, Gary Davis and Blind Boy Fuller rolled into one.
I went out and bought a harmonica the next day. The problem was I had no idea how to play it. I wanted to make the sounds that Tom Ball was making but I didn’t know where to begin. I bought a beginning harmonica book and it helped a little. Tom offered lessons but I couldn’t afford them. What was I going to do with my new instrument? I could carry it with me anywhere I went, but I was embarrassed to play it because I sucked. Luckily, a friend of a friend played harmonica in a blues band and he was kind of enough to take me under his wing. He taught me all kinds of techniques and cool riffs. Within a year or two I was pretty good, even sitting in with bands and on open mics around the area. I kept listening to Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan as well. For another year or two you couldn't catch me anywhere it seemed without a harmonica in my pocket. I would play while driving, riding my bike to school, at parties or just sitting in the living room drinking beer with my roommates. I learned a bunch of different licks and styles from all the masters, but my favorite stuff was the country blues and jugband music. I wasn't disciplined enough to learn Little Walter licks note for note and I wasn't interested in buying an amp and bullet mic and going electric. After playing harmonica for a while and getting pretty darn capable, though, I started to get bored. I couldn't find people to play with consistantly and if any instrument is an accompanying instrument it's a harmonica. My senior year in college two of my roommates had guitars that I would strum from time to time. I would play harmonica with them a little bit, but it didn't really develop into anything. I asked them to teach me some chords and I started strumming a little bit myself. I remember thinking how hard it was to fit all three of my fingers on the same fret to make an A chord. I persevered though and I learned all my basic chords and could strum a decent rythym. I was still listening to Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan a lot and wanted to learn fingerstyle guitar. I asked Kenny if he taught lessons and he did, so I started taking lessons from him. It would be impossbile to say how much he taught me - so many chords, licks, songs, techniques. He is easily my largest and most obvious influence today. I took lessons on and off for about a year, continually developing my skills and learning new songs. During this same time period my musical tastes were honing themselves as well. I began to take a liking to anything that was roots based. I liked the unpolished sounds of old blues, country, bluegrass, fiddle music, jazz, ragtime. I liked the improvisation. I liked hearing the crackling of the record when you listened the songs. It authenticated it for me. I would listen to this stuff and think about what it must have been like to live back in those days and play music. The times weren't easy that's for sure. The more I got into roots based music the less I appreciated newer, more polished types of music. I liked the idea that these musicians were playing what they wanted to play, how they wanted to play it and wherever someone would sit down, drink a bottle of moonshine and dance the night away. There were no A&R men, no overdubbing, no commercialization. it was raw, real and from the heart. I wrote my first song in December 1996 called "The Grocery Song." It was a simple 12-bar blues in the key of A (yes, I figured out how to make an A chord). Over the next couple of years I wrote more and songs, most of which were horrible, but some of which I've held onto and replayed and tinkered with to make better. Soon it was time to play live. I remember my first gig in the bar of the restaurant that I worked in. It was me on a cheap acoustic guitar and a drummer with a full drum set doing fingerstyle ragtime and blues songs. It was awful, and there are no two ways about it. But it was a learning experience and it was good to start developing my stage presence, of which I had none. A couple years later, in the summer of 2000, I recorded my first CD, "Tight Lavender Pants" in a friend of mine's studio apartment in San Diego. He lived right near the airport and you can hear airplanes coming in for landing periodically on the CD. It was fun though. I played everything myself, all guitar parts and even borrowed a friend's bass on a few tracks. My friend Ted sang backing vocals. Musically, I'm proud of the disc, being that it was my first shot at recording. It paved the way for bigger and better things to come. In the fall of 2000 I moved to San Francisco. The singer/songwriter scene is much larger up here and there are definitely more opportunities to be heard. I began to take advantage of this. As my singing, songwriting and guitar playing continually got better, I began to feel more comfortable performing. It seemed there weren't that many fingerstyle guitarists around that were writing there own songs in the songwriter circuit. Most performers focused on the lyrics and the music was just there as an accompanyment. I wanted to have both, good lyrics that could tell a story but with a unique guitar sound that was different than what everyone else was playing. I started going to the open mics at Bazaar Cafe on Thursday nights. I must have gone every Thursday for four months straight, playing a lot of my old songs and new ones that I had been working on since my arrival in San Francisco. This scene was pretty hot. It was much better than your average open mic at the corner bar. First of all, they didn't allow covers, which meant two things: first, Les, didn't have to pay ASCAP fees, but more importantly, it weeded out a lot of the mediocre players that would come in and play folk versions of old Aerosmith tunes. There were a lot of great songwriters coming in there pretty often, AJ Roach, Austin Willacy, Carmaig DeForest, Kwame Copeland, and Veronica Lustre, to name a few. Finally, after four months of coming every Thursday night to the open mics I got my first gig in San Francisco there. The gig went well, and I kept playing the open mics and I got several more gigs at Bazaar Cafe over the next year or so. In November of 2001, I met Frank Sally, a very unique, original singer/songwriter from Boston. We started talking and playing music together, and I asked him to play on the CD I was planning to record, "Ode to Byerley", dedicated to my girlfriend (now my wife). In January, 2002 I recorded the CD and Frank played beutifully on four of the tracks. I continued to play at Bazaar and was starting to get other gigs around San Francisco, playing with Frank, selling a few CDs here and there, and having a real good time. I also recorded an instrumental CD in May of 2002 entitled "Two Happy Ruths." Now that I felt I was a little more established, my confidence began to grow, and this was evident in the lyrics in my songs. I was starting to write some political songs and I was no longer hesitant to really speak my mind about things that I thought were wrong. My subversive sense of humor came out during this stage of my development as well. Songs such as "Stupid Dog" about a dog-owner who didn't clean up his dog's mess right in front of my door, and "Small Man's Complex" about a man who was the epitome of the disease were examples of some of the songs I was writing. I continued to write songs for my girlfriend (fiance in the summer of 2002) and of course the guitar instrumentals kept on coming as well. In my first couple of years of playing in San Francisco and around the Bay Area, I have had the wonderful opportunity to meet and play with a number of wonderful musicians, Frank Sally and Mario DeSio on guitar, Ted Silverman on bass, mandolin and guitar, Bill Pizzaglia on tuba and piano (and others), Rob Powell on everything under the sun, and David Sobel on percussion. Most of these musicians will be featured on the upcoming album, "Live from San Leandro" which, as of this writing, is about two weeks away from starting recording. Although we are nowhere close to being called a band, this group of musicians when they play with me, can be referred to as the Kennebunkport Symphony Orchestra. Read future ramblings to get the story on the name. The CD should be out this fall and I'm expecting it to sound really good and be a lot of fun. There will be some ragtime, blues, and even a folk song or two on there. I'll let you know as soon as it's available. Well, I hope you have enjoyed reading about my musical journey. It has been one that I am proud of and I would like to see more people take. To me, there's nothing better than sitting down on the back porch with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee blowing harp and playing sweet guitar, or Jerry Douglas playing dobro with Tony Rice's guitar and David Grissman on the mandolin playing an old time bluegrass tune. Thinking about the good times, or thinking about nothing at all. Drinking a beer and letting the music enter my soul and put a smile on my face. . .
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