I'm always amazed by how the blues, a seemingly simple form, can produce so much music of complete originality. Reduced to its basics, it contains three chords and a five-note scale. But that's not it at all, of course. The blues is a concept: a study in contrasts in terms of harmony, rhythm, tone, emotional content and attitude - all of it held together by its deceptively straightforward form. And, as I've mentioned before, the restrictions that an artist places on him or herself actually (paradoxically) lead to freedom. Robert Frost once said that writing free-verse poetry (i.e. without restrictions) was like "playing tennis without a net". And the same can be done in music.

Of all the artists that have explored the blues form, very few have gone as far as Eric Clapton. In the days ahead, I'm going to re-listen to several of his great albums from the past as well as his brand new one called, Clapton (2010), and write about the experience in this space shortly. For now, here's the opening track, a version of Melvin Jackson's "Travelin' Alone", with a melody that led to me writing the first sentence above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xgaWpQojMI